Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons, compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her child, &c. Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's assertion here would be extravagant. Serra. XXXIV. Rom. viii. 16. p. 332. Ib. p. 335. A. But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding. If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural. But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects--yet still our only mirror--to contemplate all we can of God, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense. For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself as man 'in genere', we have to look into ourselves, and there we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence ([Greek: nous]) from being ([Greek:tò on]), with the will as an accompaniment, but not from it as a cause,--in order, though not necessarily in time, precedent. This is true filiation. The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict identities, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and coeternally. For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is involved in the very idea of God, one of whose intellectual definitions is, the 'synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi inclusive, quoad se,' of all conceivable 'antitheses;' even as the best moral definition--(and, O! how much more godlike to us in this state of antithetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!)--is, God is love. This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards the moral. For what is love? Union with the desire of union. God therefore is the cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue. Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action.