at most, makes God a law or force; and the last strips him of all personality and all relations, and presents him in the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction—a mere pantheistic self-contradiction-a nothing. The first, as in the doctrine of Paulus, converts, by a sensualistic interpretation, the supernatural facts of Christianity into ordinary physical phenomena, misunderstood by an easy credulity. The glory of our Lord, which, on the night of his birth, shone around the shepherds of Jerusalem, was, according to Paulus, an ignis fatuus, or meteor; and the ascension of the Lord was nothing more than his sudden disappearance behind a cloud that accidently intervened between him and his disciples. The last, as in the doctrine of Straus, by a pantheistic interpretation, converts Christianity into a myth, a poetical fiction, representing religious ideas in the form of facts which were believed by the authors of the Gospels to have actually occurred. The ideas symbolized in the facts of the evangelical myths are, according to Straus, true as applied to humanity as a whole, but false as applied to the individual. But in the one-sided theories of the human mind, of Sensualism and Intellectualism, man's reason is put at war with itself. Both are true as a principle, but false as a theory. When Epicurus asserted that reality resides in sensuous objects alone, and that all else is imaginary; and when Plato proclaimed, that the senses are only sources of illusion, and that all reality is in intelligible objects which can be seen only by an intuition apart from sense, two theories hostile in their scopes and aims were ushered upon the battle-field of speculation, which have never yet come to terms of entire reconciliation. But as each theory is only a perverted truth, by which a part is substituted for the whole, each having a principle in the human mind for its basis, philosophers have endeavoured to reconcile the two principles in theories of mind embracing both. The most remarkable of these is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. By a too architectural view of the human intelligence, Kant has so exhibited the human mind, as to make the principle on which Sensualism reposes a mere receptivity of illusions circumscribed and conditioned by conceptions that are also illusions; and the principle on which Intellectualism reposes, he makes an illusive regulator of the

other illusions. So that Kant has reconciled the antecedent hostile theories of Sensualism and Intellectualism, not by showing that there is no real hostility between the faculties of the human mind, when both principles on which they respectively repose are recognised, but by making human intelligence utterly mendacious. And worse than this, he makes the lower faculty find its highest function in striving to realize, as objectively true, the impossible illusions which are shadowed forth by the highest faculty, and which, though illusive, all the aspirations of man's intellectual and moral natures make him hope and believe to be true.

It is upon this false theory of human intelligence that Kant has built the most potent and subtle polemic against the speculative validity of theism, as a rational doctrine, which has ever been taught. But the force of his criticism depends, for the most part, upon the chasm which he erroneously represents as existing between the lower and the higher faculties of human intelligence, in the normal exercise of their respective functions; so that the higher, which is above all possible experience, can never derive any light from experience in proof of its ideas as having corresponding objects in being, but must ever wander lost in the midst of paradoxes which it is constrained to own as the legitimate products of its function, and which, at best, can only be systematized into insoluble antinomies or necesary conflicts of reason. On this scheme of human intelligence it is that Kant starts on the examination of the proofs of the existence of a supreme being, assuming, as his theory of the mind compelled him to do, that the notion of God is a mere necessary idea of the highest faculty of man, the objective validity of which it is impossible either to prove or disprove. However the aspirations of the human heart may offer up the incense of contrition and worship, after all, according to Kant, the object of adoration is, to speculative reason, only an idea hypostatized and personified by empirical credulity. What is worshipped as God is a mere regulative idea, to give scientific unity to the illusions of sense; its value being logical, not moral; scientific, not theological. But, yet, as speculation cannot, according to Kant, either affirm or deny the existence of a supreme being, it relegates the question to empirical proofs

