Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to be. It is the maxim of most wicked men, that the Deity is some way or other like themselves; their souls do more than whisper it, though their lips speak it not; and though their tongues be silent, yet their lives cry it upon the house-tops and in the public streets. That idea which men generally have of God is nothing else but the picture of their own complexion: that archetypal notion of Him which hath the supremacy in their minds, is none else but such a one as hath been shaped out according to some pattern of themselves; though they may so clothe and disguise this idol of their own, when they carry it about in a pompous procession to expose it to the view of the world, that it may seem very beautiful, and indeed anything else rather than what it is. Most men (though it may be they themselves take no great notice of it), like that dissembling monk — aliter sentire in scholis, aliter in musceis,— are of a different judgment in the schools from what they are in the retirements of their private closets. There is a double head as well as a double heart. Men's corrupt hearts will not suffer their notions and conceptions of Divine things to be cast into that form into which a higher reason, which may sometimes work within them, would put them.¹⁾