71

Thou experiencest in the boyhood of the Race the same thing in reference to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.  It is preached in the better Primer as a Revelation, instead of taught as a result of human reason.

72

As we by this time can dispense with the Old Testament, in reference to the doctrine of the unity of God, and as we are by degrees beginning also to be less dependent on the New Testament, in reference to the immortality of the soul:  might there not in this Book also be other truths of the same sort prefigured, mirrored, as it were, which we are to marvel at, as revelations, exactly so long as until the time shall come when reason shall have learned to educe them, out of its other demonstrated truths and bind them up with them?

73

For instance, the doctrine of the Trinity.  How if this doctrine should at last, after endless errors, right and left, only bring men on the road to recognise that God cannot possibly be One in the sense in which finite things are one, that even His unity must be a transcendental unity, which does not exclude a sort of purality?  Must not God at least have the most perfect conception of Himself, i. e., a conception in which is found everything which is in Him?  But would everything be found in it which is in Him, if a mere conception, a mere possibility, were found even of his necessary Reality as well as of His other qualities?  This possibility exhausts the being of His other qualities.  Does it that of His necessary Reality?  I think not.  Consequently God can either have no perfect conception of himself at all, or this perfect conception is just as necessarily real, i. e., actually existent, as He Himself is.  Certainly the image of myself in the mirror is nothing but an empty representation of me, because it only has that of me upon the surface of which beams of light fall.  But now if this image had everything, everything without exception, which I have myself, would it then still be a mere empty representation, or not rather a true reduplication of myself?  When I believe that I recognise in God a familiar reduplication, I perhaps do not so much err, as that my language is insufficient for my ideas:  and so much at least for ever incontrovertible, that they who wish to make the idea thereof popular for comprehension, could scarcely have expressed themselves more intelligibly and suitably than by giving the name of a Son begotten from Eternity.

74

And the doctrine of Original Sin.  How, if at last everything were to convince us that man standing on the first and lowest step of his humanity, is not so entirely master of his actions as to be able to obey moral laws?

75

And the doctrine of the Son’s satisfaction.  How, if at last, all compelled us to assume that God, in spite of that original incapacity of man, chose rather to give him moral laws, and forgive him all transgressions in consideration of His Son, i. e., in consideration of the self-existent total of all His own perfections, compared with which, and in which, all imperfections of the individual disappear, than not to give him those laws, and then to exclude him from all moral blessedness, which cannot be conceived of without moral laws.