mere name and wished to commune with Him, and be assured of His
existence, I fail to see how our wish would be satisfied by the
declaration of a created thing (depending on God neither more nor
less than ourselves), "I am the Lord."  (31) If God contorted the
lips of Moses, or, I will not say Moses, but some beast, till they
pronounced the words, "I am the Lord," should we apprehend the Lord's 
existence therefrom?

(1:32) Scripture seems clearly to point to the belief that God spoke
Himself, having descended from heaven to Mount Sinai for the purpose -
and not only that the Israelites heard Him speaking, but that their
chief men beheld Him (Ex:xxiv.)  (1:33) Further the law of Moses, which
might neither be added to nor curtailed, and which was set up as a
national standard of right, nowhere prescribed the belief that God
is without body, or even without form or figure, but only ordained that
the Jews should believe in His existence and worship Him alone: it
forbade them to invent or fashion any likeness of the Deity, but this
was to insure purity of service; because, never having seen God, they
could not by means of images recall the likeness of God, but only the 
likeness of some created thing which might thus gradually take the
place of God as the object of their adoration.  (34) Nevertheless,
the Bible clearly implies that God has a form, and that Moses when he
heard God speaking was permitted to behold it, or at least its hinder
parts. 

(1:35) Doubtless some mystery lurks in this question which we will
discuss more fully below.  (36) For the present I will call attention
to the passages in Scripture indicating the means by which God has
revealed His laws to man.

(1:37) Revelation may be through figures only, as in I Chron:xxii.,
where God displays his anger to David by means of an angel bearing
a sword, and also in the story of Balaam.

(1:38) Maimonides and others do indeed maintain that these and
every other instance of angelic apparitions (e.g. to Manoah and
to Abraham offering up Isaac) occurred during sleep, for that
no one with his eyes open ever could see an angel, but this is
mere nonsense.  (39) The sole object of such commentators seems
to be to extort from Scripture confirmations of Aristotelian
quibbles and their own inventions, a proceeding which I regard
as the acme of absurdity.

(1:40) In figures, not real but existing only in the prophet's
imagination, God revealed to Joseph his future lordship, and in
words and figures He revealed to Joshua that He would fight for
the Hebrews, causing to appear an angel, as it were the Captain
of the Lord's host, bearing a sword, and by this means
communicating verbally.  (41) The forsaking of Israel by
Providence was portrayed to Isaiah by a vision of the Lord,
the thrice Holy, sitting on a very lofty throne, and the Hebrews,
stained with the mire of their sins, sunk as it were in
uncleanness, and thus as far as possible distant from God.
(42) The wretchedness of the people at the time was thus revealed,
while future calamities were foretold in words.  (42a) I could
cite from Holy Writ many similar examples, but I think they are
sufficiently well known already.

(1:43) However, we get a still more clear confirmation of our
position in Num xii:6,7, as follows: "If there be any prophet
among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision"
(i.e. by appearances and signs, for God says of the prophecy of
Moses that it was a vision without signs), "and will speak unto
him in a dream " (i.e. not with actual words and an actual voice).
(1:44) "My servant Moses is not so; with him will I speak mouth to
mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches, and the
similitude of the Lord he shall behold," i.e. looking on me as
a friend and not afraid, he speaks with me (cf. Ex xxxiii:17).

(1:45) This makes it indisputable that the other prophets did not
hear a real voice, and we gather as much from Deut. xxiv:10:
"And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses
whom the Lord knew face to face," which must mean that the Lord
spoke with none other; for not even Moses saw the Lord's face.
(1:46) These are the only media of communication between God and
man which I find mentioned in Scripture, and therefore the only
ones which may be supposed or invented.  (47) We may be able quite
to comprehend that God can communicate immediately with man, for
without the intervention of bodily means He communicates to our
minds His essence; still, a man who can by pure intuition
comprehend ideas which are neither contained in nor deducible
from the foundations of our natural knowledge, must necessarily
possess a mind far superior to those of his fellow men, nor do
I believe that any have been so endowed save Christ.  (1:48) To Him
the ordinances of God leading men to salvation were revealed
directly without words or visions, so that God manifested Himself
to the Apostles through the mind of Christ as He formerly did to
Moses through the supernatural voice.  (49) In this sense the voice
of Christ, like the voice which Moses heard, may be called the voice
of God, and it may be said that the wisdom of God (,i.e. wisdom
more than human) took upon itself in Christ human nature, and that
Christ was the way of salvation.  (1:50) I must at this juncture
declare that those doctrines which certain churches put forward
concerning Christ, I neither affirm nor deny, for I freely confess
that I do not understand them.  (1:51) What I have just stated I
gather from Scripture, where I never read that God appeared to
Christ, or spoke to Christ, but that God was revealed to the
Apostles through Christ; that Christ was the Way of Life, and
that the old law was given through an angel, and not immediately
by God; whence it follows that if Moses spoke with God face to