which may elicit a belief, but not a cognition, for the idea lies out of the field of possible experience. Such is the rationale of Kant's transcendental criticism of theology, or the problem of God. And though he relegates the problem to empirical proofs, upon his scheme of the faculties of human thought, these proofs have no real validity. For, while he states the empirical or physico-theological proofs, with great force of logical combination, they are eviscerated of their cogency because of the entire separation, in his theory of human intelligence, of the sensuous intuition and its contents from pure reason and its ideas, of which God is one. Kant's theory of the human intelligence is so revolting to common sense, that even his own perverse ingenuity, at times, seems to be on the eve of discerning its sophistical character. In the following sentence he comes near to surrendering it as a blunder: "The reason (says Kant) does not properly give birth to any conception, but only frees the conception from the unavoidable limitation of a possible experience; and thus endeavours to raise it above the empirical, though it must still be in connection with it. Transcendental ideas are properly nothing but categories elevated to the unconditioned." Our highest thought, as this sentence nearly expresses, is a continuous thread, beginning in the intuitions of the external and internal senses, and is woven exclusively of the elements furnished by these primary faculties. There is no contribution of material by any higher faculty. There is a transcendental element in the pri mary intuitions—in experience-by which the mind rises necessarily towards the unconditioned, not as something known, but believed; being relatively implied in that which is known. This transcendental element is the relation, in human thought, of the conceivable to the inconceivable. For the conceivable in human knowledge is always bounded by the inconceivable, being always conceived in relation to it; and the mind, by a logical necessity, as well as by an intelligent craving, ever strives to comprehend the inconceivable or unconditioned. Therefore, though, in human thinking, the conceivable and the inconceivable are, logically, mutually exclusive of each other, yet, psychologically, they are mutually relative and intelligently filiated, and together make up that quantum of

human knowledge and belief which, according to the laws of intelligence, must have objective validity. This truth is realized in the fact, that it is impossible to conceive either an absolute least or an absolute greatest. There is always something beyond, which, though inconceivable, is necessarily believed to exist. Knowledge is, therefore, bounded by faith. Kant extinguished by his theory the transcendental ray in experience, and made the whole region beyond actual knowledge one of outer darkness. In his view of experience, speculation must ignore a God. But in our view of experience, the transcendental element or relation is a clew to conduct us through the labyrinth of negations, which meet us on all sides with their contradiction, to the goal where reason is necessitated by its own laws, as will presently be shown, to believe in a God, or else ignore its primary beliefs and nullify its rationality. And the argument founded on merely rational principles is supplemented and corroborated by the sense of moral obligation and the profound moral interests which a spirit, like man's, feels in the destiny which is foreshadowed by the reckonings of his reason. For our spiritual instincts are deliverances of intelligence, and have their proper objects of fruition. in the universe.

Having exposed the sophistry of the objections offered by the Kantean philosophy against the validity of the argument for a God, we will proceed to examine the problem of God as it rests upon its intrinsic evidences. The clew to the solution of the problem is to be found in the doctrine of causation. The notion of cause is the clew by which the phenomena of the physical world are unravelled. Physical science does not transcend the horizon of natural causes, which are conceived as blindly operating forces inherent in matter. But as no natural cause is conceived as self-sufficient, but must be considered only as an effect of a cause, and thus, in an endless regress into infinity, the science of metaphysics emerges in human thinking, as an explanation of what lies beyond the horizon of natural causes. Two theories, to which all others may be reduced, after eliminating the irrelevant modifications, are given of the metaphysical notion of a cause. The one is that the notion is the result of an impotence to think an absolute beginning, and

therefore is purely negative, importing only a limitation of knowledge. The other and older and most generally received theory is, that the notion is the product of the consciousness of the exercise of force by our will upon our physical organization, and that this notion is transferred to all the changes in the physical world, as representative of their antecedent; the notion of cause being connected with the observed change, either by a law of association, according to some, or by a necessary law of thought, according to others. But neither the positive nor the negative theory is self-sufficient. Neither is an adequate explanation of the contingent in nature; and more especially does neither explain how effects or changes result in arrangements indicating design or final purpose. These arrangements, called final causes, are the one obtrusive manifestation characterizing universal nature; and the arrangements are not only perfect in mechanical skill and calculated with the nicest mathematical accuracy in weight and measure and forces, but the artistic finish and ornament is consummate in skill and beauty, each having no relation to a blind force, nor to any conceivable antecedent, except an intelligent creator of surpassing knowledge, taste, and power. And as an antecedent is necessarily thought, on either theory of causation, atheism, or disbelief in the existence of an intelligent artificer adequate to such work, is both a scientific and metaphysical impossibility. To suppose that the whole work is self-originated, is to ignore all intelligence, and thus to ignore the supposition itself, which is self-contradictory. Causation, in ultimate analysis, must be conceived as that which is self-determined; and when it is ascribed to physical nature, the inference is according to the analogy of man, and not according to the analogy of the world or physical nature; for cause must be conceived as originating in, if not identical with, intelligence and will. It is by this sort of inference that we determine the character or nature of our fellow-men. It is through our own image that we behold them. We are, by the laws of thought, necessitated to transfer to them our own forms of thought and our entire personality. By this same necessity, we are constrained to infer, from the data of self-consciousness, in connection with causation in the physical world, that God is; and that he is a