If, therefore, these principles are correct, acquiescence on the part of man in the divine character is impossible. It is impossible to love a being who does not present to us the aspect of loveliness; or to reverence one who does not present to us an aspect capable of exciting this emotion; or to feel trust in a being of whose justice we have no certainty that it resembles our conception of justice; or to rely on the promises of one whose veracity may differ from our own. Such feelings cannot be made to order. They can only be generated by the contemplation of a being who is holy, benevolent, just, and true, in the ordinary acceptation of these words. They cannot be excited by any merely regulative ideas. We love, reverence, and trust, not ideas or conceptions, but persons, possessing moral attributes. But on the principle of merely regulative ideas of God, the assertion that “God is love,” loses all its value, if God is not what I mean by love, but, because he is infinite, he may be something else, I know not what; and thus the great precept of the moral law, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul, and strength,” becomes meaningless. Such devotion of our entire nature cannot be created by the mere command to render it. It can only be rendered to a being whose claims over us we both feel and know to be an absolute reality, and to whom on the conviction of their reality we can offer ourselves up a voluntary sacrifice. But if we cannot know Him as He is, how is the fire of devotion to Him to be kindled in our hearts? How shall we trust in Him? How shall we acquiesce in His character? How shall we worship Him, how shall we adore Him, if it is true that the justice, benevolence, or holiness of the divine character may not resemble our conception of them? Nay, more: the theory in question lays the axe to the root of the Christian revelation itself. There is no affirmation of the New Testament more decisive than that Jesus Christ in His divine and human personality is the image of the invisible God, as far as His moral perfections are concerned. Are the perfections of the character of Jesus Christ only regulative, or are they real representations of these attributes as they exist in God? Are the divine attributes of holiness, benevolence, or justice, adequately represented by the manifestations of them, as made by Jesus Christ? If we accept the testimony of St. John’s Gospel, our Lord himself has expressly affirmed, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John xiv. 9). But this is impossible if our conceptions of God’s moral attributes are only regulative, and if the human idea of holiness is no adequate representation of the divine.