THE AMERICAN PRESBYTERIAN AND THEOLOGICAL REVIEW. NEW SERIES. No. XV.—JULY, 1866. ART. I.-THE BEING OF GOD. By MILES P. SQUIER, D. D., Geneva, N. Y. THE existence of God is a fundamental subject of thought. Nothing underlies it or goes before. All theology and moral science arise out of, and depend upon it. If God be not, then nothing is. All else must be resultant of him, and take on the postulate that he is. How can the finite be but by reason of the infinite, the created but by the uncreated, the dependent but by the independent, the conditioned but by the absolute and eternal ? Investigations in theology and moral truth have been much at fault here. They have shown weakness and equivocation, where of right belonged manhood and strength. The subject has not had justice at the hands of its friends. We have failed in method and in cogency of argument, in the reliability and comprehensiveness of our positions, in the resources and completeness of our logic and convictions. We have felt as if the theory of truth here was involved and intricate; as if the thread of the Sybil conducted us through dark and cavernous passages, and along by-ways which we knew not; that there water was too deep for us, and that we must here pass from the sphere of knowledge into that of simple faith. In this direction the English mind has taken the lead. Sir William Hamilton has formally stated "that the knowledge of God is impossible," in his article on the "Unconditioned "—a position which has been laboriously supplemented by Dr. Mansel, of Oxford, in his Limits of Religious Thought. The natural effect of such counsels is to beleaguer conscience and embarrass faith, and set men free from the obligations of religion. And the seed has already borne its legitimate fruit. This is observable in the new impulses and encouragement of "Positive Science" on the one hand, and of philosophic atheism and infidelity on the other. What else could be expected? Men will not forswear their intelligence. They will not be reli gious by prescription, or believe beyond the limits of rational conviction. They will not consent to this divorce between reason and faith; and if attempted by those who should assist their faith, they will only choose their own alternative, and repudiate a creed that does not take the intellect into its conclusions, and build its economy of belief on those enduring principles and first truths which are common to all safe and satisfactory inquiry in other departments of knowledge. Indeed, the conscience should have special help here, in view of the "law in the members," warring against the "law in the mind." It is suicidal to put reason and conscience in antagonism, or reason and faith. And yet this has been the anomaly and perturbation of our theology hitherto, and its false mission to the thinking classes of men. France turned infidel by reason of the unappreciable mummeries of the Romish faith. The Tractarianism of Oxford gives ominous signs of a like reaction. Error germinates in the twilight of conviction, and grows rank in the oscillations and tergiversations of truth. But why found religion in mysticism, and put its chief ele ments beyond limits of human thought? Was it not designed for man, and man for it. Should it not inhere in the princi ples of common sense, and be like the sunlight-for all, and |