LITERARY REMAINS.



* * * * *


NOTES ON LUTHER'S TABLE TALK [1]

I cannot meditate too often, too deeply, or too devotionally on the
personeity of God, and his personality in the Word, [Greek: Gío to
monogenei], and thence on the individuity of the responsible
creature;--that it is a perfection which, not indeed in my intellect,
but yet in my habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that
'complexus' of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and
fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make
up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the
exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in
descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them
in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the
light of reason, and (the most important of all the truths that have
been vouchsafed to me!) to the will which is the reason,--will in the
form of reason--I can form a sufficient gleam of the possibility of the
subsistence of the human soul in Jesus to the Eternal Word, and how it
might perfect itself so as to merit glorification and abiding union with
the Divinity; and how this gave a humanity to our Lord's righteousness
no less than to his sufferings. Doubtless, as God, as the absolute
Alterity of the Absolute, he could not suffer; but that he could not lay
aside the absolute, and by union with the creaturely become affectible,