ure and controlling the destinies of
man, and that religious worship--prayer, and praise, and
sacrifice--offered to that unseen yet omnipresent Power is an universal
fact of human nature. The recognition of an _immediate_ and a
_necessary_ "connection" between the visible and the invisible, the
objects of sense and the objects of faith, is one of the most obvious
facts of consciousness--of universal consciousness as revealed in
history, and of individual consciousness as developed in every rational
mind.

That this connection is "not perceptible to human observation," if by
this our author means "not perceptible to sense," we readily admit. No
one ever asserted it was perceptible to human observation. We say that
this connection is perceptible to human _reason_, and is revealed in
every attempt to think about, and seek an explanation of, the phenomenal
world. The Phenomenal and the Real, Genesis and Being, Space and
Extension, Succession and Duration, Time and Eternity, the Finite and
the Infinite, are correlatives which are given in one and the same
indivisible act of thought. "The conception of one term of a relation
necessarily implies that of the other; it being the very nature of a
correlative to be thinkable only through the conjunct thought of its
correlative; for a relation is, in truth, a thought one and indivisible;
and whilst the thinking of one relation necessarily involves the thought
of its two terms, so it is, with equal necessity, itself involved in the
thought of either."[367] Finite, dependent, contingent, temporal
existence, therefore, necessarily supposes infinite, self-existent,
independent, eternal Being; the Conditioned and Relative implies the
Unconditioned and Absolute--one is known only in and through the other.
But inasmuch as the unconditioned is cognized solely _a priori_, and the
conditioned solely _a posteriori_, the recognition by the human mind of
their necessary correlation becomes the bridge whereby the chasm between
the subjective and the objective may be spanned, and whereby Thought may
be brought face to face with Existence.

[Footnote 367: Hamilton's "Metaphysics," vol. ii. pp. 536, 537.]

The reverence which, from boyhood, we have entertained for the
distinguished author of the "Institutes" restrains us from speaking in
adequate terms of reprobation of the statement that "the _First Cause_"
may be known, and yet not conceived "as eternal, self-existent,
immortal, and independen