RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 2/7 



in and through the existence of the absolutely total 

 and complete society of possible minds, the question 

 of God's reality is exactly the question whether a 

 perfect Person is necessarily included in the total 

 circle of individual differentiation by which the abso- 

 lutely entire society of minds is constituted. To 

 this, it would seem there is but one answer : It is 

 impossible to exclude from the total circle that Su- 

 preme Person whose mark of individual difference 

 is his eternal perfection in the rational nature wlilcl-), 

 under various conditions of manifestation amid de- 

 fects, is common to all the others.^ 



Such is the argument to the inherently religious 

 and theistic character of the Method of Reason 

 v/hen applied to reHgion. It has undertaken to 

 show that reason, by its nature, asserts the ex- 

 istence of God, — of God in the deep Christian 

 sense of the living and loving Recogniser and 

 Saviour of the spiritual and rational nature of 

 every mind ; a God who is an ever-active member, 

 with all intelligences, in the benign society where the 

 ultimate aim of all, quite as it is God's eternal will, 

 is the perfection and bliss of all the rest. Such, I 

 repeat, is the argument. I do not offer it as the 

 only possible proof of the truth of Rationalism, but 

 simply as a sufficient one, and one naturally drawn 

 from the leading mental interests of our time, and 



^ For a full treatment of this argument, see pp. 351-359, below. 



