heism, as we do in the argument under
consideration, it is evident that man conceives the superhuman object of
his fear and worship more truly as personal than as impersonal; as
spiritual than as embodied; as one or few than as many; as infinite than
as finite; as creator than as maker; as moral than as non-moral or
immoral; as both transcendent and immanent than as either alone. If then
it appears that as man's intelligence and morality develop in due
proportion, he advances from a material polytheistic immoral conception
of the All, to a spiritual and moral monotheism, it may be claimed that
the latter is a less inadequate conception. And similarly with regard to
other dependent religious beliefs which usually radiate from the central
notion. It will be seen that we do not argue from the self-determined
wishes or desires of any individual or class of individuals to their
possible fulfilment,--to the existence in Nature of some supply
answering to that demand; we do not argue that because many men or all
men desire to fly, flying must for that reason alone be possible. We
speak of the needs of man's nature, not of this individual's nature; of
needs consequent on what man is made, and not on what he has made
himself; of those wants and exigencies which if unsatisfied or
insatiable must leave his nature not merely negatively imperfect and
finite, but positively defective and as inexplicable as a lock without a
key--not necessarily, of needs felt at all times by every man, but of
those which manifest themselves naturally and regularly at certain
stages of moral and social development; just as the bodily appetites
assert themselves under certain conditions not always given.

Now there is one form in which this argument from adaptability is
somewhat too hastily applied and which it is well to guard against. Were
we to find a key accommodated to the wards of a most complicated lock,
we should be justified in concluding, with a certainty proportioned to
the complexity of the lock, that both originated with one and the same
mind; and so, it is urged, if a religion, say Christianity, answers to
the needs of human nature, we may conclude that it is from the Author of
human nature with a certainty increasing as it is seen to answer to the
higher and more complex developments of the soul.

Now if, like the key in our illustration, the religion in question were
something given _in rerum natura_ independent of human origination in