The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

part of God anywhere, and that the whole of God is everywhere, no less in
the least than in the greatest, no less in the minutest part than in the
absolute whole; in place, yet illocal, in all parts, yet impartible, in infinity,
yet unextended.
Eternity.
The idea of ETERNITY, of something to which all time is unrelated,
to which millions are no more than a unit, each being relatively to eternity
nothing, of which a trillion trillion of years is no larger part than the
minutest fraction of a second--a something of which we are compelled to
conceive as back of us, and before us, but which is not back of us nor
before us; in which we seem surely to have reached the middle point, this
centre at which we stand, but which has no middle point; an infinite gone,
and an infinite to come, but which has not gone and is not to come, but
ever is, without past, or future, or proportion; this is a something which to
reason and logic is utterly incomprehensible and impossible upon the one
side, as on the other it is the irresistible necessity of our thinking. It is
inconceivable how it is, or even what it is; but we can no more doubt that it
is than we can doubt our own being.
Trinity.
If we come within the limits of the theology of the Catholic creeds,
we find the seemingly impossible here also accepted as necessary truth.
That the entire essence of the Godhead, the unity of the divine Being
unimpaired, shall in its modifications form the personality of the three
persons; each person having the whole essence, yet being personally
distinct from each of the others, not three essences, nor one essence in
three thirds, but one essence entire in each--this swallows up the
understanding of man.
Hypostatic Union.
That the infinite Godhead should so take to itself a true human body,
that the "human" and "divine" shall henceforth be one person, so that we
can say, not by mere accommodation of language, but literally, "Christ
made the universe, and God purchased the Church with His own blood"-this
is fathomless. God is substantially present in every human creature:
How is it then that but one of our race is God incarnate? However
fathomless then, a doctrine whose basis is the truth, that the God of