With respect to mystery, everything we behold is, in one sense, a mystery to us. Our own existence is a mystery, the whole vegetable world is a mystery. We know not how it is that the seed we sow unfolds and multiplies itself. But though every created thing is in this sense a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. The God in whom we believe is a God of moral truth, and not of mystery.
Mystery is the antagonist of truth.
It is a fog of human invention that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Religion, therefore, being the belief of a God, and the practice of moral truth, cannot have connexion with mystery. The belief of a God, so far from having anything of mystery in it, is of all beliefs the most easy, because it arises to us out of necessity. And the practice of moral truth, or, in other words, a practical imitation of the goodness of God, is no other than our acting towards each other as He acts benignly towards all. When men, whether from policy or pious fraud, set up systems of religion incompatible with the word or works of God in the creation, they were under the necessity of inventing or adopting a word that should serve as a bar to all inquiries and speculations.