fore, as Kant, and Sir William Hamilton, while denying the valid- ity of all other arguments for the existence of God, admit that oiir nature forces us to believe that He is, and that He is a persor
Ou7- Moral Feelings not due to Education.
It is indeed objected that these phenomena of our moral nature are due to education or to superstition. To this it is answered, first, that moral truths have a self-evidencing light. They can no more be denied than the intuitions of sense and reason. It may even be said that our moral judgments have greater certainty than any other of our convictions. Men believe absurdities. They believe what contradicts trie evidence of their senses. But no man ever has, or ever can believe that malignity is a virtue. In the second place, what is universal cannot be accounted for by peculiarities of culture. All men are moral beings ; all have this sense of moral obligation, and of responsibility ; and no man can free himself from these convictions. The Apostle, therefore, speaking out of the common consciousness of men, as well as under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, speaks of sinners as " knowing the judgment of God " (Rom. i. 32) ; that is, a sense of sin involves the knowledge of a righteous God.
We then are placed in the midst of a vast universe, of which we constitute a part. We are forced not merely by the desire of knowledge, but from the necessities of our nature, to ask. How did this universe originate? How is it sustained? To what does it tend ? What are we ? Whence did we come ? Whither are we going ? These questions must be answered. This complicated problem must be solved. To refer everything to chance, is no so- lution. It is a frivolous denial that any solution is necessary, that such questions need any answer. To refer everything to necessity, is to say that the existence of things as they are is the ultimate fact. The universe is, and always has been, and always must be. It is the evolution of necessary being by necessary laws. This is all we can know, and all that need be known. This, however, is no solution. It is merely the denial that any solution is possible. Could this theory be accepted with regard to the outward world, it leaves all the phenomena of man's nature — intellectual, moral, and religious — unaccounted for. Theism is a solution. It as- sumes the existence of an eternal and necessary Being ; a Spirit, and therefore intelligent, voluntary, self-conscious, and endowed with moral perfections. This hypothesis accounts for the origin of the universe. " In the beginning God created the heaven and
240 PAET L — THEOLOGY. [Ch. 11. — Theism.
the earth." This is a satisfactory answer to the fii'st question. It accounts for all the universe is, its immensity, its variety, its ox'der, its numberless organisms, the adaptation of external nature to the wants of all living things. It accounts for the nature of man. It gives what that nature demands, — an infinite object of love, con- fidence, and adoration. It reveals who it is to whom we are re- sponsible, and on whom we are dependent. We know that this so- lution is true, because it is a solution. It meets all the facts of the case. And it so meets them that it cannot fail to be accepted as true, either intelligently or bhndly. The God whom all men igno- rantly worship, the Scriptures reveal, not only in the certainty of his existence, but in the plenitude of his perfections.