with strength and joy, has something better to do than to be listening to such discourses as these.  Solitude, prayer, a calm activity pursued under the guidance of the conscience,—­these are the best paths for such a soul, and the discussions in which we are now engaged are not perhaps altogether free from danger for one who has remained hitherto undisturbed in the first simplicity of his faith.  But we are not masters of our own ways, and the circumstances of the present times impose upon us special duties.  The barriers which separate the school and the world are everywhere thrown down.  Everywhere shreds of philosophy, and very often of bad philosophy,—­scattered fragments of theological science, and very often of a deplorable theological science,—­are insinuating themselves into the current literature.  There is not a literary review, there is scarcely a political journal, which does not speak on occasion, or without occasion, of the problems relating to our eternal interests.  The most sacred beliefs are attacked every day in the organs of public opinion.  At such a juncture, can men who preserve faith in their own soul remain like dumb dogs, or keep themselves shut up in the narrow limits of the schools?  Assuredly not.  We must descend to the common ground, and fight with equal weapons the great battles of thought.  For this purpose it is necessary to make use of terms which may alarm some consciences, and to state questions which run the risk of startling sincerely religious persons.  But there is no help for it, if we are to combat the adversaries on their own ground; and because it is thus only that, while we startle a few, we can prove to all that the torrent of negations is but a passing rush of waters, which, fret as they may in their channel, shall be found to have left not so much as a trace of their passage upon the Rock of Ages.

I now therefore resume my course of argument.  God is neither an object of experience, nor yet of demonstration properly so called.  In the view of science, as it is commonly understood, of science which follows out the chain of its deductions, without giving attention to the very foundations of all the work of the reason,—­God, that chief of all realities for a believing heart, that experience of every hour, that evidence superior to all proof, God is an hypothesis.  I grant it.  Hence it is inferred that God has no place in science, for that hypothesis has no place in a science worthy of the name.  But this I deny; and in support of this denial I proceed to show that the hypothesis which it is pretended to get quit of, is the generating principle of all human knowledge.