e are enabled to
perceive various objects around us; and, by travelling to other lands, we
can obtain a knowledge of many things of which we had before been
ignorant. We perceive also what is going on within us. The telescope
and the microscope reveal to us wonders which, without their
intervention, we could never have discovered. But we cannot through the
instrumentality of any of our faculties perceive God. Travel where we
will we cannot find Him out. No appliance of art has availed to disclose
Him to us. If any philosophers conceive that they can intuitively gaze
upon God, other philosophers declare their ignorance of any intuition of
this kind, and assuredly the common people, who most stand in need of
clear notions on the subject, and who would hardly be neglected by a
beneficent God, are altogether unconscious of it. The knowledge of Him,
therefore, if obtained at all, must be had in some other way.

But may not an adequate knowledge of God be obtained _by the exercise of
the faculties of the human mind upon external nature_, _or in some other
way_? The Apostle St. Paul says something which rather favours this
view, when he declares that "the invisible things of Him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things
that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are
without excuse" (Rom. i. 20): and we believe that a considerable insight
into the nature of God, and the probable character of His dealings with
us may be obtained in the manner to which we have referred. Still we
have only to look at the ever varying and degrading notions which have,
at all times, prevailed in many parts of the world respecting the Divine
Being, to perceive that a more clear method of obtaining knowledge about
Him would, to say the least of it, be a most valuable boon. The method
under consideration has not practically issued as we might have hoped
that it would; and therefore there is reason to expect, that God might
make use of some more direct way of communicating to us a knowledge of
Himself.

Another possible mode of communicating a knowledge of God would be, _by
implanting in the mind of man_, _an idea corresponding_, _so far as might
be needful_, _to the nature of God_. But a belief in the existence of
anything of this kind is open to several objections. If such an idea
existed, it must, to answer the required end, be sufficiently clear and
well defined to give at least