herefore, is
more natural than to imagine that the idea of God is a verbal,
intellectual proposition; and nothing is more misleading. If we start
from this misleading notion, then, as words are but words, we may be
led to imagine that the idea of God is nothing more or other than the
words: it is mere words. If however this conclusion is, for any
reason, displeasing to us, and if we stick to the premiss that the
idea of God is a verbal proposition, then we shall naturally draw a
distinction between the idea of God and the being of God; and, having
thus fixed a great gulf between the idea and the being of God, we
shall be faced with the difficulty of crossing it. We may then feel it
to be not merely difficult but impossible to get logically to the
other side of the gulf; that is to say, we shall conclude that the
being of God is an inference, but an inference which never can be
logically verified: the inference may be a correct or an incorrect
inference, but we cannot possibly know which it is. From the idea of
God we can never logically infer His being. Since then no logic will
carry us over the chasm we have fixed between the idea and the being
of God, if we are to cross it, we must jump it: we must take the leap
of faith, we must believe the passage possible, just because it is
impossible. And those who take the leap, do land safely--we have their
own testimony to that--as safely as, in _King Lear_, Gloucester leaps
from the cliff of Dover; and they well may

'Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserv'd them.'

But, in Gloucester's case, there was no cliff and no abyss; and, in
our case, it may be well to enquire whether the great gulf between the
idea and the being of God has any more reality than that down which
Gloucester, precipitating, flung himself. The premiss, that the idea
of God is a mere verbal proposition, may be a premiss as imaginary as
that from which Gloucester leaped. If the idea of God is merely a
proposition in words, and if words are but words, then the gulf
between idea and being is real. If the being of God is an inference
from the idea of God, it is merely an inference, and an inference of
no logical value. And the same remark holds equally true, if we apply
it to the case of any finite personal being: if the being of our
neighbours were an inference from the idea we have formed of them, it
also would be an inference of no logical value.