y
stopped there. For then we who deny that the world is a machine, or
anything like a machine, might argue fairly with them on the common
ground of a common belief in God.

But some go further still, and say--A God? We do not deny that there may
be a God: but we do not deny that there may not be one. This we say--If
He exists, we know nothing of Him: and what is more, you know nothing of
Him. No man can know aught of Him. No man can know whether there be a
God or not. A living God, an acting God, a God of providence, a God who
hears prayer, a God such as your Bible tells you of, is an inconceivable
Being; and what you cannot conceive, that you must not believe: and
therefore prayer is not merely an impertinence, it is a mistake; for it
is speaking to a Being who only exists in your own imagination. I need
not say, my friends, that all this, to my mind, is only a train of
sophistry and false reasoning, which--so I at least hold--has been
answered and refuted again and again. And I trust in God and in Christ
sufficiently to believe that He will raise up sound divines and true
philosophers in His Church, who will refute it once more. But meanwhile
I can only appeal to your common sense; to the true and higher reason,
which lies in men's hearts, not in their heads; and ask--And is it come
to this? Is this the last outcome of civilization, the last discovery of
the human intellect, the last good news for man? That the soundest
thinkers--they who have the truest and clearest notion of the universe
are the savage who knows nothing but what his five senses teach him, and
the ungodly who makes boast of his own desire, and speaks good of the
covetous whom God abhorreth, while he says, "Tush, God hath forgotten. He
hideth away his face, and God will never see it"?

True: these so-called philosophers would say that the savage makes a
mistake in his sensuality, and the worldling in his covetousness and his
tyranny; that from an imperfect conception of their own true
self-interest, they carry their philosophy to conclusions which the
philosopher in his study must regret. But as to their philosophy being
correct: there can be no question that if providence, and prayer, and the
living God, be phantoms of man's imagination, then the cynical worldling
at one end of the social scale, and the brutal savage at the other, are
wiser than apostles and prophets, and sages and divines.

These men talk of facts, the facts of human