Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Saul's mm ia m. James iv. 8: Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you. When once we have based religion on the spiritual instincts of man, and clearly seen how the common possession of those instincts renders possible general appeal and mutual confirmation, we are led straightway to a somewhat more careful inquiry into their nature and origin. Whence come these mysterious aspirations which are felt to be so powerful even while they are so difficult to justify ? From what fountain springs this awful consciousness of a moral law external to ourselves, and yet vindicating its authority in every fibre of our nature ? Why cannot we live a quite unconscious life, taking pain and pleasure as they come, untroubled by anything beyond the daily sensation, undisturbed by a haunting sense of a better and a worse ? We cannot suppose that a dog or a horse vexes itself with any attempt to account for the existence of the universe of which it forms a part, or to explain its moral difficulties: why then do we? In one sense our doubts and our denials are almost as strong a testimony to the existence of the religious instinct as are our faith and our affirmations: for why should the question ever arise in human minds, and occupy so large a share of speculation, and, in spite of the absence of certain answer, exercise an irresistible fascination over the keenest and noblest intellects ? If we ask for the origin of these instincts in our own souls alone, we might have considerable difficulty in obtaining a satisfactory answer: perhaps we could get no further than the statement that there was a certain attraction of the human spirit towards a Divine Ideal of truth and right, in yielding to which lay hid the secret of strength and peace. But, in fact, we are not reduced to the singl...