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NOTES OF SERMONS.

I.

ON THE BEING AND NAME OF JEHOVAH.

Exod. iii. 14.—And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM : and he said, Thus shall ye say to the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.* *

I. LET us consider the import of the name; the incommunicable name.

II. The proof of his [God's] possessing the attributes included in it.

III. The probable reasons of his choosing to represent himself under this character.

I. The import of the word JEHOVAH. It comes from a word which denotes to be, to exist; and the proper import of it appears to be permanent, unchanging existence. In the word JEHOVAH is included the affixes and terminations of the future and of the past; implying that he centres within himself all past, together with all future, exist

ence.

The name I AM in the LXX. is rendered öv. In the first chapter of the Revelation of St. John, the Lord describes himself under the following * Preached at Leicester, in October 1814.

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character, "Who is, (ó v,) and who was, and who is to come." It denotes eternal, original, unchanging Being.

Solve the difficulty respecting this name not being known to Abraham, to Isaac and Jacob. He never used that name himself, though Moses employs it in reciting the communications he made to the nation.

II. We propose to demonstrate the existence of such a Being.

1. Something always must have existed, or nothing could have had an existence. To suppose the matter of this world, for example, to have arisen out of nothing, without any cause whatever, is, evidently, to suppose what is absurd and impossible.

2. Whatever exists of itself, and consequently from all eternity, can never cease to exist, and must be perfectly independent of every other being, with respect to existence, and the manner of its existence. Since it exists of itself, the cause and reason of its existence must, by the supposition, be in itself, not in another; it must have, so to speak, a perpetual spring of existence, independent of the operation or will of all other beings. It exists by absolute necessity. It exists because it cannot be otherwise than it is; for whatever can be so is contingent, not necessary. Hence it is absolutely unchangeable: which is sufficient to prove that matter is not that eternal, self-existent, Being; because matter is undergoing continual changes;

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and, instead of being unalterable, is perfectly passive and indifferent to all changes whatever.

3. The Being who always existed, in and of himself, must be an intelligent Being, or a Being possessed of reason and understanding: for these exist; and since they could not arise out of nothing, they must have been produced by something or other. But they could not have been produced by what was unintelligent. Reason and understanding could no more have been caused by what had none, than matter could have arisen out of nothing. Take a lump of clay, or of any part of inanimate matter, and ask yourselves whether it is not, in the highest degree, absurd to suppose that the power of remembering, of reasoning, of judging, should arise from that, as a cause. It is, plainly, just as possible that light should spring from darkness as a cause, as that which is incapable of thought should produce it. Whether the power of thinking may possibly be superadded to matter, is not the question at present; admitting this were possible, it is plainly impossible that thought, or the power of thinking, should spring from inanimate matter as a cause. But as there are many beings possessed of reason and understanding, there must have been, at least, some one intelligent Being from eternity, or those thinking creatures could never have existed; since it is quite as impossible that thought and intelligence should arise out of unconscious matter, as that they should spring out of nothing.

As to the idea which some atheists have pleaded for, of an eternal succession of finite beings, such as we witness at present, without supposing any original, uncaused Being, it is evidently inconsistent with reason and with itself. For it affirms that to be true of the part, which it denies with respect to the whole: every particular being in the series, upon that supposition, depends upon a preceding one, yet the whole depends upon nothing; as if it were affirmed that there could be a chain infinitely long, each link of which was supported by the next, and so on, in each instance, and yet the whole absolutely depended upon nothing. The difficulty of supposing a being beginning to exist without a cause, is not at all lessened by supposing an eternal succession of such beings; for unless there be some first Being, on whom all the rest depend, it is evident the whole series hang upon nothing, which is altogether as impossible as that any one in particular should. Hence it is evident, there must have always been some one intelligent Being, whose existence is uncaused and absolutely eternal, unchangeable, and independent.

4. There is but one such Being. To affirm there is more than one, without reason, must, by the very terms, be unreasonable. But no shadow of reason can be assigned for believing in a plurality of such beings, because the supposition of one accounts for all that we see, as well, and even much better, than the supposition of more.

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