of the name, and no one can at the same time accept the
Christian religion and deny the dogma of creation. [Page 245]

"I believe in God," "the Creator of Heaven and Earth," the very first
clauses of the Apostles' Creed, formally commit those who accept them to
the assertion of this belief. If, therefore, any theory of physical science
really conflicts with such an authoritative statement, its importance to
Christians is unquestionable.

As, however, "creation" forms a part of "revelation," and as "revelation"
appeals for its acceptance to "reason" which has to prepare a basis for it
by an intelligent acceptance of theism on _purely rational grounds_, it is
necessary to start with a few words as to the reasonableness of belief in
God, which indeed are less superfluous than some readers may perhaps
imagine; "a few words," because this is not the place where the argument
can be drawn out, but only one or two hints given in reply to certain
modern objections.

No better example perhaps can be taken, as a type of these objections, than
a passage in Mr. Herbert Spencer's First Principles.[246] This author
constantly speaks of the "ultimate cause of things" as "the Unknowable," a
term singularly unfortunate, and as Mr. James Martineau has pointed
out,[247] even self-contradictory: for that entity, the knowledge of {246}
the existence of which presses itself ever more and more upon the
cultivated intellect, cannot be the unknown, still less _the unknowable_,
because we certainly know it, in that we know for certain that it exists.
Nay more, to predicate incognoscibility of it, is even a certain knowledge
of the mode of its existence. Mr. H. Spencer says:[248] "The consciousness
of an Inscrutable Power manifested to us through all phenomena has been
growing ever clearer; and must eventually be freed from its imperfections.
The certainty that on the one hand such a Power exists, while on the other
hand its nature transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination, is the
certainty towards which intelligence has from the first been progressing."
One would think then that the familiar and accepted word "the Inscrutable"
(which is in this passage actually employed, and to which no theologian
would object) would be an indefinitely better term than "the unknowable."
The above extract has, however, such a theistic aspect that some readers
may think the opposition here offered superfluous; it may be well,
therefore, to quote two other