PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM.
A CHRISTIAN man knows God in his own experience; all that is of highest worth to man in life rests on his experience of God's graciouspresence and power in his own moral and spiritual development. In the strength of such knowledge many a Christian has lived a life of Christ-like love or gone to a martyr's stake, who never attempted to define or defend the articles of his belief. And the spontaneous religious beliefs of ruder men rest on what they have felt and known of the presence and power of the supernatural in and about them. Thus the knowledge of God begins, like the knowledge of nature and of man, in experience.
But since man is rational he cannot rest permanently in this spontaneous belief. As he advances in intelligence and intellectual development, he must reflect on what he thus believes, must define to himself what it is, and interpret and vindicate it to his reason as reasonable belief and real knowledge. This must be done if religious belief is to commend itself to thinking persons; it must be done anew from generation to generation if, in every period of intellectual activity and of advance in knowledge and culture, Christianity is to retain its preeminence as the light and inspiration of human life and the universal religion of mankind. The knowledge of God, like the knowledge of man and nature, begins in experience, and is ascertained, defined and systemized in thought. Even where God transcends our knowledge, we at least mark definitely the limits of the known. In this transition from spontaneous to reflective knowledge, questions of two classes arise. First are the questions: Have we