God is "a Spirit," and man was made "in the image of God." Take away all spiritual essences; reduce every known object in nature to matter, gross or refined; let mental and moral phenomena be blended with the physical, and what remains to constitute the groundwork of a "spiritual" system, or to conduct us to the recognition of a supreme, immaterial Mind?
If the material body, with its peculiar organization, be capable of producing human thought, and sufficient to account for the intelligence of man, why may not the material universe, with its mysterious laws and manifold forces, be held sufficient to explain whatever marks of a higher intelligence may appear in Nature?
and why may we not at once embrace Pantheism, and conceive of God only as "the soul of the world ?" Dr.Priestley's reply to this question appears to us to be a mere evasion of the difficulty.

In treating of "the objection to the system of Materialism derived from the consideration of the Divine essence," he first of all premises that "in fact we have no proper idea of any essence whatever; that our ideas concerning 'matter' do not go beyond the powers of which it is possessed, and much less can our ideas go beyond powers, properties, or attributes with respect to the Divine Being;" and then adds, "Now, the powers and properties of the Divine mind, as clearly deduced from the works of God, are not only so infinitely superior to those of the human mind, when there is some analogy between them, but so essentially different from them in other respects, that whatever term we make use of to denote the one, it must be improperly applied to the other." He specifies several points of "essential difference" between the human and the Divine mind: the _first_ is, the limited intelligence of the one as contrasted with the all-comprehensive omniscience of the other; the _second_ is, the omnipotence which belongs to God, and in virtue of which He can produce, or annihilate, anything at His pleasure: the _third_ is, that "the Divine essence cannot be the object of any of our senses, as everything else that we call 'matter' is." And on these grounds he concludes that "as the Divine powers, so the Divine nature, must be essentially different from ours, and, consequently, no common term, except such comprehensive terms as _being, nature_, &c., can be properly used to express both." He further argues that "no proof of the materiality of man can be extended, by any just analogy, to a proof or evidence of a similar materiality of the Divine nature; for the properties or powers being different, the 'substance' or 'essence' (if it be any convenience to us to use such terms at all) must be different also."[177] Now, we conceive this to be a mere evasion of the real difficulty: _first_, because the same mode of reasoning, if applied to the case of the human mind, would equally serve to prove that _it_ should be distinguished from matter: and, _secondly_, because the alleged _differences_ between the human and the Divine mind, great and real as we admit them to be, afford no better reason for calling God a "spirit," than that which may be found in the _resemblance or analogy_ between created and uncreated intelligence.

It is as true of the human as it is of the Divine mind, that we know nothing of its essence, except what we learn through its properties and powers, that "it cannot be the object of any of our senses, as everything that we call 'matter' is," and that if it be right to give different and distinctive names to substances, expressive of their properties in so far as these are known to us, we are warranted in calling the human soul a "spirit" and distinguishing it from "matter," until it can be shown that the properties of both are identical.

If this be denied, we cannot see on what ground the distinction between "matter" and "spirit" can be maintained with reference to God Himself.

Dr.Priestley founds, not on the _resemblance or analogy,_ but on the _essential difference_, between created and uncreated intelligence; but, in point of fact, the _difference_, great and real as it is, has no bearing on the only question at issue; it is the _resemblance or analogy_ between all thinking beings and the Supreme Mind that suggests the reason for classing them under the same category as "spirits," and that enables us to rise from the spiritual nature of man to the spiritual nature of God.
The personality of God, as a living, self-conscious, and active Being, distinct from the created universe and superior to it, is dependent on the "spirituality" of His nature; and in so far as the latter is affected by the theory of Materialism, the evidence of the former must also be proportionally weakened.