What canst thou imagine he could foresee in thee? a propensness, a disposition to goodness, when his grace should come? Either there is no such propensness, no such disposition in thee, or, if there be, even that propensness and disposition to the good use of grace, is grace; it is an effect of former grace, and his grace wrought before he saw any such propensness, any such disposition; grace was first, and his grace is his, it is none of thine. One of many instances in dogmatic theology, in which the half of a divine truth has passed into a fearful error by being mistaken for the whole truth. Ib. p. 6. D. God's justice required blood, but that blood is not spilt, but poured from that head to our hearts, into the veins and wounds of our own souls: there was blood shed, but no blood lost. It is affecting to observe how this great man's mind sways and oscillates between his reason, which demands in the word 'blood' a symbolic meaning, a spiritual interpretation, and the habitual awe for the letter; so that he himself seems uncertain whether he means the physical lymph, 'serum,' and globules that trickled from the wounds of the nails and thorns down the sides and face of Jesus, or the blood of the Son of Man, which he who drinketh not cannot live. Yea, it is most affecting to see the struggles of so great a mind to preserve its inborn fealty to the reason under the servitude to an accepted article of belief, which was, alas! confounded with the high obligations of faith;--faith the co-adunation of the finite individual will with the universal reason, by the submission of the former to the latter. To reconcile redemption by the material blood of Jesus with the mind of the spirit, he seeks to spiritualize the material blood itself in all men! And a deep truth lies hidden even in this. Indeed the whole is a profound subject, the true solution of which may best, God's grace assisting, be sought for in the collation of Paul with John, and specially in St. Paul's assertion that we are baptized into the death of Christ, that we may be partakers of his resurrection and life. [3] It was not on the visible cross, it was not directing attention to the blood-drops on his temples and sides, that our blessed Redeemer said, 'This is my body', and 'this is my blood! Ib. p. 9. A. But if we consider those who are in heaven, and have been so from the first minute of their creation, angels, why have they, or how have they any reconciliation? &c. The history and successive meanings of the term 'angels' in the Old and New Testaments, and the idea that shall reconcile all as so many several forms, and as it were perspectives, of one and the same truth--this is still a 'desideratum' in Christian theology. Ib. C.