To the Supreme Being, will and understanding belong in a supreme degree; in him they exist in the most perfect harmony--will is understanding, and understanding will. But with no propriety can the faculty of reason be ascribed to the Deity; and it is remarkable, says the author, that nowhere in Holy Writ, nor in the sacred traditions of the primitive nations, nor in the writings of the great philosophers of antiquity, is the term reason ever used in reference to Almighty God. It is only among a few of the later, degenerate, and rationalist sects of philosophy, the Stoics for example, that the expression _Divine Reason_ is ever met with. If such an expression is incorrect or unsound, with still less fitness and decorum can the faculty of imagination be assigned to the God-head--the very term would shock the understandings, and revolt the inmost feelings, of all men. The Deity reveals himself unto men in four different ways--in Scripture, (including of course its running and necessary commentary, ecclesiastical Tradition);--in Nature--in Conscience, and in History. "Holy Writ," says the author, "as it is delivered to us, and as it was begun and founded three-and-thirty centuries ago, does not exclude the elder sacred traditions of the preceding two thousand four hundred years; or the revelation, which was the common heritage of the whole human race. On the contrary, it contains very explicit allusions to the fact that such a revelation was imparted to the first man, as well as to that patriarch who, after the destruction of the primeval world of giants, was the second progenitor of mankind. As the sacred knowledge, derived from this revelation, flowed on every side, and in copious streams over the succeeding generations of men, the ancient and holy traditions were soon disfigured, and covered over with fictions and fables; where, amid a multitude of remarkable vestiges and glorious traits of true religion, immoral mysteries and Bacchanalian rites were often intermixed, and truth itself, as in a second chaos, buried under a mass of contradictory symbols. Thence arose that Babylonish confusion of languages, sagas, and symbols, which is universally found among the ancient, and even the primitive nations. In the great work of the restoration of true religion, which accordingly we must regard as a second revelation, or rather as a second stage of revelation, a rigid proscription of those heathen fictions, and of all the immorality connected with them, was the first and most essential requisite. But in that gospel of creation, which forms the introduction to the whole Bible, that elder revelation, accorded to the first man and to the second progenitor, is expressly laid down as the ground-work; and in this introduction, we shall find the clue to the history and religion of the primitive world--nay, it is the true Genesis of all historical science."[25]