us only in a much looser way.  Indeed, many men who believe most firmly that without religion human life will be dead, rest their hopes for the future not on the revival and triumph of any one alleged revelation, but on the gradual evanescence of the special claims of all.  Nor can we find any sharp and defined line of argument to convince them that they are wrong.  The objections, however, to which this position is open are, I think, none the less cogent because they are somewhat general; and to all practical men, conversant with life and history, it must be plain that the necessity of doing God’s will being granted, it is a most anxious and earnest question whether that will has not been in some special and articulate way revealed to us.

Take the mass of religious humanity, and giving it a natural creed, it will be found that instinctively and inevitably it asks for more.  Such a creed by itself has excited more longings than it has satisfied, and raised more perplexities than it has set at rest.  It is true that it has supplied men with a sufficient analysis of the worth they attach to life, and of the momentous issues attendant on the way in which they live it.  But when they come practically to choose their way, they find that such religion is of little help to them.  It never puts out a hand to lift or lead them.  It is an alluring voice, heard far off through a fog, and calling to them, ‘Follow me!’ but it leaves them in the fog to pick their own way out towards it, over rocks and streams and pitfalls, which they can but half distinguish, and amongst which they may be either killed or crippled, and are almost certain to grow bewildered.  And even should there be a small minority, who feel that this is not true of themselves, they can hardly help feeling that it is true of the world in general.  A purely natural theism, with no organs of human speech, and with no machinery for making its spirit articulate, never has ruled men, and, so far as we can see, never possibly can rule them.  The choices which our life consists of are definite things.  The rule which is to guide our choices must be something definite also.  And here it is that natural theism fails.  It may supply us with the major premiss, but it is vague and uncertain about the minor.  It can tell us with sufficient emphasis that all vice is to be avoided; it is continually at a loss to tell us whether this thing or whether that thing is vicious.  Indeed, this practical insufficiency of natural theism is borne witness to by the very existence of all alleged revelations.  For, if none of these be really the special word of God, a belief in them is all the more a sign of a general need in man.  If none of them represent the actual attainment of help, they all of them embody the passionate and persistent cry for it.