Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE MEDIATORIAL WORK CHARACTERIZED BY OUTWARD AND VISIBLE MANIFESTATIONS. 1. This work contemplated as embracing the creation, preservation and government of all creatures, and as having for its object the manifestation of the Divine counsels and perfections, is in its nature external and visible; and our knowledge of it results from those operations of the Mediator which are objective to our apprehensions: we behold the visible works of his hand in the material creation, we hear his voice in his word, and witness the results of his agency in preserving and governing the dependent universe. 2. His adoption of this method warrants the assumption that created minds, whether angels or men, were, in the nature of the case, not more incapable of omniscience, than of acquiring a knowledge of the Divine perfections, except as they were manifested by acts and results, operations and effects, so brought within their observation as to be properly characterized as visible, or cognizable to their external perceptions, or their consciousness. 3. The fact that innumerable material worlds have been created, is evidence enough that outward, visible, tangible or otherwise perceptible subsistences distinctand diverse in nature from mind, were necessary as a medium of Divine manifestations to rational creatures ; that the existence and conditions of matter were necessary on account of the mode in which, from their nature and their limited faculties, rational creatures could alone receive or attain any knowledge of the Divine perfections. 4. Accordingly the Apostle argues, that as no man knows the thoughts, feelings, desires or purposes, of another's mind, except so far as he makes them known by words or acts within the observation or perception of others: so the things of ...