gles, which
may be declared to be no longer absurdities and contradictions in terms,
but mysteries that go beyond our reason, without being contrary to it.
Few will maintain this, and those few may be neglected; an impersonal
person must therefore be admitted to be nonsense, and an immaterial God
to be Atheism in another shape.

On the other hand, if God is "of a reasonable soul and human flesh
subsisting," and if he thus has the body without which he is-as far as
we are concerned-non-existent, this body must yet be reasonably
like other bodies, and must exist in some place and at some time.
Furthermore, it must do sufficiently nearly what all other "human flesh"
belonging to "perfect man" must do, or cease to be human flesh. Our
ideas are like our organisms; they have some little elasticity and
circumstance-suiting power, some little margin on which, as I have
elsewhere said, side-notes may be written, and glosses on the original
text; but this power is very limited. As offspring will only, as a
general rule, vary very little from its immediate parents, and as it
will fail either immediately or in the second generation if the parents
differ too widely from one another, so we cannot get our idea of-we
will say a horse-to conjure up to our minds the idea of any animal more
unlike a horse than a pony is; nor can we get a well-defined idea of a
combination between a horse and any animal more remote from it than an
ass, zebra, or giraffe. We may, indeed, make a statue of a flying horse,
but the idea is one which cannot be made plausible to any but ignorant
people. So "human flesh" may vary a little from "human flesh" without
undue violence being done to our reason and to the right use of
language, but it cannot differ from it so much as not to eat, drink, nor
waste and repair itself. "Human flesh," which is without these necessary
adjuncts, is human flesh only to those who can believe in flying horses
with feathered wings and bills like birds-that is to say, to vulgar and
superstitious persons.

Lastly, not only must the "perfect man," who is the second person of
the Godhead according to the orthodox faith, and who subsists of "human
flesh" as well as of a "reasonable soul," not only must this person
exist, but he must exist in some place either on this earth or outside
it. If he exists on earth, he must be in Europe, Asia, Africa, America,
or on some island, and if he were met with he must be capable of being
seen and ha