erefore be urged against one more than
another. So far as certain difficulties are inherent in the constitution
of the human mind itself, they must necessarily occupy the same position
with respect to all religions alike. To exhibit the nature of these
difficulties is a service to true religion; but it is the service of the
pioneer, not of the builder; it does not prove the religion to be true;
it only clears the ground for the production of the special evidences.

[Q] Letter to Mr. Calderwood. See _Lectures_, vol. ii, p.
534.

Where those evidences are to be found, Sir W. Hamilton has not failed to
tell us. If mere intellectual speculations on the nature and origin of
the material universe form a common ground in which the theist, the
pantheist, and even the atheist, may alike expatiate, the moral and
religious feelings of man--those facts of consciousness which have their
direct source in the sense of personality and free will--plead with
overwhelming evidence in behalf of a personal God, and of man's relation
to Him, as a person to a person. We have seen, in a previous quotation,
Hamilton's emphatic declaration that "psychological materialism, if
carried out fully and fairly to its conclusions, inevitably results in
theological atheism." In the same spirit he tells us that "it is only as
man is a free intelligence, a moral power, that he is created after the
image of God;"[R] that "with the proof of the moral nature of man,
stands or falls the proof of the existence of a Deity;" that "the
possibility of morality depends on the possibility of liberty;" that "if
man be not a free agent, he is not the author of his actions, and has
therefore no responsibility, no moral personality at all;"[S] and,
finally, "that he who disbelieves the moral agency of man, must, in
consistency with that opinion, disbelieve Christianity."[T] We have
thus, in the positive and negative sides of this philosophy, both a
reasonable ground of belief and a warning against presumption. By our
immediate consciousness of a moral and personal nature, we are led to the
belief in a moral and personal God: by our ignorance of the
unconditioned, we are led to the further belief, that behind that moral
and personal manifestation of God there lies concealed a mystery--the
mystery of the Absolute and the Infinite; that our intellectual and moral
qualities, though indicating the nearest approach to the Divine
Perfections which we are capable of c