Not to countervene the purpose of a Synopsis, I have detached the confirmative or explanatory remarks from the Answers to Questions II. and III., and place them below as _scholia_. A single glance of the eye will enable the reader to re-connect each with the sentence it is supposed to follow.
Nevertheless, _the fact or actual truth having been assured to us by Revelation_, it is not impossible, by stedfast meditation on the idea and super-natural character of a personal WILL, for a mind spiritually disciplined to satisfy itself, that the redemptive act _supposes_ (and that our redemption is even negatively _conceivable_ only on the supposition of) an agent who can at once act _on_ the Will as an exciting cause, _quasi ab extra_; and _in_ the Will, as the _condition_ of its potential, and the _ground_ of its actual, being.
Where two subjects, that stand to each other in the relation of _antithesis_ or contradistinction, are connected by a middle term common to _both_, the sense of this middle term is indifferently determinable by _either_; the preferability of the one or the other in any given case being decided by the circumstance of our more frequent experience of, or greater familiarity with, the Term, in _this_ connexion. Thus, if I put hydrogen and oxygen gas, as opposite poles, the term _gas_ is common to both; and it is a matter of indifference, by which of the two bodies I ascertain the sense of the term. But if for the conjoint purposes of connexion and contrast, I oppose transparent crystallized alumen to opaque derb, or uncrystallized alumen;--it may easily happen to be far more _convenient_ for me to show the sense of the middle term, that is, alumen, by a piece of pipe-clay than by a sapphire or ruby; especially if I should be describing the beauty and preciousness of the latter to a peasant woman, or in a district where a ruby was a rarity which the fewest only had an opportunity of seeing. This is a plain rule of common logic directed in its application by common sense.
Now let us apply this to the case in hand. The two opposites _here_ are Flesh and Spirit, _this_ in relation to _Christ_, _that_ in relation to the _World_; and these two opposites are connected by the middle term, _Birth_, which is of course common to both. But for the same reason, as in the instance last mentioned, the interpretation of the common term is to be ascertained from its known sense, in the more familiar connexion--birth, namely, in relation to our natural life and to the organized body, by which we belong to the present world.--Whatever the word signifies in this connexion, the same _essentially_ (in _kind_ though not in dignity and value) must be its signification in the other. How else could it be (what yet in this text it undeniably _is_), the _punctum indifferens_, or _nota communis_, of the _thesis_, Flesh; or the World, and the _antithesis_ Spirit; or Christ? We might therefore, upon the supposition of a writer having been speaking of river-water in distinction from rain-water, as rationally pretend that in the latter phrase the term, water, was to be understood metaphorically, as that the word, birth, is a metaphor, and means only so and so, in the Gospel according to St. John.