To a truly pious mind awfully impressed with the surpassing excellency of God's ineffable love to fallen man, in the revelation of himself to the inner man through the reason and conscience by the spiritual light and substantiality--(for the conscience is to the spirit or reason what the understanding is to the sense, a substantiative power); this consequence of miracles is so fearful, that it cannot but redouble his zeal against that fashion of modern theologists which would convert miracles from a motive to attention and solicitous examination, and at best from a negative condition of revelation, into the positive foundation of Christian faith. Ib. c.22. p.116. But if this be as vile a slander as ever Satanist devised, the Lord reward them that have been the authors and advisers of it according to their works. O no! no! this the good man did not utter from his heart, but from his passion. A vile and wicked slander it was and is. O may God have turned the hearts of those who uttered it, or may it be among their unknown sins done in ignorance, for which the infinite merits of Christ may satisfy! I am most assured that if Dr. Field were now alive, or if any one had but said this to him, he would have replied--"I thank thee, brother, for thy Christian admonition. Add thy prayer, and pray God to forgive me my inconsiderate zeal!" Ib. c. 23. p. 119. For what rectitude is due to the specifical act of hating God? or what rectitude is it capable of? Is this a possible act to any man understanding by the word God what we mean by God? Ib. p. 129. It is this complicated dispute, as to the origin and permission of evil, which supplies to atheism its most plausible, because its only moral, arguments; but more especially to that species of atheism which existed in Greece in the form of polytheism, admitting moral and intelligent shapers and governors of the world, but denying an intelligent ground, or self-conscious Creator of the universe; their gods being themselves the offspring of chaos and necessity, that is, of matter and its essential laws or properties. The Leibnitzian distinction of the Eternal Reason, or nature of God, [Greek: tò theion](the [Greek: nous kaì anágkae] of Timæus Locrus) from the will or personal attributes of God--([Greek: thélaema kaì boúlaesis--agathou patròs agathòn boúlaema])--planted the germ of the only possible solution, or rather perhaps, in words less exceptionable and more likely to be endured in the schools of modern theology, brought forward the truth involved in Behmen's too bold distinction of God and the ground of God;--who yet in this is to be excused, not only for his good aim and his ignorance of scholastic terms, but likewise because some of the Fathers expressed themselves no less crudely in the other extreme; though it is not improbable that the meaning was the same in both.