existence. The mind itself, with its marvelous power of thought, its tender susceptibility of feeling and the irresistible assertion of the law of duty, is the most convincing witness of Divine creative activity. It is comforting to believe that the physical sciences furnish additional arguments for the Divine existence; but the foundations of our belief would not be disturbed if physical science should fail to add materially to the original arguments of natural theology.

President W. F. Warren has said that "the knowledge of God is simpler and easier than the knowledge of nature. This is not the popular impression. Even among those who emphatically reject agnosticism, and contend that God may be known, there are thousands who have an idea that we must first protractedly study matter and force and life, and all their combinations, rising from one sphere of knowledge to another, strengthening our powers and enlarging our outlook at every step, until at last, having acquainted ourselves with all that the world offers, we are prepared to form a conception of that exalted Being whose existence seems essential to the rational explanation of the whole. Every such view of the knowledge of God in its relation to the knowledge of nature is a complete inversion of the true. I speak with strictest scientific precision when I say that I know far more of the nature of God than I do of the nature of a sand-grain. And I speak with equal soberness when I say that it is easier to give a child a right conception of the former than it is to give it a right conception of the latter. Furthermore, while a life-long study of certain Greek books ascribed to Plato may make it very difficult indeed for me to doubt that a man by the name of Plato once lived, and that he wrote these books, I can not, after all, properly know it; still less can I by this process ever come to personal knowledge of the man. The veriest boy who jovially spent a single half-day with him nutting in the woods of Attica obtained a personal insight into the real Plato such as a life-time of the most laborious study of his Dialogues can never give to me. The day for knowing Plato as old Athenian youths knew him is forever past. God's day, on the contrary, is from everlasting to everlasting. And the human child who desires to make his acquaintance is under no necessity to go to work as if the Heavenly Father had been dead some thousands of years, and was only to be known by painstaking inferences from certain books which he is said to have written, and from certain ruins of a grandly planned house which he is supposed to have built. The difficulties in the way of our knowledge of God, if any exist, are in us, not in him. Even a pagan could say, 'We are his offspring;' and shall not a father be himself

more intelligible to a son than can be any vast, uninterpreted mecanique céleste which that father may have builded? Even though he were not, when conceived of as passive, what is to prevent us from conceiving of this Father as active, and as taking delight in disclosing himself to every humble and filial spirit?"

PURE MORALITY DEPENDENT UPON BELIEF IN GOD.

Without faith in a Higher Power man never rises above the level of superstition and base sensuality; and, once exalted by true relig ion to a higher plane, if he becomes faithless again he degenerates to the condition of a wretch. The approving smile of God is the natural want of the human heart, and without this there is no adequate motive to holy living.

"We investigate the instincts of the ant and the bee and the beaver, and discover that they are led by an inscrutable agency to work toward a distant purpose. Let us be faithful to our scientific method, and investigate also those instincts of the human mind by which man is led to work as if the approval of a Higher Being were the aim of life." (Jevons.) "If the demands of our moral nature are to be satisfied, we need not merely a power, but a person, who, by virtue of his personal qualities, will be able to judge us individually, alike with justice and with mercy." (Wace.) "The Eternal Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness." (M. Arnold.) "O Thou! The One! Thou pure and everlasting Spirit that dwelleth in me as I know by my horror of a lie." (Ebers.) "There is but one solid basis of morality; namely, the recognition of God, and a sense of accountability to him." (O. P. Fitzgerald, D. D.)

God is the author of that universally recognized monitor and guide to goodness, a Christian conscience. "When we speak of a sensitive conscience, it is well always to bear in mind that, apart from God's help, there is practically no such thing; it is a gift which must come from him. He is wont to carry on his hidden dealings with the soul by means of what we should call very little things. Nothing is beneath his watchful care, and he would have his law to be our guide in every word and look, as well as in the weightiest matters. He requires an absolute purity of heart in those with whom he vouchsafes to dwell, and a spirit of self-sacrifice which is ever ready to offer all things, however seemingly small, to him." (Guilloré.)

"All ye wanderers in lands of doubt and unbelief, where the harvest will fail and where the grass will die under foot, the King asks

you and your father and mother and friends to dwell in that part of the vale which is richest. Compare the realms of God and no God, and if in that of faith there flows a Nile whose waters never fail-a river which depends not upon the small clouds of an April sky, but upon the movements of a season, and the lakes and forests of a tropic world, then move into that world without delay. It will be, compared with the parched-up land of denial and doubt, a vale of paradise. For the Maker of the universe is kinder than Egyptian king, and asks the soul to pitch its tent in that part of thought's wide domain where there are the highest morals and the most inspiring hopes." (David Swing.)

