g about it?

I am in a boat near the mouth of a river. The boat is tossed by the
waves, driven by currents of wind, and now and then temporarily
turned by eddies. I seem to look out upon a chaos of apparently
conflicting forces. But all the time the wind and tide are sweeping
me homeward. Now the wind, which sometimes indeed does shift, and
the great tidal wave are steadily bearing me in a certain direction,
though wave and eddy and gust may often make this appear doubtful to
me. So, underneath all waves and eddies of environment, there is a
great tidal wave, bearing man steadily onward; and I gain a certain
amount of valid knowledge of environment from the direction in which
it is bearing me.

Let us change the illustration. Man survives as all his ancestors
have survived before him, through conformity to environment.
Environment has therefore during ages past been continually making
impressions upon him. And he can draw valid inferences concerning
the one power, which must underlie the apparent host of forces of
environment, from the impressions which these have left upon the
structure of his mind and character. By studying himself he gains
valid knowledge of what is deepest in environment. For man is the
most completely and closely conformed thereto of all living beings.

But man _is_ a religious being. This is a fact which demands
explanation just as much as bone and muscle. Now no evolutionist
would believe that the eye could ever have developed without the
stimulus of light acting upon the cells of the skin. Place the
animal in darkness and the eye becomes rudimentary and disappears.
Could a visual organ for seeing moral and religious truth have ever
originated in the mind of man had there been no corresponding
pulsation and thrill of a corresponding reality in environment? Is
not the one development just as improbable or inconceivable as the
other?

And this is the reason that, when man awakened to himself and his
own powers, he knew that there was and must be a God. "Pass over the
earth," says Plutarch; "you may discover cities without walls,
without literature, without monarchs, without palaces and wealth;
where the theatre and the school are not known; but no man ever saw
a city without temples and gods, where prayers and oaths and oracles
and sacrifices were not used for obtaining pardon or averting evil."
Given man and environment as they are, and a belief in God is a
necessary result. But you may ask,