180 W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., LL.D., ON 
established without a shadow of controversy by this new 
science? It is that in all ages of the history of human in- 
telligence there has been an effort, conscious or unconscious, 
to formulate certain theories about the unseen world and the 
unseen God, according to the measure and capacities of the 
human spirit, at different stages of its development. Thus 
the tendency which we call “the religions tendency” is 
one of the inseparable concomitants of human intelligence, 
present to it from the first, clinging to it even through some 
of the more repulsive shapes of superstition, changed and 
altered in various ways, and now looked at under a philo- 
sophical, now sometimes even under a scientific guise, but 
representing always and in all places a permanent back- 
ground to all the serious thought of the age. We look, in 
the second place, at another great nineteenth century 
discovery, the discovery of the law of evolution, the last and 
culminating point of the successive progresses of science. 
And here once again, if we discard the less important con- 
siderations, we find that the central fact about the world’s 
history is the development of successively higher forms of 
existence, till we reach the final stage of human, conscious, 
and intellectual life. Each stage grows out of the preceding 
stage, but each stage also puts on, as it were, fresh qualities, 
till, at the highest point, we find gifts and capacities which 
contain the promise and potency, not only of an intellectual, 
but of a moral and even spiritual life. And when we have suf- 
ficiently estimated the results of these two enquiries, we turn 
back again to Kant’s proofs, and a fresh hght is thrown upon 
them, as though they, too, indicated different stages in the 
mind’s advance towards God. The earliest feeling is one of 
the transitoriness of things, with which we contrast the 
notion of something that has been from the beginning, and 
that remains permanent, however much they may change. 
This is not an argument at al], observe; it is a mere 
sentiment, a feeling, which, when we seek to formulate 
it in precise terms, loses its emotional value, and gains 
no corresponding intellectual value; it is merely the 
cri du cwur, the cry of the heart, the confession, it may 
be, of weakness, the language of children, “crying for 
the light, and with no language but a cry.” And then 
comes the higher stage, representing initial processes in 
argumentation, where we attempt analogically to establish 
the reality of an author of existence, on grounds of 
human industry and effort. This argument, too, fails, 
