In the latter as objectized by the former arise the emotions, affections, and in one word, the passions, as distinguished from the cognitions and appetites.  Now the reason has been shown to be super-individual, generally, and therefore not less so when the form of an individualization subsists in the ‘alter’, than when it is confined to the ‘idem’; not less when the emotions have their conscious or believed object in another, than when their subject is the individual personal self.  For though these emotions, affections, attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room,—­as we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher ’per medium commune’ with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the higher (namely, the objects of reason) and finally to know that the latter are indeed and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your Heavenly Father who is invisible;—­yet this holds good only so far as the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and cases may arise in which the Christ as the Logos or Redemptive Reason declares, ’He that loves father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me’; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason.  Here then reason appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is the attachment to individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or in competition with, the love which is reason.

In these five paragraphs I have enumerated and explained the several powers or forces belonging or incidental to human nature, which in all matters of reason the man is bound either to subjugate or subordinate to reason.  The application to Faith follows of its own accord.  The first or most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity:  then fidelity under previous contract or particular moral obligation.  In this sense faith is fealty to a rightful superior:  faith is the duty of a faithful subject to a rightful governor.  Then it is allegiance in active service; fidelity to the liege lord under circumstances, and amid the temptations, of usurpation, rebellion, and intestine discord.  Next we seek for that rightful superior on our duties to whom all our duties to all other superiors, on our faithfulness to whom all our bounden relations to all other objects of fidelity, are founded.  We must inquire after that duty in which all others find their several degrees and dignities, and from which they derive their obligative force.  We are to find a superior, whose rights, including our duties, are presented to the mind in the very idea of that Supreme Being, whose sovereign prerogatives are predicates implied in the subjects, as the essential properties of a circle are co-assumed in the first assumption of a circle, consequently underived, unconditional, and as rationally insusceptible, so probably prohibitive, of all further question.  In this sense then faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral nature to God, in opposition to all usurpation, and in resistance to all temptation to the placing any other claim above or equal with our fidelity to God.