It is an error not at all peculiar to the author of the “Eclipse of Faith,” but is shared with him by many others, and by one who has treated me in a very different spirit, that Christians are able to use atheistic arguments against me without wounding Christianity.  As I have written a rather ample book, called “Theism,” expressly designed to establish against Atheists and Pantheists that moral Theism which Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans have in common, and which underlies every attempt of any of the three religions to establish its peculiar and supernatural claims; I have no need of entering on that argument here.  It is not true, that, as a Theist, I evade the objections urged by real atheists or sceptics; on the contrary, I try to search them to the very bottom.  It is only in arguing with Christians that I disown the obligation of reply; and that, because they are as much concerned as I to answer; and ought to be able to give me, on the ground of natural theology, good replies to every fundamental objection from the sceptic, if I have not got them myself.  To declare the objections of our common adversaries valid against those first principles of religion which are older than Jesus or Moses, is certainly to surrender the cause of Christianity.

If this need more elucidation, let it be observed, that no Christian can take a single step in argument with a heathen, much less establish his claim of authority for the Bible, without presuming that the heathen will admit, on hearing them, those doctrines of moral Theism, which, it is pretended, I can have no good reason for admitting.  If the heathen sincerely retorts against the missionary such Pagan scepticism as is flung at me by Christians, the missionary’s words are vain; nor is any success possible, unless (with me) he can lay a prior foundation of moral Theism, independent of any assumption concerning the claims of the Bible.  It avails nothing to preach repentance of sin and salvation from judgment to come, to minds which are truly empty of the belief that God has any care for morality.  I of course do not say, and have never said, that the doctrine of the divine holiness, goodness, truth, must have been previously an active belief of the heathen hearer.  To have stated a question clearly is often half the solution; and the teacher, who so states a high doctrine, gives a great aid to the learner’s mind.  But unless, after it has been affirmed that there is a Great Eternal Being pervading the universe, who disapproves of human evil and commands us to pursue the good, the conscience and intellect of the hearer gives assent, no argument of moral religion can have weight with him; therefore neither can any argument about miracles, nor any appeal to the “Bible” as authoritative.  Of course the book has not as yet any influence over him, nor will its miracles, any more than its doctrines, be received on the ground of their being in the book.  Thus a direct and