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induction, and this is our answer. We go upon facts. I hold that a true 
philosophy, dealing with facts, leads us to the conviction that this nature 
must have a mind connected with it, which mind plans and designs and 
purposes. But a man says, “ Here is nature ; I believe in nature and in 
nothing else,” and that man plies me with difficulties as to a personal God. 
But what are my difficulties compared with this notion of nature and 
nothing else ? He says, “ How can there be a God apart from nature V' I 
ask, “ How can there be nature apart from God ?” He says, “ How can 
there be a God, in conception at least, before nature ?” I ask, “How can 
there be nature, even in conception, before design, before the plan of the 
whole wondrous and marvellous economy which spreads itself forth to our 
view V The more we look at it, the more we shall see that the difficulties 
involved in the conception of nature without God amount to contradictions 
manifold, and that it is also weighted with the destruction of morality and of 
all that belongs to domestic purity. When I look at the logical difficulties 
on the atheistic side, and at the moral ruin of the whole universe — morality 
committing suicide, and going down headlong into the bottomless gulf, — 
—I confess I have no doubt or difficulty, notwithstanding all Mr, Holyoake 
can advance, in saying that I must believe in a moral Governor, in a 
Supreme God ; and I accept the faith with all its terrible mysteries, 
humbling myself in the presence of those mysteries, and in the presence 
of the God of mystery, who is also the God of truth. 
Mr. Reddie. — I should like to make one or two remarks on this all- 
important subject. I regret that Dr. Rigg has left ; but he was not so far 
in antagonism with Dr. Irons eventually as in setting out he appeared to 
be ; because the argument in Dr. Irons’s papers is especially based upon that 
sense of duty which men recognize generally, and which is very rarely 
denied even by atheists. Dr. Irons therefore goes upon the consequent 
assumption that we are all free agents, and Dr. Rigg’s conclusion is 
based upon that. That also affords a complete answer to Mr. Holyoake, 
when he says that he does not believe in a moral Governor, expressly 
because he thinks there is something so monstrous in the state of the world 
and something so altogether wrong. For that very idea of “ wrong ’’ 
concedes the whole matter. Dr. Irons simply requires, as the basis of 
his argument, a recognition of the fact that there is what we call right and 
wrong, or, in other words, what we praise or blame. Mr. Holyoake’s 
other difficulties, as regards retribution, simply come to be the difficulties 
felt by the heathen, or by those who do not know God’s revelation, inasmuch 
as those difficulties are entirely got rid of by that revelation, which 
Mr. Holyoake, notwithstanding, unhappily rejects. If the revelation of 
God did not make those difficulties less, and in truth give us a solution of 
them, I venture to say that reasonable men would almost be bound to reject 
revelation. But, on the other hand, I think that Mr. Holyoake ought 
to know, that the revelation which is put forward for his acceptance is not 
that of a God, who, like an inexorable fate, first makes imperfect beings, and 
then punishes them for being imperfect. We don’t believe that. We admit 
