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religious knowledge as well as of what we may call instinctive religious 
sentiment ? 
Max Muller admits a “ sense of the Divine ” as an ultimate fact in the 
analysis of human nature. In his preface to “ Chips,” &c., he enumerates 
“ the radical elements of all religions,” as “ an intuition of God, a sense of 
human weakness and dependence, a belief in a Divine government of 
the world, a distinction between good and evil, and a hope of a better life.” 
And yet he seems strangely averse to start with any definite idea of God in 
his history of religions. These Aryans, e.g. would seem to be a reasonable (?) 
religious (?) kind of animals, with no name for God, and no definite language ; 
who, from a sense of infinite surrounding space, imagined supra-mundane 
powers, and gradually shaped an idea of God, and devise for their idea a 
Name ! 
Credo ut intelligam is, doubtless, the reasonable process of all knowledge; 
but the “belief” is not a vague, objectless, sentiment. Its foundation is a 
revealed knowledge (partial and elementary, but real) of a Personal God, 
mysteriously complex, yet eternally one ; a revelation made at the com- 
mencement of human history by the Creator to the first created man. I 
cannot but think that we should reasonably prefer the statements of Moses 
to the “it may be ” of Max Muller (p. 137). The Bible record is not suf- 
ficiently esteemed or used as historical material by philosophises concerning 
man’s origin and progress. Were it so, we should see them more ready to 
admit that a religion of Nature- worship is a declension from, rather than an 
ascent to, the knowledge of God. 
Mr. Blencowe’s paper is an able contribution towards the controversy 
which, I believe, Christian philosophers have to wage with three erroneous 
tendencies of the present day, viz. : — 
(1.) The prevalent reference of all things to a merely natural evolution. 
The common and universal fact of deterioration ought to warn us 
against a philosophy which advocates a continuous natural order of 
things, without reference to God as the Anterior of all things, and 
the supra-mundane Ruler of the universe. 
(2.) The tendency to equalise all religions, as being so many fairly parallel 
forms of “ religion.” By the extension of the term “ religion,” its 
intension is diminished, until we have connoted by it only a thin 
residuum of vague sentiment, which is called Divine, but does not 
rest on God. 
(3.) The tendency to leave unduly out of consideration the “traditional” 
and “ historical ” phenomena of the Bible record concerning the 
earlier development of the human race. 
To the Hon. Secretary, 
Victoria Institute. 
YOL. XY. 
M 
