attributes, were not manifoldly modified, limited, and conditioned by His goodness, His mercy, and His patience. Before such a justice of God, if it were at once to make such an unconditional manifestation of itself, the whole world in terror would sink in dust and ashes. But it is not so. Man does hope--he must believe--ay, we may go on and add, man does know, that the divine justice is not unconditional, but is in an eminent degree limited by His fatherly love and goodness. No doubt, too, it must not, on the other hand, be forgotten, that the divine love and grace are also conditioned by the attribute of justice, what, however, in a certain effeminate theology of a recent day, seems to have been totally overlooked. However, this grave error of a too sentimental view of divine things is now pretty generally recognized as such, and, for the most part, abandoned. Moreover, it does not properly lie within the scope of our present disquisition. Now, the position that the justice and the grace of God mutually limit each other, involves nothing unintelligible, or, in this sense, inconceivable; as, however, is the case with the baseless phantom of the absolute, where the empty phrase becomes only the more unintelligible the more frequently it is repeated. How much more correct, in this respect, were the definitions and distinctions of the great philosophers of antiquity, especially the Pythagoreans. With them the limitless and the indeterminate were even the imperfect and the evil, and the former they regarded as the characteristic marks of the latter; while the fixedly definite and positive, which forms the very heart and core of personality, was with them identical with the good: and unquestionably, God’s personality--the fundamental notion, the proper and universal dogma of every religion that acknowledges the one true God--is the true center around which the whole inquiry revolves. For the question is, whether philosophy, while it allows this idea to stand indeed externally, and apparently--for even in Germany only one has been found bold enough to deny it expressly and without reserve--intends all the while to put it quietly aside, and secretly to entomb it by refusing to see in it any thing more than an illusion of the natural feelings. The point at issue is whether, by so teaching, philosophy is to come into direct collision with one of man’s most universal and deeply-rooted feelings, and to produce an eternal schism--an irreconcilable discord--not only between science and faith, but even between science and life. For to unsettle life, is even the necessary result of rationalism.