Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: substance? Two forms or modes of the one substance which flows forth from its Divine origin, and takes one or the other of these forms, to provide for man a body and a world, first in this beginning of life, and then in the life which follows this. As God is the beginning of all being, so the knowledge of God is the beginning of all knowledge concerning things which belong to man as immortal. Let us now inquire into the origin and nature of man's belief of God, and the manner in which and the purpose for which this belief is given to us. I. OF THE BELIEF IN GOD. It has been often said that a belief in God, of some kind or measure, belongs to human nature, and is inevitable and universal. If any tribes are found so utterly savage that they seem to have no religion whatever, it is said that a more thorough knowledge or a more careful inquiry would detect some notion of a governing God, although it might be dim and clouded. .And if men of ability and culture deduce their unbelief from what they consider logical reasoning and declare it unreservedly, it is then said that they are mistaken as to their own opinions, and that within their ratiocinative deniallies an unconscious belief, because the heart refuses to listen to argument on this point. It may be doubted whether this be quite so. There seem to be some savages so wholly brutified that no spark of religion, even in the perverted form of superstition, can be detected by the sharpest scrutiny. On the other hand, there have been in all ages, and certainly are in this, men distinguished for intellectual power and cultivation, who not only assert, but manifest, in the whole course of their thought and the whole structure of their opinions, absence of all belief in a God. This absence must be admitted as to them, unless...