Excerpt from The Bible in the Light of Nature, of Man, and of God, Vol. 1: Also in Its Essential Relations to the Religions of the World

God for and to himself and others. Atheism, in a less aggravated and personal form, sometimes assumes the existence of space, matter, and motion to be adequate causes of every appearance; and, in one of its mildest forms, it holds that no sufficient evidence of the existence of God has yet been furnished. It is unnatural to man, and the remaining step is the return to the starting point of the one living and true God. Monotheism is natural to man and to all things and it underlies all those other isms, even in their darkest and strongest forms and imports In infidelity there is a denial of, or disbelief in, Christ being a personal manifestation of the Deity, or such manifestation having ever been made or being possible.

Between God and the heaven and the earth the connection is causal He is the first cause He created them in the beginning. That everything that happens must have a cause, and that there is not an infinity of secondary causes are the two indisputable postulates of all philosophy. It lies at the basis of human intelligence that the ultimate reality is a being with omnipotent and eternal causal energy the laws of nature are an expression of volition and the whole course of nature or world process is, in its existence, a continued act of will; while, in its content, it is a logical course or process. The will requires an end for some reason; and that implies that both the will and the end are reasonable. Power, or force, presupposes will to exercise it, and intellect and righteous mode or law to give its exercise intellectual fitness for just action and end and yet will presupposes power to exercise it. The exercise of will and intellect in the region behind and beyond that of subject and object, as known in the relative, may be difficult to form into thought or formal act of the mind, because it does lie in that region, and because of the difference between the absolute and the relative; yet it is in that region that the will and the intellect, and all else, have their real and essential power and force; our life is hid with Christ in God. Intellect does need an object in order to its exercise and opera tions; it does need the distinction of subject and object for its exercise, just as consciousness needs the same, in the relative; but both have their higher existence and exercise in their essential relation to, and radical being in, the absolute. Its intuitions are wider, its reasonings fewer, and its affirmations larger, as its power is higher or greater and there is every ground to conclude the existence of a self-existent, infinite, and eternal intellect. The union of will and intelligence with power is manifested by the whole universe, as well as in idea; and the universe may be a necessary end of the divine activity or contingent.

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