24 The Fundamen tals that there is no God, he must arrogate to himself the wisdom and ubiquity of God. He must explore the entire circuit of the universe to be sure that no God is there. He must have interrogated all the generations of mankind and all the hier- archies of heaven to be certain they had never heard of a God. In short, as Chalmers puts it, “For man not to know God, he has only to sink beneath the level of our common nature. But to deny God he must be God himself.” 3. Denial o f the divine existence is not warranted by in- ability to discern traces of God’s presence in the universe. Prof. Huxley, who once described himself in a letter to Charles Kingsley as “exactly what the Christian world called, and, so far as he could judge, was justified in calling him, an atheist and infidel,” appeared to think it was. “I cannot see,” he wrote, “one shadow or tittle of evidence that the Great Un- known underlying the phenomena of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father, loves us and cares for us as Chris- tianity asserts.” Blatchford also with equal emphasis affirms: “I cannot believe that God is a personal God who interferes in human affairs. I cannot see in science, or in experience, or in history, any signs o f such a God or of such intervention.” Neither of these writers, however, it may be presumed, would on reflection advance their incapacity to perceive the foot- prints or hear the voices of the Creator as proof that no Creator existed, any more than a blind man would maintain there was no sun because he could not see it, or a deaf man would contend there was no sound because he never heard it. The incapacity of Huxley and Blatchford to either see or hear God may, and no doubt does, serve as an explanation of their atheistical creed, but assuredly it is no justification of the same, since a profounder reasoner than either has said: “The in- visible things of God since the creation of the world are clear- ly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity; so that they [who believe not] are without excuse.”
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