204 
Bible. There are, as I know by experience, thinking minds so entangled in 
the idea of nature as an original entity, working with blind, mechanical, 
resistless power, and of man as but a product and part of this natural 
mechanism, that they see no possibility of the truth of the doctrines of God’s 
existence, of Divine Providence, and of human freedom. Such men must 
be met on their own ground. I conceive it to be our duty, as members of a 
society aiming to reconcile Science and Religion, to show our readiness to 
meet those who cannot yet agree with us, on the ground where their difficul- 
ties lie ; to attempt to show them that their purely theoretical difficulties 
may be removed. Once make a man believe that the doctrines of Christian 
idealism are philosophically, i.e. really, possible, and he will not be long in 
concluding that they are probable, and then really true. Then the Bible 
will speak to his heart, and find responses in his best and inmost nature. 
He will find in it the indispensable food for his otherwise famishing soul. 
He will recognize in religion — and by this I mean true religion, the essence 
of Christianity — the consummate flower of human life and destiny ; and 
God, as revealed in the person of His Blessed Son, will be loved as the One 
“ who redeemeth our life from destruction,” and “ crowneth us with mercies 
and loving-kindness.” 
It would have been a pleasure to me to enter more fully into the dis- 
cussion of the theory of unconscious intelligence, as the basis of real exist- 
ence ; had I deemed that such a discussion would be wholly relevant to the 
purpose of my paper, or would not too greatly extend its limits. I will 
now say, however, that I do not know what atoms are (I know of no one 
who does). But, if atoms exist, I most certainly believe them to partici- 
pate, in some manner, in the ideal nature. I believe that God, as a Spirit 
(or, in philosophical language, the Ideal), is the source of all real things ; 
and hence that all things have a God-given, consequently, a spiritual or 
ideal, aspect, which is their true being. Now, God’s ways (the ways of the 
“ Idea ”) are not our ways, and are past finding out. How so-called 
“ material ” atoms can participate in the ideal nature without consciousness, 
I do not know. But so surely as I believe, and as a true philosophy demon- 
strates, that God is the source of all being, so surely am I convinced that 
the ideal element in the so-called atoms of the universe (in whatever manner 
it is to be conceived as existing) is the controlling and fundamental one. 
If this element is not conscious, it is yet impressed with a nature which 
compels it to comport itself in consonance with the intentions of that con- 
scious intelligence in which it originated. The theory of an unconscious 
intelligence in nature as the first in time, as existing absolutely (and not 
by derivation from the Divine Being), and as that out of which human mind 
is necessarily evolved, is absurd ; because the less cannot be the source of 
the greater, and because any conceivable form of intelligence, less than con- 
scious intelligence, is absurd, except in so far as it is regarded as having 
its roots, its origin, its law, in what is conscious. 
