conscience toward the right.  To assume that they are wholly evil is disrespectful to human nature.  It supposes man to be the easy and universal dupe of fraud.  But these religions do not rest on such a sandy foundation, but on the feeling of dependence, the sense of accountability, the recognition of spiritual realities very near to this world of matter, and the need of looking up and worshipping some unseen power higher and better than ourselves.  A decent respect for the opinions of mankind forbids us to ascribe pagan religions to priestcraft as their chief source.

And a reverence for Divine Providence brings us to the same conclusion.  Can it be that God has left himself without a witness in the world, except among the Hebrews in ancient times and the Christians in modern times?  This narrow creed excludes God from any communion with the great majority of human beings.  The Father of the human race is represented as selecting a few of his children to keep near himself, and as leaving all the rest to perish in their ignorance and error.  And this is not because they are prodigal children who have gone astray into a far country of their own accord; for they are just where they were placed by their Creator.  He “has determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation.”  He has caused some to be born in India, where they can only hear of him through Brahmanism; and some in China, where they can know him only through Buddha and Confucius.  The doctrine which we are opposing is; that, being put there by God, they are born into hopeless error, and are then punished for their error by everlasting destruction.  The doctrine for which we contend is that of the Apostle Paul, that God has “determined beforehand the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if haply they may feel after him and find him.”  Paul teaches that “all nations dwelling on all the face of the earth” may not only seek and feel after God, but also find him.  But as all living in heathen lands are heathen, if they find God at all, they must find him through heathenism.  The pagan religions are the effort of man to feel after God.  Otherwise we must conclude that the Being without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, the Being who never puts an insect into the air or a polyp into the water without providing it with some appropriate food, so that it may live and grow, has left the vast majority of his human children, made with religious appetences of conscience, reverence, hope, without a corresponding nutriment of truth.  This view tends to atheism; for if the presence of adaptation everywhere is the legitimate proof of creative design, the absence of adaptation in so important a sphere tends, so far, to set aside that proof.