universal essence, who has no known existence except in His works, as an all-pervading power or principle not external to the created world, but in it, and developed through it. He goes on to say that Almighty God, who is thus illimitable and incomprehensible, is exhibited in personal attributes in Christ, as if all the laws and provisions in which He energizes in nature impersonally, were condensed and exemplified in a real personal being. Hence he calls our Lord by a strange term, the personification of God, i.e. (I suppose) the personal image, or the manifestation in a person. In other words God, whose person is unknown in nature, in spite of His works, is revealed in Christ, who is the express image of His person; and just in this, and (as I conceive) nothing more, would he conceive there was a difference between the manifestation of God in Christ and the Manifestation of Him in a plant or flower. Christ is a personal Manifestation. Whether there be any elements of truth in this theory, I do not concern myself to decide; thus much is evident, that he so applies it as utterly to explain away the real divinity of our Lord. The passages are as follow:—
"It is by Jesus Christ that we have access to the Father. This vivid exhibition of His character, this personification of His moral attributes, opens to us the way. Here we see a manifestation of divinity, an image of the Invisible God, which comes as it were down to us; it meets our feeble faculties with a personification," &c. p. 40.
"We accordingly commenced with His childhood, and were led at once into a train of reflection on the nature and the character of that eternal and invisible essence, whose attributes were personified in Him." p. 192.
"The human mind ... reaches forward for some vision of the Divinity, the great unseen and inconceivable essence. Jesus Christ is the personification of the divinity for us, the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person." p. 200.
Next, as to his opinions concerning the doctrine of the Atonement. I will not deny that some of his general expressions are correct, and taken by themselves, would be satisfactory; but they are invalidated altogether by what he has at other times advanced. It may be recollected that Mr. E., in his treatise on Internal Evidence, lays such a stress upon the use of the Atonement as a Manifestation, as to throw the real doctrine itself into the shade.
