every thing, it by no means follows that it should be so with regard to a Supreme Being. We are bewildered and lost in our ideas, whenever we attempt to consider any object divested of time; it must be past, present, or future: yet we are not to suppose the mind of the Supreme Being to be so bewildered; we are naturally led to a contrary idea, and suppose that nothing is impossible with him. Such I think would be the inference which even unassisted reason would form to itself of a God, and would consider him necessarily above all conditions because the maker of all.*

* As [extension and] duration cannot be supposed to bear the most distant resemblance to any sensations of which the mind is conscious, the origin of these notions forms a manifest exception to the account given by Locke of the primary sources of our knowledge.'-D. Stewart's Phil. Essays p. 57. Such is the language used when bringing together into one view the ideas of Kant and of Reid.

Kant calls space and time notions supposed or implied, as conditions in all our empirical perceptions,' i. e. the perceptions belonging to our experience-le temps est la forme ou condition de toutes les perceptions en general. Toutes les sensations de l'homme sont dans le temps, qui seul les procede, et qui est a priori.—Buhle.-La Philosophie, Moderne v. Kant. Tome V. p. 447.

A Christian certainly has this idea inculcated in his mind from the Bible itself, to him the Supreme Being is described in a manner too sublime to suffer these restrictions to interfere even in his imagination, and he must uphold this argument in its fullest extent. He knows that with God a thousand years are but as one day.' 'Before Abraham

Where and when are questions belonging to all finite existences, and are by us always reckoned from some unknown parts of this sensible world, and from some certain epochs marked out to us by the motions observable in it. Without some such fixed parts or periods, the order of things would be lost, to our finite understandings, in the boundless invariable oceans of duration and expansion, which comprehends in them all finite beings, and in their full extent belong only to the Deity. And therefore we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not, and do so often find our minds at a loss, when we would consider them either abstractedly in themselves, or as any way attributed to the first incomprehensible Being.-Locke, Essay c. 15, s. 8

We cannot conceive any duration without succession, nor can put it together in our thoughts that any being does not exist tomorrow, or possess at once more than the present moment of duration. God's infinite duration being accompanied with infinite knowledge and infinite power, he sees all things past and to come; and they are no more distant from his sight than the present. They all lie under the same view, &c.-Locke, Essay 15, 12.

must have formed the

was I am,' says Christ; Christians therefore conception of an Almighty superior to the restrictions of time. We suppose the past, the present, and the future to be the same to him, and knowledge and fore-knowledge to be as one idea.

To reflect upon and gain knowledge of the past is one of the greatest sources of gratification to the human mind, and to contemplate (or to anticipate) the future in our ideas, to make even an approach to it in our schemes and calculations, is if possible a still more rapturous employment for the intellect. There is no. flight of fancy which we indulge so willingly and so often; it is one that seems to flatter our senses as if creating for us other higher powers than those that attach to mortal beings, and to raise us beyond ourselves. Whatever carries us,' says Johnson, beyond the ignorant present to the past or the future, elevates us in the dignity of thinking beings;' there is no man that will not feel the force of this truly philosophical expression: and if our ideas above stated, be just, it appears to bring us, as

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it were, to a nearer approach to the mysterious prerogatives of Omnipotence.

If there be any who will say that to reason thus furnishes them with no positive ideas upon such a subject: at any rate, he who founds his indifference to religion on the subtle suggestions of human reason, must not be found amongst the number. He who stickles for abstruse positions on one side, cannot refuse them when brought against him on the other; much less can the true philosopher object to that which forms, in fact, one of the chief grounds of his craft. We may go farther, indeed, and say, we are convinced that as to him the effect of such an argument will be and ought to be fully satisfactory, whatever it may prove in the sight of other people. He who is used to scrutinize the mysteries of nature so deeply, will feel these dark sayings more deeply too.

One thing, however, it does teach us, and that most clearly-it demonstrates the true nature of our intellectual feebleness, and points out to us, as it were, a spot in the immeasurable distance, that secret of his power which it

has pleased God, in our present state of being, to place beyond the reach of our comprehension. It makes us feel that we are men.

'The shadow of knowledge passeth over the mind of man as a dream; he seeth as in the dark; he reasoneth and is deceived. But the wisdom of God is as the light of heaven.'Economy of Human Life. Introd.