It seems impossible to get rid of the ideas of direction and
control. If we regard the world as it exists at the present moment, as
one stage in an age-long process, then at least [Greek text] the facts
which now appear were contained in the earliest stage of all. Man
appears with his moral and spiritual nature. Then already the moral and
the spiritual were somehow present when the first living cell began its
wonderful course. [Greek text]. All movements have converged towards
this end, and the co-ordination of movements implies control.

This then is our first reason for our belief in God. We live in a
universe which seems throughout to manifest evidence of direction and
control.

(ii) But I have much surer and more cogent evidence within myself.
Whence comes that ineradicable conviction of the supremacy of
righteousness, of the utter loveliness of the good, and utter hatefulness
of the evil? I am not concerned with the steps of the process by which
the moral sense may have developed. The majesty of goodness, before
which I bow, really, sincerely, even when by my acts I give the lie to my
own innermost convictions, that is no creation of my consciousness. Nor
do I see good reason to believe that it has been an invention of, or
growth in, human consciousness during the slow development of past ages.
There is something deeper in my moral convictions than an outward
sanction wondrously transmuted into an internal one. Moreover, in the
best men, those who have really developed that moral faculty which I
detect, in beginning and germ, as it were, in myself, I see no abatement
in reverence for the ideal. Rather, the better and saintlier that they
are, the keener do they feel their fallings off from it. A moral lapse,
which would give me hardly a moment's uneasy thought, is capable of
causing in them acute and prolonged sorrow. The nearer they draw to the
moral ideal, strange paradox, the farther off from them does it ever
appear, and they from it. It is an apostle who writes, "Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief." Nor can I
discover any tolerable explanation of all this, except that the guiding
and directive power in the world, reveals itself in the moral
consciousness of men, and with growing clearness in proportion as that
consciousness has been trained and educated, as the moral ideal.

I find myself then, when my eyes are opened to the realities of the world
in whi