s him.

But with the existence of God it is different. That men do not think
that an examination of the evidence can be dispensed with is evident
from the books that are written and lectures that are delivered year
after year. There seem to be honest differences of opinion, and we
feel compelled to offer men proofs--to show that belief is reasonable.

How shall we determine whether this world in which we live is such a
world that we may take it as a revelation of God? And of what sort of
a Being are we speaking when we use the word "God"? The question is
not an idle one, for men's conceptions have differed widely. There is
the savage, with a conception that strikes the modern civilized man as
altogether inadequate; there is the thoughtful man of our day, who has
inherited the reflections of those who have lived in the ages gone by.

And there is the philosopher, or, perhaps, I should rather say, there
are the philosophers. Have they not conceived of God as a group of
abstract notions, or as a something that may best be described as the
Unknowable, or as the Substance which is the identity of thought and
extension, or as the external world itself? All have not sinned in
this way, but some have, and they are not men whom we can ignore.

If we turn from all such notions and, in harmony with the faith of the
great body of religious men in the ages past, some of whom were
philosophers but most of whom were not, cling close to the notion that
God is a mind or spirit, and must be conceived according to the
analogy, at least, of the human mind, the mind we most directly
know--if we do this, we are still confronted by problems to which the
thoughtful man cannot refuse attention.

What do we mean by a mind? This is a question to which one can
scarcely give an intelligent answer unless one has exercised one's
faculty of philosophic reflection. And upon what sort of evidence does
one depend in establishing the existence of minds other than one's own?
This has been discussed at length in Chapter X, and the problem is
certainly a metaphysical one. And if we believe that the Divine Mind
is not subject to the limitations which confine the human, how shall we
conceive it? The question is an important one. Some of the
philosophers and theologians who have tried to free the Divine Mind
from such limitations have taken away every positive mark by which we
recognize a mind to be such, and have left us a naked "Absolute" whic