ese conceptions from the contemplation of our own nature; and
even if it were not so, of what avail would be the notion of an
Absolute, Infinite existence, an Uncaused Unity, if stripped of all
those intellectual and moral attributes which we learn only from our
own souls? What but a vague shadow, a sounding name, is the metaphysical
Deity, the substance without modes, the being without properties, the
naked Unity which performs such a part in some of our philosophical
systems. The only God whom our thoughts can rest on and our hearts can
cling to, and our consciences can recognize is the God whose image
dwells in our own souls. The grand ideas of Power, Reason, Wisdom, Love,
Rectitude, Holiness, Blessedness, that is, of all God's attributes, come
from within, from the action of our own spiritual nature. Many indeed
think that they learn God from marks of design and skill in the outward
world; but our ideas of design and skill, of a determining cause, of an
end or purpose, are derived from consciousness, from our own souls. Thus
the soul is the spring of our knowledge of God."[241]

The creed of the Unitarians must be studied as one would take soundings
at sea. The measurement of one place is no guarantee of the depth in
another. What was believed twenty years ago, may not be endorsed by the
leaders of to-day. One writer of their fold says: "Unitarianism is
loose, vague, general, indeterminate in its elements and
formularies."[242] When George Putnam installed Mr. Fosdick over the
Hollis Street Church, he said with commendable candor, "There is no
other Christian body of which it is so impossible to tell where it
begins and where it ends. We have no recognized principles by which any
man who chooses to be a Christian disciple, and desires to be numbered
with us, whatever he believes or denies, can be excluded."

But Unitarianism has ever remained true to a few points. One of them is
antagonism to orthodoxy. It was an old cry of the German skeptics,
"Away with orthodoxy. It fetters us to forms and creeds, makes us blind
devotees to system, converts us into bigots, and dwarfs reason into an
invisible pigmy." Yet we frequently meet with language of similar import
in the present day. If we did not know its authorship we could easily
tell the ecclesiastical fountain whence it flows. "The implications of
false and shallow reasoning," says an American Unitarian divine,
"partial observation, intellectual grouping, moral obliqui