The earth is only one of a number of worlds which compose the solar system. So far as the other worlds are known to us we see that the same substances exist in them, and the same laws obtain in them. It cannot be but that the whole solar system owes its being to the same author. But the sun is only one star of a myriad stars, which form a connected stellar system; He who made the one star doubtless made the rest of the system of stars of which it is a part. Still further, the very little we know of the other stellar systems reveals the same mind and the same hand as this of which our sun forms a part. And so we conclude at length that the whole universe is the work of the same being who made the world: "He telleth the number of the stars, and calleth them all by their names" (Ps. cxlvii. 4). "By Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him and for Him" (Col. i. 16). To reason thus from nature is in accordance with Scripture, which habitually refers to God's works for evidences of His existence. "Every house," says St. Paul (Heb. iii. 4), "is builded by some man; now He that built all things is God." "For the invisible things of Him, even His eternal power and Godhead, are clearly seen, from the creation of the world, being declared by the things that are made" (Rom. i. 20). Holy Scripture assumes the existence of the Personal God, Creator and Governor, on every page. "I am the Lord thy God," I, a conscious, thinking, and speaking person. "I am the first and I am the last, and beside Me there is no God." "Is there a God beside Me? Yea there is no God, I know not any" (Isa. xliv. 6, 8). "Hath not My hand made all these things?" "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth" (Ps. xxxiii. 6).

"Without Him was not anything made that was made" (John i. 3).

GOD A SPIRIT.

This God is pure Spirit.

There are two kinds of beings in the world: material beings, such as stones, trees, bodies of animals; and immaterial or spiritual beings which think, and will, and act, like the souls of men.

God is certainly not matter only, for matter cannot design and act.

Neither is God partly matter and partly spirit, as men are. The idea that God is partly material and partly spiritual, when it is thought out and put into definite shape, resolves itself into Pantheism, viz., the theory that there is a kind of spirit inhabiting the material universe, as a man's soul inhabits his body; and that this Animated Universe is God. But this is to destroy the idea of a personal God. Thinking, reasoning, willing, acting man would then be the noblest part of the universe, and God would find His highest expression in man. This is not an idea of God, which satisfies the reason, or the heart, or the conscience of man. All the instincts of our being, and all the reason of our minds, look up into the heavens for a Divine Person, greater, mightier, better than ourselves.

God is Spirit only. We have no difficulty in conceiving the idea. The spiritual part of our own being helps us. We are conscious to ourselves that our very self-the conscious being who thinks, and wills, and acts-is not the body, it is something within the body, or intimately united with the body. So we easily conceive of God as Spirit only. If God had a material body, be the matter ever so ethereal, He would not be what we know otherwise that God

must be. If God had a material body, it could be divided, it must be limited, it would be finite. If He had a body He could not be omnipresent, for a body can only be in one place at once; and God could not be everywhere but in parts.

"God is a Spirit" (John iv. 27). When we think of our own spirits we do not conceive of them as having any size, or shape, or dwelling in any particular part of our body. This will help us to conceive of God as without form or magnitude.

God is pure Spirit.

We talk indeed of different attributes of God, His power, and wisdom, and the like, but these are not different one from another, and are not different from His essence, but are of His very essence; only our finite minds cannot conceive of God in the whole, as He is, but only by different acts of our mind apprehending God piecemeal, as He is manifested to us in different relations.

CHAPTER II.

GOD HIS IMMENSITY-OMNIPRESENCE-ETERNITY.

OUR spirits are finite; we can only conceive of them as being somewhere within, or in intimate connection with our bodies; but there are no bounds or limits to the being of God. If four mighty angels were to take the earth as their starting-point, and to fly to the right hand and the left, and up into the height and down into the depth, and to fly on for ever, they would never, in any direction, arrive at the boundaries of the being of God. "Whither shall I go then from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I go then from Thy presence? If I climb up into heaven Thou art there, if I go down to hell Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me" (Ps. cxxxix. 6—9). "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" (Jer. xxiii. 24). "Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee" (1 Kings viii. 27).

God fills immensity, but not like an organised body which has one part here and another part there, and which performs various acts by appropriate members; or like a human mind which performs different operations by appropriate faculties; God fills immensity with His simple, pure, uncompounded, unorganised essence. He does not pass through space in order to act in any given place, but without any motion from place to place He acts at will in any point of space with all the force of His being. He can so act in every point of space at one and the same instant of

time. So that to obtain a conception of this attribute of God, His infinity, we have to put two ideas together; first the idea that His being is unbounded, so that there is no place to which it does not reach, and the other idea that God is wholly everywhere.

He is immense not to be measured; He is not conditioned by space; He is no more limited by smallness than by largeness. If the telescope has given us in modern times new conceptions of the immensity of God in the vast spaces which it has revealed to us peopled with innumerable worlds, so the microscope has illustrated the truth that God is not limited by smallness, but within the compass of a drop of water displays the wonders of His power and wisdom, as clearly as in the ample margin of a world.

The infinity of God's essence extends to all His attributes, for His attributes are not different from His essence, but are of His essence.

THE ETERNITY OF GOD.

God dwells in eternity. "I am the high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy" (Isa. lvii. 15). "From everlasting to everlasting Thou art God" (Ps. xc. 2). We must try to conceive the difference between our life in time, and God's life in eternity. Men sometimes think that when they pile up years on years, and centuries on centuries, they are reaching towards some idea of eternity. Not so; they are only imagining an indefinite prolongation of time. Eternity is a different idea. There is no time in eternity, no succession of years and centuries. "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as Time is like a one day" (2 Peter iii. 8). river, which has a source, and we measure its course by the successive objects it flows past on its banks; but