Now, if this is all, if there is for us only the physical might of nature and the world is only what it seems to be; if there is no other God except such as can be found within this sort of cosmic process, then human life is a sardonic mockery, and self-respect a silly farce, and all the heroism of the heart and the valor of the mind the unmeaning activities of an insignificant atom.  The very men who will naturally enter your churches are the ones who have always found that theory of life intolerable.  It doesn’t take in all the facts.  They could not live by it and the soul of the race, looking out upon this universe of immeasurable material bulk, has challenged it and dared to assert its own superiority.

So by this road these men come back to the transcendent God without whom they cannot guard that integrity of personality which we are all set to keep.  For here there is no way of believing in oneself, no way of enduring this world or our place in it and no tolerable way of understanding it except we look beneath this cosmic hostility and find our self-respect and a satisfying cosmic meaning in perceiving spiritual force, a conscious ethical purpose, which interpenetrates the thunder and the lightning, which lies behind the stars as they move in their perpetual courses.  “Through it the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.”  Integrity of personality in such a world as this, belief in self, without which life is dust and ashes in the mouth, rest on the sublime assumption that suffusing material force is ethical spirit, more like unto us than it, controlling force in the interest of moral and eternal purposes.  In these purposes living, not mechanical, forces play a major part.

Of course, to all such reasoning the Kantians and humanists reply that these notions of an objective and eternal beauty, of a transcendent and actual Cosmic Being exist within the mind.  They are purely subjective ideas, they are bounded by the inexorable circle of our experience, hence they offer no proof of any objective reality which may in greater or less degree correspond to them.

However, there must be a “source” of these ideas.  To which the philosophers reply, Yes, they are “primitive and necessary,” produced by reason only, without borrowing anything from the senses or the understanding.  Yet there is no sufficient evidence that the idea of God is thus produced by any faculty of mind acting in entire freedom from external influence.  On the contrary, the idea appears to owe much to the operation of external things upon the mind; it is not then the wholly unaffected product of reason.  It is a response no less than an intuition.  Like all knowledge a discovery, but the discovery of something there which could be discovered, hence, in that sense, a revelation.