d which the world
at large would regard as permissible or at least venial. Even if
inherited use has its full play, there is still a something wanted
before the one can be got into (or out of) the other. Why, again, are
savages prone to imagine natural phenomena to be caused or actuated by
"spirits"? Surely it is because there _is_ consciously a spirit in man,
and a Higher Power, even God, outside, who exists, though man in his
ignorance has many false ideas regarding Him.

[Footnote 1: It is not necessary to my immediate argument, and therefore
I do not press it into the text (though I should be sorry to seem to
forget it for a moment), to urge that St. Paul draws a clear distinction
between the intellectual faculties and the higher spiritual ones, when
he assures us that the clearest intellect alone cannot assimilate the
truths of religion. For the spiritual faculties have been in man
grievously deadened and distorted (to say the least of it), so that his
intellectual faculties, bright and highly developed as they may be, will
always prove insufficient for the highest life in the absence of the
"grace of God." It is exactly analogous to the case of a man whom we
might suppose to have his sense of sight, touch, &c., distorted, and he
himself unable to correct them by aid of the senses of others. However
acutely he might exercise his reason, he would be continually wrong in
his conclusions. See 1 Cor. ii., the whole, but specially vers. 14, 15.]

[Footnote 2: "Descent of Man," vol. i. p, 70.]

[Footnote 3: The attempt (already alluded to) to separate moral and
spiritual, to imagine something that is ethical, apart from the
religious idea, has lent some strength to these ideas of the moral
sense; but in fact, the moral sense is _inseparably_ connected with the
idea of God, and His approval and disapproval. The idea of God may be
obscured and lost, but conscience is the surviving trace of it; the
circumference that accounts for the broken arc.]

It is an objection of the same order that applies to the other theory
(Mr. Spencer's). There can be little doubt that in many respects it is
true: as an account of all _human_ systems of religion it is adequate
and natural; but it breaks down hopelessly when we try to use it to
explain how the conception of God originated in the mind. Just as there
is a felt difference--not of degree or in form, but essential and
radical in its nature--between the _undesirable_ and the _wrong