RELIGIOUS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 934, 24 January 1890, Page 6

RELIGIOUS.

MAN’S KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. V e ourselver, in the sphere of relations—in the related world—can speak of God’s manifestations only in broken, diverse, incomplete phrases; Far beyond us God is, yet He is near to us in all that is—in our own selfhood, in power, in cause, in truth, goodness, aud beauty, m all high ends which we can seek ; He is at our door, even dimly in oui hsarts. But this Being can never be grasped in one conception, or treated as if He were the term or beginning of a mathematical demonstration. He is, no doubt, one and supreme. But he has endless relations—endless, just because he is God. He is the ground of all, in all, through all, yet somehow not there—not in His supreme essence, not in His selfhood, not as God. But in looking up to Him as the ground of all relations, we cannot formulate God in ons conception, in one idea of the so-called reason. The only philosophy and the only religion worthy of the name is that which looks beyond pure formulae of the mere intelligence or thought, and finds God in the breadth of experience, history, human life, yet, in Himself utterly transcendantof all that in these we can know, feel, or name. Not the definitely Known God, not the unknown God is our last word, far less the Unknownable God, but the ever-fco-be-known God. We are not God, and when we form, or attempt to form, an idea of Him, we do not create Him. As Bosauet well said : ‘Si l’bomme avait pu ouvertement se declarer Dieu son orgueil se seraifc emporte juEqu’i), cet exces ; mais ee dire Dieu efc se sentir mortel, l’arrogance la plus aveugle en au*ait honte.’—‘Knowing and Being/ by John. Veitoh, LL.D. (Blackwood). THE ‘ADVENTISTS/ The * Adventists, ’ who form some 100,000

of the population of the United States, are a curious people, and are divided into at least five bodies or companies—(1) Second Advent Christian, who believe in the resurrection and everlasting destruction of the wicked dead; (2) Evangelical Adventists who hold the orthodox view respecting future punishment ; (3) Seventh Day Adventists, who observe the seventh day as the Sabbath; (4) Lie and Advent Union, a destinctivfe tenet of whose belief is the non-resurrection of the wicked dead ; (•'.) Age-to-Come Adventists, who look for the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. In polity these branches, excepting the Seventh Day, which lodges ecclesiastical power in its annual and general conferences, are congregational.—Hock.