recognition of the plan of Divine Providence generally, I have implicitly touched upon a prominent question of the day, viz., that of the possibility of knowing God; or rather—­since public opinion has ceased to allow it to be a matter of question—­the doctrine that it is impossible to know God.  In direct contravention of what is commanded in holy Scripture as the highest duty—­that we should not merely love, but know God—­the prevalent dogma involves the denial of what is there said—­namely, that it is the Spirit, der Geist, that leads into truth, knows all things, penetrates even into the deep things of the Godhead.  While the Divine Being is thus placed beyond our knowledge and outside the limit of all human things, we have the convenient license of wandering as far as we list, in the direction of our own fancies.  We are freed from the obligation to refer our knowledge to the Divine and True.  On the other hand, the vanity and egoism which characterize our knowledge find, in this false position, ample justification; and the pious modesty which puts far from itself the knowledge of God can well estimate how much furtherance thereby accrues to its own wayward and vain strivings.  I have been unwilling to leave out of sight the connection between our thesis—­that Reason governs and has governed the world—­and the question of the possibility of a knowledge of God, chiefly that I might not lose the opportunity of mentioning the imputation against philosophy of being shy of noticing religious truths, or of having occasion to be so; in which is insinuated the suspicion that it has anything but a clear conscience in the presence of these truths.  So far from this being the case, the fact is that in recent times philosophy has been obliged to defend the domain of religion against the attacks of several theological systems.  In the Christian religion God has revealed Himself—­that is, He has given us to understand what He is, with the result that He is no longer a concealed or secret existence.  And this possibility of knowing Him, thus afforded us, renders such knowledge a duty.  God wishes for His children no narrow-hearted souls or empty heads, but those whose spirit is of itself indeed, poor, but rich in the knowledge of Him, and who regard this knowledge of God as the only valuable possession.  That development of the thinking spirit, which has resulted from the revelation of the Divine Being as its original basis, must ultimately advance to the intellectual comprehension of what was presented, in the first instance, to feeling and imagination.  The time must eventually come for understanding that rich product of active Reason which the history of the world offers to us.  It was for a while the fashion to profess admiration for the wisdom of God, as displayed in animals, plants, and isolated occurrences.  But if it be allowed that Providence manifests itself in such objects and forms of existence, why not also in universal history?