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
of a peculiar quality and higher in degree. All true human knowledge in
moral matters rests on experience, internal or external, higher or lower,
on tradition, on language as the bearer of tradition, on revelation;
while that false, monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the pride
of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at
once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and
beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always
would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral
God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of
nature, the demand of mind, received not invented, existing in the soul
not reasoned into it--this is the gravitating point of the moral world,
the only intelligible centre of any world; from which whatsoever is
centrifugal errs, and to which whatsoever is opposed is the devil.

Not private speculation, therefore, or famous philosophies of any kind,
but the living spiritual man, and the totality of the living flow of
sacred tradition on which he is borne, and with which he is encompassed,
are the two grand sources of "the philosophy of life." Let us follow these
princip