ology, we meet with certain difficulties, which, while
they are not sufficient to hinder us from _believing_ in the Divine
Personality as a fact, yet hinder us from _conceiving_ the manner of its
existence, and prevent us from exhibiting our belief as a philosophical
conclusion, proved by irrefragable reasoning and secured against all
objections. These difficulties are occasioned, on the one hand, by the
so-called Philosophy of the Unconditioned, which in all ages has shown a
tendency towards Pantheism, and which, in one of its latest and most
finished manifestations, announces itself as the exhibition of God as He
is in His eternal nature before creation; and, on the other hand, by the
limitations and conditions to which our own personality is subject, and
which, as we have pointed out in the earlier part of this article, have,
from the very beginning of Christian theology, prevented theologians from
accepting the limited personality of man as an exact image and
counterpart of the unlimited personality of God. These difficulties Mr.
Mansel endeavours to meet in two ways. On the one side, he maintains, in
common with Sir W. Hamilton, that the Philosophy of the Unconditioned, by
reason of its own incongruities and self-contradictions, has no claim to
be accepted as a competent witness in the matter; and on the other side,
he maintains, in common with many theologians before him, that human
personality cannot be assumed as an exact copy of the Divine, but only as
that which is most nearly analogous to it among finite things. But these
two positions, if admitted, involve a corresponding practical conclusion
as regards the criterion of religious truth or falsehood. Were we
capable, either, on the one hand, of a clear conception of the
Unconditioned, or, on the other, of a direct intuition of the Divine
Attributes as objects of consciousness, we might be able to construct,
deductively or inductively, an exact science of Theology. As it is, we
are compelled to reason by analogy; and analogy furnishes only
probabilities, varying, it may be, from slight presumptions up to moral
certainties, but whose weight, in any given case, can only be determined
by comparison with other evidences. There are three distinct sources from
which we may form a judgment about the ways of God--first, from our own
moral and intellectual consciousness, by which we judge _a priori_ of
what God ought to do in a given case, by determining what we should th