Now this unity of science with faith can only be found and discovered in their common object--in truth, consequently, and _i.e._ in God, who is the sum of all truth. Mere negations--like that of the idea of the infinite, or the notion of the immeasurable, which is applicable even to nature itself, or that of the absolute or unconditional, of which many palpably erroneous applications might easily be made--no such pure negations, nor even any mere enumeration of predicates and properties devoid of intrinsic coherence, can furnish us with an adequate conception of the Deity. But now if a cognition, an understanding of life in general, be attainable (and no skeptical perplexities have yet been able to deter or seduce man’s sound common sense from entertaining and acting upon such a supposition), then it is clear that there is no reason for holding the notion of the supreme life in and by itself to be impossible or utterly unattainable by man. Now, this is the path which a profounder science and philosophy has invariably marked out for itself in this respect; and in the three different powers, which, however, are at the same time but one, in the trine energy of the one first cause of all, has it ever sought and discovered this highest notion. In this notion belonging to the supreme science, as advanced by philosophy in very different ages of the world and among widely-remote nations, there is a remarkable resemblance, although in the subordinate statements there is a greater or less admixture of error. In the midst of many subordinate aberrations, it has recognized the one great fact, that in the Supreme Life, who has His life in Himself, and is the prime source of all other life, there is, at the same time, a creative intelligence and thought which from the beginning issued therefrom as the Eternal Word self-subsistent and ordering all things, and that the Light which proceeded therefrom was itself also the first life. But now, just as this original life, which was from the beginning, was not simply Infinite, but even the source of all finite and infinite existence, and as this Life is an illumination which illuminates Itself and all other things, so is this Light also a living entity, and not merely spiritual and immaterial (for as such even It might still be a part of nature), but one thoroughly supernatural and holy, and, if man will have it so, an awful light which repels all darkness from itself, and, eternally rejecting, annihilates it.