horoughly comprehend and
pursue throughout all their consequences and relations
to other truths (for then almost everything would be
above reason), but only of not comprehending the union
or connection of those immediate ideas of which the
proposition supposed to be above reason consists."
_Comprehension_, as thus explained, answers exactly to
the ordinary logical use of the term _conception_, to
denote the combination of two or more attributes in an
unity of representation. In the same sense, M. Peisse,
in the preface to his translation of Hamilton's
_Fragments_, p. 98, says,--"Comprendre, c'est voir un
terme en rapport avec un autre; c'est voir comme un ce
qui est donne comme multiple." This is exactly the
sense in which Hamilton himself uses the word
_conception_. (See _Reid's Works_, p. 377.)

But this distinction involves a further consequence. If the mysteries of
the Divine Nature are not apprehended by reason as existing in a
particular manner (in which case they would be mysteries no longer), but
are accepted by faith as existing in some manner unknown to us, it
follows that we do not know God as He is in His absolute nature, but only
as He is imperfectly represented by those qualities in His creatures
which are analogous to, but not identical with, His own. If, for example,
we had a knowledge of the Divine Personality as it is in itself, we
should know it as existing in a certain manner compatible with
unconditioned action; and this knowledge of the manner would at once
transform our conviction from an act of faith to a conception of reason.
If, on the other hand, the only personality of which we have a positive
knowledge is our own, and if our own personality can only be conceived as
conditioned in time, it follows that the Divine Personality, in so far as
it is exempt from conditions, does not resemble the only personality
which we directly know, and is not adequately represented by it. This
necessitates a confession, which, like the distinction which gives rise
to it, has been vehemently condemned by modern critics, but which has
been concurred in with singular unanimity by earlier divines of various
ages and countries,--the confession that the knowledge which man in this
life can have of God is not a knowledge of the Divine Nature as it is in
itself, but only of that nature as imperfectly represented th