but infinity. This, I apprehend, will have struck many readers as
merely a rhetorical _bravura_; sublime, perhaps, and fitted
to exalt the feeling of awe connected with so unapproachable a
mystery, but otherwise not throwing any new light upon the darkness
of the idea as a problem before the intellect. Yet indirectly
perhaps it _does_, when brought out into its latent sense by
placing it in juxtaposition with paganism. If a philosophic theist,
who is also a Christian, or who (_not_ being a Christian,)
has yet by his birth and breeding become saturated with Christian
ideas and feelings,[Footnote: this case is far from uncommon; and
undoubtedly, from having too much escaped observation, it has been
the cause of much error. Poets I could mention, if it were not
invidious to do so, who, whilst composing in a spirit of burning
enmity to the Christian faith, yet rested for the very sting of
their pathos upon ideas that but for Christianity could never have
existed. Translators there have been, English, French, German, of
Mahometan books, who have so colored the whole vein of thinking with
sentiments peculiar to Christianity, as to draw from a reflecting
reader the exclamation, 'If this can be indeed the product
of Islamism, wherefore should Christianity exist?' If thoughts so
divine can, indeed, belong to a false religion, what more could
we gain from a true one?] attempts to realize the idea of supreme
Deity, he becomes aware of a double and contradictory movement in
his own mind whilst striving towards that result. He demands, in
the first place, something in the highest degree generic; and yet
again in the opposite direction, something in the highest degree
individual; he demands on the one path, a vast ideality, and yet
on the other, in union with a determinate personality. He must not
surrender himself to the first impulse, else he is betrayed into a
mere _anima mundi_; he must not surrender himself to the second,