imaginative animal; and if to start from, as to end, in mere reason, be in
human psychology a gross one-sidedness, much more in theology is such a
procedure erroneous, and altogether perverse. If not the smallest poem of
a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, but from something deeper
and more vital, much less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, the
deep-seated convictions of religious faith in the inner man, to be spoke
of as things that mere reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we
see, when we look narrowly into the great philosophical systems that have
been projected by scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each man out
of his own brain, that they all end either in materialism and atheism on
the one hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other. All our
philosophers have stopped short of that one living, personal, moral God,
on whose existence alone humanity can confidently repose--who alone can
give to the trembling arch of human speculation that keystone which it
demands. The idea of God, in fact, is not a thing that individual reason
has first to strike out, so to speak, by the collision or combination of
ideas, the collocation of proofs, and the concatenation of arguments. It
is a living growth rather of our whole nature, a primary instinct of all
moral beings, a necessary postulate of healthy humanity, which is given
and received as our life and our breath is, and admits not of being
reasoned into any soul that has it not already from other sources. And as
no philosopher of Greek or German times that history tells of, ever
succeeded yet in inventing a satisfactory theology, or establishing a
religion in which men could find solace to their souls, therefore it is
clear that that satisfactory Christian theology and Christian religion
which we have, and not only that, but all the glimpses of great
theological truth that are found twinkling through the darkness of a
widespread superstition, came originally from God by common revelation,
and not from man by private reasoning. The knowledge of God and a living
theology is, in fact, a simple science of experience like any other, only