THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created
He him.' _Genesis_ i. 27.

The order of phenomena is not the highest revelation of God, nor is the
voice of Science the only nor the most commanding voice that speaks to
us about Him. The belief in Him and in the character which we assign to
Him does not spring from any observation of phenomena, but from the
declaration made to us through the spiritual faculty.

There is within us a voice which tells of a supreme Law unchanged
throughout all space and all time; which speaks with an authority
entirely its own; which finds corroboration in the revelations of
Science, but which never relies on those revelations as its primary or
its ultimate sanction; which is no inference from observations by the
senses external or internal, but a direct communication from the
spiritual kingdom, the kingdom, as philosophers call it, of things in
themselves; which commands belief as a duty, and by necessary
consequence ever leaves it possible to disbelieve; and in listening to
which we are rightly said to walk not by sight but by faith.

Now, before going on to say anything more about the message thus given
to us from the spiritual world, it is necessary to consider an objection
that meets us on the threshold of all such doctrines, namely, that it is
simply impossible for us to know anything whatever of things in
themselves. Our knowledge, it is urged, is necessarily relative to
ourselves, whereas absolute as distinct from relative knowledge is for
ever beyond our reach. We can speak of what things appear to us to be;
we cannot speak of what they are. We know or may know whatever comes
under the observation of our senses as phenomena; we cannot know what
underlies these phenomena. And sometimes it has been maintained that we
not only cannot know what it is that underlies the phenomena, but cannot
even know whether anything at all underlies the phenomena, and that, for
aught we can tell, the whole world and all that exists or happens in it
may be nothing but a system of appearances with no substance whatever.
This doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge is not only applied to
things external but to our very selves. We know ourselves, it is
maintained, only through an internal sense which can only tell us how we
appear to ourselves, but cannot tell us in any the least degree what we
really are.

Now this conten