But some go further still, and say—­A God?  We do not deny that there may be a God:  but we do not deny that there may not be one.  This we say—­If He exists, we know nothing of Him:  and what is more, you know nothing of Him.  No man can know aught of Him.  No man can know whether there be a God or not.  A living God, an acting God, a God of providence, a God who hears prayer, a God such as your Bible tells you of, is an inconceivable Being; and what you cannot conceive, that you must not believe:  and therefore prayer is not merely an impertinence, it is a mistake; for it is speaking to a Being who only exists in your own imagination.  I need not say, my friends, that all this, to my mind, is only a train of sophistry and false reasoning, which—­so I at least hold—­has been answered and refuted again and again.  And I trust in God and in Christ sufficiently to believe that He will raise up sound divines and true philosophers in His Church, who will refute it once more.  But meanwhile I can only appeal to your common sense; to the true and higher reason, which lies in men’s hearts, not in their heads; and ask—­And is it come to this?  Is this the last outcome of civilization, the last discovery of the human intellect, the last good news for man?  That the soundest thinkers—­they who have the truest and clearest notion of the universe are the savage who knows nothing but what his five senses teach him, and the ungodly who makes boast of his own desire, and speaks good of the covetous whom God abhorreth, while he says, “Tush, God hath forgotten.  He hideth away his face, and God will never see it”?

True:  these so-called philosophers would say that the savage makes a mistake in his sensuality, and the worldling in his covetousness and his tyranny; that from an imperfect conception of their own true self-interest, they carry their philosophy to conclusions which the philosopher in his study must regret.  But as to their philosophy being correct:  there can be no question that if providence, and prayer, and the living God, be phantoms of man’s imagination, then the cynical worldling at one end of the social scale, and the brutal savage at the other, are wiser than apostles and prophets, and sages and divines.

These men talk of facts, the facts of human nature.  Why do they ask us to ignore the most striking fact of human nature, that man, even if he were a mere animal, is alone of all animals—­a praying animal?  Is that strange instinct of worship, which rises in the heart of man as soon as he begins to think, to become a civilized being and not a savage, to be disregarded as a childish dream when he rises to a higher civilization still?  Is the experience of men, heathen as well as Christian, for all these ages to go for nought?  Has it mattered nought whether men cried to Baal or to God; for with both alike there has been neither sound nor voice, nor any that answered?  Has every utterance that has ever gone up from suffering and doubting humanity,