d, does not our heart bear witness to the fact that to
believe in a God is an exercise of faith? That the universe was
produced by the will of a personal Being, that its infinite forces
are all the power of that one Being, its infinite relations the
perceptions of one Mind--would not this, if any truth could,
demand the application of the maxim, _Credo quia impossibile_?
Look at it only as a conception, and does the wildest fiction of
the imagination equal it? No premisses, no arguments therefore,
can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in
it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished
from sight. _Divest_ reason of its trust, and the universe stops
at the impersonal stage--there is no God; and yet, if the first
step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and
boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most
mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What is it
which guards this truth? What is it which makes men shrink from
denying it? Why is atheism a crime? Is it that authority still
reigns upon one question, and that the voice of all ages is too
potent to be withstood?

But the progress of civilisation and thought has impressed this amazing
idea on the general mind. It is no matter-of-course conception. The
difficulties attending it were long insuperable to the deepest thought
as well as to popular belief; and the triumph of the modern and
Christian idea of God is the result not merely of the eager forwardness
of faith, but of the patient and inquiring waiting of reason. And the
question, whether we shall pronounce the miraculous to be impossible as
such, is really the question whether we shall once more let this belief
go.

The conception of a limited Deity then, i.e. a Being really
circumscribed in power, and not verbally only by a confinement to
necessary truth, is at variance with our fundamental idea of a
God; to depart from which is to retrograde from modern thought to
ancient, and to go from Christianity back again to Paganism. The
God of ancient religion was either not a personal Being or not an
omnipotent Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed,
civilisation is not opposed to faith. The idea of the Supreme
Being in the mind of European society now is more primitive, more
childlike, more imaginative th