A Brief Compend of Bible Truth Author:Archibald Alexander General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1846 Original Publisher: Presbyterian Board of Publication Subjects: Theology, Doctrinal Religion / Christian Theology / General Religion / Christian Theology / Systematic Religion / Christianity / General Religion / Theology Notes: This is a black and white OCR repr... more »int of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V. SPIRITUALITY AND SIMPLICITY OF THE DIVINE NATURE. That God is a pure Spirit, reason as well as Scripture requires us to believe. As God is an intelligent being, and the source of all intelligence, he must be a spirit; and as he is a voluntary agent, he must be an intelligent person. Matter is inert, unconscious, and cannot be the subject of thought or volition. Matter is also divisible to an indefinite extent, and the parts of bodies are separate from each other, so that each particle is a separate existence; but unity belongs to mind, therefore the mind cannot be material. Again, all matter is solid and extended, and necessarily excludes all other bodies from occupying'the same space: if then God were a material being, as he is omnipresent, he would exclude all other bodies from the universe : or if not everywhere present, there would be some places where there was no God; and if limited to a certain locality, however extended it might be, there would be infinite space, in which God does not exist. But if the materialist denies that inactivity, solidity, divisibility and extension, are the natural properties of matter, and maintains that all matter consists of monads, which are in their nature active, indivisible, un- extended, and that some of these, if not the whole, are endued with consciousness, and are susceptible of allthe actions which we ascribe to mind, t...« less