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 than the idea of the ancient Brahman or Alexandrian philosopher; it is an idea which both of these would have derided as the notion of a child—­a negotiosus Deus, who interposes in human affairs and answers prayers.  So far from the philosophical conception of the Deity having advanced with civilisation, and the poetical receded, the philosophical has receded and the poetical advanced.  The God of whom it is said, “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God; but even the very hairs of your head are numbered,” is the object of modern worship.  Nor, again, has civilisation shown any signs of rejecting doctrine.  Certain ages are, indeed, called the ages of faith; but the bulk of society in this age believes that it lives under a supernatural dispensation, and accepts truths which are not less supernatural, though they have more proof, than some doctrines of the Middle Ages; and, if so, this is an age of faith.  It is true that most people do not live up to their faith now; neither did they in the Middle Ages.

Has not modern philosophy, again, shown both more strength and acuteness, and also more faith, than the ancient?  I speak of the main