the universe trying to keep up with events. So, comparing man and God, it was "not the visibility of their persons that differed, but the glory of them only." Tomkinson advances two reasons why this must be so. Firstly, he argued that God created man in his own image and that righteousness and holiness cannot act unless they are embodied in an agent. Secondly and ingeniously, that many of the virtues of God relate to states of being and that would be meaningless without a body to be in. "Now the learned professors resist this doctrine," Tomkinson advises us. Yet this is what mystery means. Those wedded to reason will always look to the bare letter of the law and to their own proud reasonings. Whereas those born of the seed of the woman "can trace the footsteps of the prophets till they come to the paths of God and so find him out and know him." Tomkinson thinks the impure motives behind the idea of God being pure spirit are only too obvious. He says it was originally a pagan form of self-flattery to imagine there was a little bit of God in us all. He traces its history from Nimrod, through Pythagoras to Pliny the Elder and tells how they loved to commission statues of themselves to impress others. Scriptural literalists (from Augustine to Richard Baxter) fall into a similar error of human imaginings. Yet there was always an underground stream of the truth. He cites the followers of Sabilis which we would probably label Sabellianism. Also the Athrapamorphets. These truth-sayers were persecuted by the dominant culture due to the take-over of the church by the state and because the Apostles "preached the faith in a personal God, but in that they clothed it within the appellation of several titles, it appeared more intricate and mysterious" than it really was. Tomkinson summarises his reasons why an embodied God is the "true lip of heaven". that God created man in his own likeness that God talked with Adam and Abraham and walked with Enoch that God wrestled with Jacob that God covered the eyes of Moses that the words of the law were scribed by God's own finger. Wrong doctrine tends to result in evil fruit and Tomkinson expresses this with a remarkable extended metaphor. "Like as to a man that goeth into his garden more for the love