[Footnote 1:  It is not necessary to my immediate argument, and therefore I do not press it into the text (though I should be sorry to seem to forget it for a moment), to urge that St. Paul draws a clear distinction between the intellectual faculties and the higher spiritual ones, when he assures us that the clearest intellect alone cannot assimilate the truths of religion.  For the spiritual faculties have been in man grievously deadened and distorted (to say the least of it), so that his intellectual faculties, bright and highly developed as they may be, will always prove insufficient for the highest life in the absence of the “grace of God.”  It is exactly analogous to the case of a man whom we might suppose to have his sense of sight, touch, &c., distorted, and he himself unable to correct them by aid of the senses of others.  However acutely he might exercise his reason, he would be continually wrong in his conclusions.  See 1 Cor. ii., the whole, but specially vers. 14, 15.]

[Footnote 2:  “Descent of Man,” vol. i. p, 70.]

[Footnote 3:  The attempt (already alluded to) to separate moral and spiritual, to imagine something that is ethical, apart from the religious idea, has lent some strength to these ideas of the moral sense; but in fact, the moral sense is inseparably connected with the idea of God, and His approval and disapproval.  The idea of God may be obscured and lost, but conscience is the surviving trace of it; the circumference that accounts for the broken arc.]

It is an objection of the same order that applies to the other theory (Mr. Spencer’s).  There can be little doubt that in many respects it is true:  as an account of all human systems of religion it is adequate and natural; but it breaks down hopelessly when we try to use it to explain how the conception of God originated in the mind.  Just as there is a felt difference—­not of degree or in form, but essential and radical in its nature—­between the undesirable and the wrong, so there is a difference between the idea of a mysterious thing towards which apprehension or awe is felt, and the conception of God.  Granted that man believed in his own spirit or double, and attributed similar immaterial motor powers as a cause for the wind and waves, and so forth; granted that he at last “refined” this into the belief in one Spirit whose power was necessarily great and varied—­the origin is still unexplained.  How did man get the idea of a personal spirit or double—­no such thing, ex hypothesi existing?  How did he get to formulate the idea of a God when he had simplified his group of many spirits into one?