It is much more easy to disbelieve than to believe.  This is obvious on the side of reason, but it is also true on that of spirit, for to disbelieve is in accordance with environment or custom, while to believe necessitates a spiritual use of the imagination.  For both these reasons, very few unbelievers have any justification, either intellectual or spiritual, for their own unbelief.

Unbelief is usually due to indolence, often to prejudice, and never a thing to be proud of.

’Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?’ Clearly no answer can be given by the pure agnostic.  But he will naturally say in reply, ’the question rather is, why should it be thought credible with you that there is a God, or, if there is, that he should raise the dead?’ And I think the wise Christian will answer, ’I believe in the resurrection of the dead, partly on grounds of reason, partly on those of intuition, but chiefly on both combined; so to speak, it is my whole character which accepts the whole system of which the doctrine of personal immortality forms an essential part.’  And to this it may be fairly added that the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of our bodily form cannot have been arrived at for the purpose of meeting modern materialistic objections to the doctrine of personal immortality; hence it is certainly a strange doctrine to have been propounded at that time, together with its companion, and scarcely less distinctive, doctrine of the vileness of the body.  Why was it not said that the ‘soul’ alone should survive as a disembodied ‘spirit’?  Or if form were supposed necessary for man as distinguished from God, that he was to be an angel?  But, be this as it may, the doctrine of the resurrection seems to have fully met beforehand the materialistic objection to a future life, and so to have raised the ulterior question with which this paragraph opens.

We have seen in the Introduction that all first principles even of scientific facts are known by intuition and not by reason.  No one can deny this.  Now, if there be a God, the fact is certainly of the nature of a first principle; for it must be the first of all first principles.  No one can dispute this.  No one can therefore dispute the necessary conclusion, that, if there be a God, He is knowable, (if knowable at all) by intuition and not by reason.

Indeed a little thought is enough to show that from its very nature as such, reason must be incapable of adjudicating on the subject, for it is a process of inferring from the known to the unknown.

Or thus.  It would be against reason itself to suppose that God, even if He exists, can be known by reason; He must be known, if knowable at all, by intuition[57].

Observe, although God might give an objective revelation of Himself, e.g. as Christians believe He has, even this would not give knowledge of Him save to those who believe the revelations genuine; and I doubt whether it is logically possible for any form of objective revelation of itself to compel belief in it.  Assuredly one rising from the dead to testify thereto would not, nor would letters of fire across the sky do so.  But, even if it were logically possible, we need not consider the abstract possibility, seeing that, as a matter of fact, no such demonstrative revelation has been given.