in the Divine Being and His government. They serve as confirmation of a
belief, which is in harmony with many facts, that God had revealed
Himself to humanity before He furnished the revelation which has come
down to us. Words are not originated by accident. They are expressions
of real existences, and before they found place in hymns or prayers the
ideas which they denoted must have been matters of faith or knowledge to
those who used them. Before man is found professing faith in pagan
deities some idea of God must have existed in his mind. Men did not like
to retain God in their knowledge, and so the idea of the Divine became
perverted, and in its first simplicity was lost, and the multitude
followed numberless shadows all illusory and vain. Still, there
lingered remnants and traditions of belief in a Divine Creator and
Governor which must have originated in such a primeval revelation as the
book of Genesis records. We find there the statement that God revealed
Himself to our first parents by direct intercourse. They heard and saw
and talked with God. They therefore knew of the existence of God by
personal perception, and the ideas they held regarding Him were founded
on His own manifestation of Himself.

Closely connected with this consciousness is the sense of responsibility
universally prevalent. There is a law written on the heart of every
rational human being, under the guidance of which he recognises a
distinction between good and evil, right and wrong. He possesses a
faculty to which the name of conscience has been given, that convicts
him of sin when he violates, and approves his conduct when he conforms
to, its dictates. However much different peoples and different ages may
be at variance in their particular ideas of what is right and what is
wrong, the conception itself has place in all of them. There are certain
fundamental notions as to what is just and what is unjust, what is
virtuous and what is vicious, that find universal or all but universal