HIS NAMES is this contemplation of the height and depth of the riches of divine love! with what attraction must it draw every thoughtful man to return love for love to this overflowing Fountain of boundless goodness! What charms has that religion which discovers to us our existence in relation to, and dependence upon, this Ocean of divine love! View every part of our redemption, from Adam's first sin to the resurrection of the dead, and you will find nothing but successive mysteries of that first love which created angels and All the mysteries of the gospel are only so many marks and proofs of God's desiring to make His love triumph in the removal of sin and disorder from all nature and creature.-[The Spirit of Prayer, p. 29.] men. A of He is the Destruc SK what God is? His name is Love; He is the good, the perfection, the peace, the joy, the glory, and the blessing every life. Ask what Christ is? He is the universal Remedy of all evil broken forth in nature and creature. tion of misery, sin, darkness, death, and hell. He is the Resurrection and Life of all fallen nature. He is the unwearied Compassion, the long-suffering Pity, the never-ceasing Mercifulness of God to every want and infirmity of human nature. He is the Breathing forth of the heart, life, and spirit of God, into all the dead race of Adam. He is the Seeker, the Finder, the Restorer of all that was lost and dead to the life of God. He is the Love that from Cain to the end of time prays for all its murderers, the Love that willingly suffers and dies among thieves that thieves may have a life with Him in paradise; the Love that visits publicans, harlots, and sinners and wants and seeks to forgive where most is to be forgiven. . . . Oh Humanus, love is my bait; you must be caught by it; it will put its hook into your heart, and will force you to know that of all strong things nothing is so strong, so irresistible, as Divine Love.-[The Spirit of Prayer, Part I. p. 127.] W" THE TRINITY IN GOD ILL or desire in the Deity is justly considered as God the TRINITY Father, Who from eternity to eternity wills or generates only the Son, from which eternal generating the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds. And this is the infinite perfection or fulness of beatitude of the life of the Triune God. . . . And here lies the ground of that plain and most fundamental doctrine of Scripture, that the Father is the Creator, the Son the Regenerator, and the Holy Spirit the Sanctifier. For what is this but saying in the plainest manner that as there are Three in God, so there must be three in the creature; that as the Three stand related to one another in God, so they must stand in the same relation in the creature. For, if a threefold life of God must have distinct shares in the creation, blessing, and perfection of man, is not that a demonstra- AND IN MAN tion that the life of man must stand in the same threefold state and have such a trinity in it as has its true likeness to that Trinity which is in God? . . . It has been already observed that when man was created in his original perfection the Holy Trinity was his Creator; but when man was fallen and had lost his first divine life, then there began a new language of a redeeming religion. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, were now to be considered, not as creating every man as they created the first man, but as differently concerned in raising the fallen race of mankind to that first likeness of the Holy Trinity, in which their first father was created. Hence it is that the Scriptures speak of the Father as drawing and calling men, because the desire which is from the Father's nature must be the first mover, stirrer, and beginner. . . . The THE DOCTRINE Son of God is now considered as the Regenerator or Raiser of a new birth in us, because He enters a second time into the life of the soul in order that His own nature and likeness may be again generated in it, and that He may be that to the soul in its state which He is to the Father in the Deity. The Holy Ghost is represented as the Sanctifier or Finisher of the divine life restored in us because, as in the Deity the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son as the amiable blessed Finisher of the triune life of God, so the fallen nature of man cannot be raised out of its unholy state, cannot be blessed and sanctified with its true degree of the divine life, till the Holy Spirit arises up in it. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is thus wholly practical; it is revealed to us to discover our high original and the greatness of our fall, to show us the deep and profound operation of the Triune God in the recovery of the divine life in our souls, that by the means of this mystery thus discovered our piety may be rightly directed, our faith and prayer have their proper objects; that the workings and aspirings of our own hearts may co-operate and correspond with that triune life in the Deity which is always desiring to manifest itself in us. For as everything that is in us, whether it be heaven or hell, rises up in us by a birth and is generated in us by the will-spirit of our souls, which kindles itself either in heaven or hell, so this mystery of a Triune Deity manifesting itself as a Father creating, a Son or Word regenerating, and a Holy Spirit sanctifying us, is not to entertain our speculation with dry metaphysical distinctions of the Deity, but to show us from what a height and depth we are fallen, and to excite such a prayer and faith, such a hungering and thirsting after this Triune Fountain of all good, as may help to generate and bring forth in us that first image of the Holy Trinity in which we were created and which must be born in us before we can enter into the state of the blessed. . . . It is this eternal unbeginning Trinity in Unity of Fire, Light, and Spirit, that constitutes Eternal Nature, the Kingdom of Heaven, the heavenly Jerusalem, the Divine Life, the beatific Visibility, the majestic Glory and Presence of God. Through this Kingdom of Heaven, or Eternal Nature, is the invisible God, the incomprehensible Trinity eternally breaking forth and manifesting itself in a boundless height and depth of blissful wonders, opening and displaying itself to all its creatures in an infinite variation and endless multiplicity of its powers, beauties, joys, and glories. So that all the inhabitants of heaven are for ever knowing, seeing, hearing, feeling, and variously enjoying all that is great, amiable, infinite, and glorious in the Divine Nature.—[An Appeal to all that Doubt, p. 34.] THE INVISIBLE ALL THINGS THAT THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE HAT this outward world was not created out of nothing is plainly taught by St. Paul, who declares that the creation of the world is out of the invisible things of God; so that the outward condition and frame of visible nature is a plain manifestation of that spiritual world from whence it is descended. Heaven itself is nothing else but the first glorious Out-birth, the majestic Manifestation, the beatific Visibility, of the one God in Trinity.— [An Appeal, etc., p. 21.] UT of this transcendent Eternal Nature, which is as universal and immense as the Deity itself, do all the highest beings, cherubims and seraphims, all the hosts of angels, and all intelligent spirits, receive their birth, existence, substance, and form. They are all so many different, finite, bounded forms of the heavenly fire and light of Eternal Nature, into which creaturely beings the invisible Triune God breathes His invisible Spirit, by which they become both the true children and likeness of the invisible Deity, and also the true offspring of His Eternal Nature, and are fitted to rejoice with God, to live in the Life of God, and have their being in that Eternal Nature or Kingdom of Heaven, in which the Deity itself liveth and worketh. And they are one, and united in one, God in them, and they in God, according to the prayer of Christ for His disciples, that they, and He, and His Holy Father might be united in one.-[The Way to Divine Knowledge, p. 117.] |