Is There a God? 23 his audacious utterance is as much the outcome of ignorance as of impiety. When one meets in the “Hibbert Journal” from the pen of its editor such a statement as this: “Society abounds with earnest and educated persons who have lost faith in a living personal God, and see their fellows and fore- see themselves passing out of life entirely without hope,” and when Blatchford in the English “Clarion” writes: “There is no Heavenly Father watching tenderly over us, His creatures, He is the baseless shadow of a wistful dream,” it becomes ap- parent that theoretical atheism is not extinct, even in cultured circles, and that some observations with regard to it may still be needful. Let these observations be the following: 1. Belief that there is no God does not amount to a dem- onstration that no God is. Neither, it is true, does belief that God is prove the truth of the proposition except to the indi- vidual in whose heart that belief has been awakened by the Divine Spirit. To another than him it is destitute of weight as an argument in support of the theistic position. At the same time it is of importance, while conceding this, to empha- size the fact that disbelief in the existence of a Divine Being is not equivalent to a demonstration that there is no God. 2. Such a demonstration is from the nature of the case impossible. Here again it may be true as Kant contends that reason cannot demonstrate (that is, by logic) the existence of God; but it is equally true, as the same philosopher admits, that reason can just as little disprove the existence of God. It was well observed by the late Prof. Calderwood of the Edin- burgh University that “the divine existence is a truth so plain that it needs no proof, as it is a truth so high that it admits of none.” But the situation is altered when it comes to a posi- tive denial of that existence. The idea of God once formed in the mind, whether as an intuition or as a deduction, cannot be laid aside without convincing evidence that it is delusive and unreal. And such evidence cannot be produced. As Dr. Chalmers long ago observed, before one can positively assert
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