no longer find those rudiments in the law. We read it with
the eyes of the mind, and we receive not from thy lips that God is like
a man--a parcel of moods, and obedient to them. It is true that God
justifies whom he glorifies, Paul answered, but for that he is not an
unjust God. If he did not spare his son, but delivered him to death that
we might be saved, will he not give us all things? Who shall accuse
God's elect? He that chose them? Who will condemn them? Christ that will
sit on the right hand of his Father, that intercedes for us? Neither
death nor life nor angels can separate me from the love of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and if I came hither it is for the sake of my brothers, my
kinsmen that might be saved. God has not broken his promise to his
chosen people. A man may be born an Israelite and not be one; we are
true Israelites, not by birth but by election. God calls whom he
pleases, and without injustice. But, brethren, Mathias would ask of me:
why does God yet find a fault though none may resist his will? We dare
not reason with God or ask him to explain his preferences. Does the vase
ask the potter: why hast thou made me thus? Had not the potter power
over the clay to make from the same lump two vases, one for noble and
the other for ignoble use. Not in discourse of reason is the Kingdom of
God, but in its own power to be and to grow, and that power is
manifested in my gospel.

The approval of the brethren whitened Mathias' cheek with anger, and he
answered Paul that his denial of the law did not help him to rise to any
higher conception of the deity than to compare him to a potter, and he
warned Paul that to arrive at any idea of God we must forget potters,
rejecting the idea of a maker setting out from a certain moment of time
to shape things according to a pattern out of pre-existing matter. And I
would tell thee before thou startest for the end of the earth that the
Jesus Christ which has obsessed thee is but the Logos, the principle
that mediates between the supreme God and the world formed out of
matter, which has no being of its own, for being is not in that mere
potency of all things alike, which thou callest Power, but in Divine
Reason.

I have heard men speak like thee in Athens, Paul answered slowly and
sadly, and I said then that the wisdom of man is but foolishness in
God's sight. But thy stay there was not long, and thou hast not spoken
of my country, Egypt, Mathias answered, and rising from his