distinct meaning. One sort of them, faith, grace, justification, have been
the symbols of one class of disputes; as the words substance, nature,
person, of another, revelation, inspiration, and the like, of a third. All
of them have been the subject of endless reasonings and inferences; but a
spell has hung over the minds of theologians or philosophers which has
prevented them from examining the words themselves. Either the effort to
rise above and beyond their own first ideas was too great for them, or
there might, perhaps, have seemed to be an irreverence in doing so. About
the Divine Being Himself, in whom all true theological ideas live and move,
men have spoken and reasoned much, and have fancied that they instinctively
know Him. But they hardly suspect that under the name of God even
Christians have included two characters or natures as much opposed as the
good and evil principle of the Persians.

To have the true use of words we must compare them with things; in using
them we acknowledge that they seldom give a perfect representation of our
meaning. In like manner when we interrogate our ideas we find that we are
not using them always in the sense which we supposed. And Plato, while he
criticizes the inconsistency of his own doctrine of universals and draws
out the endless consequences which flow from the assertion either that
'Being is' or that 'Being is not,' by no means intends to deny the
existence of universals or the unity under which they are comprehended.
There is nothing further from his thoughts than scepticism. But before
proceeding he must examine the foundations which he and others have been
laying; there is nothing true which is not from some point of view untrue,
nothing absolute which is not also relative (compare Republic).

And so, in modern times, because we are called upon to analyze our ideas
and to come to a distinct understanding about the meaning of words; because
we know that the powers of language are very unequal to the subtlety of