s special duties. The barriers which separate the school and the world
are everywhere thrown down. Everywhere shreds of philosophy, and very
often of bad philosophy,--scattered fragments of theological science,
and very often of a deplorable theological science,--are insinuating
themselves into the current literature. There is not a literary review,
there is scarcely a political journal, which does not speak on occasion,
or without occasion, of the problems relating to our eternal interests.
The most sacred beliefs are attacked every day in the organs of public
opinion. At such a juncture, can men who preserve faith in their own
soul remain like dumb dogs, or keep themselves shut up in the narrow
limits of the schools? Assuredly not. We must descend to the common
ground, and fight with equal weapons the great battles of thought. For
this purpose it is necessary to make use of terms which may alarm some
consciences, and to state questions which run the risk of startling
sincerely religious persons. But there is no help for it, if we are to
combat the adversaries on their own ground; and because it is thus only
that, while we startle a few, we can prove to all that the torrent of
negations is but a passing rush of waters, which, fret as they may in
their channel, shall be found to have left not so much as a trace of
their passage upon the Rock of Ages.

I now therefore resume my course of argument. God is neither an object
of experience, nor yet of demonstration properly so called. In the view
of science, as it is commonly understood, of science which follows out
the chain of its deductions, without giving attention to the very
foundations of all the work of the reason,--God, that chief of all
realities for a believing heart, that experience of every hour, that
evidence superior to all proof, God is an hypothesis. I grant it. Hence
it is inferred that God has no place in science, for that hypothesis has
no place in a science worthy of the name. But this I deny; and in
support of this denial I proceed to show that the hypothesis which it is
pretended to get quit of, is the generating principle of all human
knowledge.

Whence does science proceed? Does it result from mere experience? No.
What does experience teach us when quite alone? Nothing. Experience,
separated from all element of reason, only reveals to us our own
sensations. This, a Scotch philosopher, Hume, has proved to
demonstration,--a demonstration which constit