sonal, those principles are ideas, thoughts, purposes, of the
Divine mind.

So long, therefore, as our spiritual nature can trust, can unfold a
morality, can pray, the simple soul need not much bewail its want of
logic and its loss of arguments. If the famous ontological argument for
the being of God has been refuted, we shall not, on that account,
tremble for the ark. We shall not lament though the argument from the
watch has proved treacherous. Our God is not a mere infinite
mechanician. Indeed, such a phrase is a contradiction in terms. A
mechanician must be finite. He contrives, and as the result produces,
not what is absolutely best, but what is the best possible under the
circumstances and with the materials at his disposal. But if we have
lost the mechanician, we have not lost the God that thinks. We have
gained the perfectly righteous and perfectly good. His thoughts have
manifested themselves in nature, in human freedom, in the incarnation of
His Son, in the redemption of sinners. But the intellect that knows
these things is the good heart of faith.

FOOTNOTES:

[246] Chap. iii. 12.

[247] Chaps. iii. 19; iv. 11.

[248] Chap. vi. 12.

[249] Chap. x. 19.

[250] 2 Cor. iii. 17; 1 Cor. ii. 16.

[251] James ii. 17, 18.

[252] =parresia=.

[253] =plerophoria=.

[254] =hypostasis=.

[255] =elenchos=.

[256] Gen. i. 1, 3.

[257] As if =me ek phainomenon= were for =ek me phainomenon=.

CHAPTER XI.

_THE FAITH OF ABRAHAM._

"By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place
which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not
knowing whither he went. By faith he became a sojourner in the land
of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac
and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for
the city which hath the foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God.
By faith even Sarah herself received power to conceive seed when she
was past age, since she counted Him faithful Who had promised:
wherefore also there sprang of one, and him as good as dead, so many
as the stars of heaven in multitude, and as the sand, which is by
the sea-shore, innumerable. These all died in faith, not having
received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from
afar, and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on
the earth. For they that say such things make it ma