than does either nature or providence. All the evidences of Christi- anity, which are spread out in the third chapter of this volume, which prove that, if there be a God Christianity is a revelation from him, also just as legitimately prove that there is a God, since these are divine works. We are under the same necessity of accounting rationally for the phenomena of Scripture that we are of accounting for the phenomena of creation. Thus, 1st, miracles and prophecy are undoubted facts established by testimony. But miracles and prophecy are inconceivable except as acts of a God. 2d, The Scriptures themselves are evidently the work of a super- human intelligence. — See chapter 3d, questions 13 and 14. 3d. The feeble and crude notion of God furnished by natural religion, is by revelation taken up, completed, glorified, and justified to the reason and conscience. 4th. The spiritual power of Christi- anity as an experimental system in the individual and in all com- munities, in proving its suitableness to the highest wants of hu- man nature, proves also the being of a God.
30. State summarily the amount of knowledge concerning God we derive from the foregoing sources.
I. Our constitutional sense of dependence and of moral ac- countability give us spontaneously our primary elemental notion of God, and assurance of his existence.
II. Reasoning upon all existences and events known to us upon the two principles, (1,) that every effect must have a cause ; (2,) that the power, intelligence and benevolence exercised by the cause in any special act of causation may be argued from their traces in the effect. We find, a, that God is the eternal, self- existent, first cause, and b, that he is indefinitely powerful, wise, free of will and benevolent.
III. Reflecting upon the nature of intelligence and free, will, and their relation to organization as always its cause, never its effect, as developed in our own experience, we rise by necessary inference to the conclusion that God, as a free intelligence, must be a personal spirit.
IV. Reflecting upon the phenomena of conscience, and upon the constitution of our emotional nature and the general course of providence in relation to the law of conscience, we are neces- sarily led to the conclusion that God is also a moral governor,
32 THE BEING OF GOD.
who speaks through conscience and who will vindicate its sanc- tions, because he himself is a holy and righteous being.
Y. From the profound constitution of our nature, although we are utterly incapable of forming any commensurate conception of the infinite and absolute, yet we must, as all men do, affirm their existence, and that they meet in the self-existent and in- comprehensible God.
This much we may now, under the noonday light of revela- tion, certainly deduce from the phenomena of nature as to the being and attributes of God ; but before the light of revelation no man was able to see thus much, nor to affirm with confidence even what he did see.
VI. From the diligent and rational study of the Holy Scrip- tures, with the illumination of the Holy Ghost, we shall attain to a complete theology, as far as that is possible to man on earth.
31. What is Atheism, and how far is it possible ?
Atheism is the denial of God. Of Atheists there are three classes. 1st. Those who confessedly deny the being of any God ; such as those who believe in an eternal succession of things as they are, or in a successive development of nature in virtue of inherent mechanical laws, e. g., Comte, etc. 2d. Those who, while admitting God nominally deny any of his essential constituent attributes. In this sense the Pantheist, who denies the person- ality of God, and who confounds him with the universe, is really, though not nominally, an Atheist, since it makes little difference whether we say that the world is God, or that God is the world. 3d. To the same end tends practically, and by logical though not by confessed consequence, all materialism, which makes intelligence the result not the cause of physical organization, and of all natur- alism, which, while verbally admitting a distant God in the first inconceivably remote act of creation, denies him altogether in all providence and supernatural revelation.
Atheism is possible. 1st. Practically ; many men live thus without God in the world. 2d. Although, from the indestruc- tible constitution of human nature, men must believe in and feel dependence upon some first self-existent being, and fear the judg- ment of some righteous ruler, yet through ignorance and want of intellectual development, and through the delusive power of so-
MATERIALISM. 33
phistical speculation, many men honestly reject as untrue one or more of the essential constituent attributes of God, so that the gross superstition, or the barren notion left in their minds is not God. Not loving God, they for a time succeed in eliminating, as a matter of thought, his distasteful presence. — Kom. i., 21-26.