"But a skeptic might say: 'I confess that religion and a God are useful for restraining evil, but I love truth so that I will proclaim it, no matter what results. Let the world go to moral ruin; but if no God, say so.' Now, I would reply to that: A thousand times yes, my friend; truth is so magnificent a thing, and so demands and deserves our loyalty, that to die for it is not too much. But it is just because we believe this that we believe in a God who stands behind truth, and gives it its value and grandeur. All over the world men worship moral greatness. Infidels, heathen, Christians, worldlings bow to moral qualities sincerity, truth, generosity, self-sacrifice. They consider the grandeur of these facts to be primary, intuitive certainties, beyond disputation, 'ringed with the azure world.' Now, my friend, ponder this argument. If you agree to this, you must believe in a personal, loving God, the author and possessor of these virtues— nay, in a future life, if you consider what they imply. For why should truth be followed though the heavens fall? Why should you, the skeptic, love it so, that, as you say, you are willing to follow it to the dreariest conclusions, and ruin your life? It is all a delusion, a willo'-the-wisp, if you and it came from nowhere, and go no whither. It would be as absurd for you to die for it as 'to die of a rose in aromatic pain,' or to die for the color in a picture, the expression in a symphony, or for a theory in chemistry. A thing must have a person behind it to give it supreme value. Gold would be useless unless men were willing to buy or work it. A sailor values a light-house only because the whole nation seems to stand behind it, saying, 'Sail there.' If light-houses grew hap-hazard, what value would he place on them, then? But am I not more logical than you? I say, Yes; miserably imperfect man as I am, I believe so thoroughly in moral truth, as having value in itself, and not being merely a useful fiction to restrain robbery and lust, that it throws one back necessarily on

the fact that a God must exist who gave truth, and desires me to follow it. I can not believe that all virtue is in reality a phantom, a mirage, a useful, selfish cheat, and that one is talking secret foolishness, when he says that sincerity, purity, honesty are good absolutely-good in themselves—as distinguished from useful. As much as I believe in the reality of this body of mine, which I touch-as thoroughly as I am convinced that parallel lines do not meet, or that twice two is four, so positively do I know-yes, know-that such a thing as purity, or self-sacrifice, or lofty principle has inborn in it a divine essence of righteousness, which has nothing to do with my opinion, or with yours, or with our forefathers' in its origin. Observe that men and nations may differ as to what is right and wrong. 'The time cometh that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service,' said our Lord to his disciples. That is not the point at this time. The point is, that back of all that there is in the human soul an indestructible conviction of the necessary difference between the ideas of right and wrong in the abstract, and of the inherent right of certain virtues, and wrong of certain vices, however we may dispute as to what constitutes them. And when we come to analyze, as far as we may, that conviction, we find that in its turn it logically implies God and a future life. If right be really right, and if the absolute truth is that, as even atheists confess, a righteous unfortunate man is a more desirable model to set before our children than an unrighteous prosperous one; if, once more, one ought, as even atheists confess, to die on the scaffold for principle rather than to mount a throne at the price of betraying it; if this is as firm a conviction of an intelligent mind as any axiom, and not confessed to be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,' then must there be another existence beyond ours to justify, to prove, and to complete all this. I leave those who accept these premises to work out any other conclusion.

"Now, who holds the nobler, truer ground before the world-the unbeliever or the Christian? Compress the Christian idea again. We do not love virtue simply because it is useful or beautiful, as an agnostic must do; but we believe that a thing so self-commended as virtue, so intuitively true, must be from God, and can not be false. Because we believe in virtue as absolute, it compels us to believe in God. For virtue in society is like law in nature, holding it together; and the Christian believes that so glorious a thing, so heartfelt a good, such a conserving principle, which alone prevents chaos-that this must have a purpose and cause behind it to make it true, and can not be from chance. Yes; moral truth, however nations and creeds may

differ as to its boundaries and definitions, is, in its last analysis, intuitively true-yet not without God. It is the salt and the salvation

of the world-yet not without God. So it is that we believe not only that we can know God, but that we do know him. If that awful, yet loving, glorious, and holy Personal Cause does not exist, one can believe in nothing, the distinction between right and wrong disappears; nay, there is no reality in cities or lands, or in this audience; for I am very sure that these are no more certain to any one of us than is the statement that purity is to be always chosen rather than lust. Yet why? The agnostic, the secularist can not ignore that question as to the origin of moral truth. His first step in forming the future raises it. God will not be thrust out of the world he has made, either under the plea of a false humility, 'I can not know him,' or by the argument that it is all a useless problem, and that 'I do not know him.' It is the primary question of life." (Alexander Mackay Smith.)

HOW BEST TO KNOW GOD.

"All the knowledge of God we can acquire by the study of nature or of ourselves is very limited. Beyond a certain point our reasoning can not go. Who by searching can find out God? It is impossible through science or philosophy to find out the Almighty to perfection.' The respect in which he is like ourselves is so limited that it no more than gives us a hint, a slight clew to the reality and personality of infinite intelligence. In our struggle for further light and knowledge of Deity we must come to the 'only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father. He hath revealed him.' Short of this we may reason forever, and come no nearer the Christian conception of God than did the old Greeks, who, in feeling after him, could only raise an altar with this inscription: 'To the unknown God.'

"Dost thou ask, 'When may I say that I have known God?' the answer is, When thou hast found him in Christ, through repentance and faith! Even Paul served an unknown God until repentance and faith in Christ taught him. And is it not ever just so to-day? Many a one believes that he knows God, while, nevertheless, he is serving an unknown God. When he opens entirely his heart to God, and in repentance and faith receives a new heart, then his heart is conscious that he now, for the first time, has found his God! Until then his knowledge of God was dead; now it is living, true, saving through the spirit of sonship." (Theodor Christlieb, D. D., LL. D.)