Does God exist? We may feel very sure that He does, and yet be forced to admit that the evidence of His existence is not so clear and undeniable as to compel the assent of every one. We do not try to prove the existence of the men we meet and who talk to us. No one thinks of denying their existence; it is taken for granted. Even the metaphysician, when he takes up and discusses the question whether we can prove the existence of any mind beyond our own, does not seriously doubt whether there are other minds or not. It is not so much what we know, as how we know it, that interests him. But with the existence of God it is different. That men do not think that an examination of the evidence can be dispensed with is evident from the books that are written and lectures that are delivered year after year. There seem to be honest differences of opinion, and we feel compelled to offer men proofs--to show that belief is reasonable. How shall we determine whether this world in which we live is such a world that we may take it as a revelation of God? And of what sort of a Being are we speaking when we use the word "God"? The question is not an idle one, for men's conceptions have differed widely. There is the savage, with a conception that strikes the modern civilized man as altogether inadequate; there is the thoughtful man of our day, who has inherited the reflections of those who have lived in the ages gone by. And there is the philosopher, or, perhaps, I should rather say, there are the philosophers. Have they not conceived of God as a group of abstract notions, or as a something that may best be described as the Unknowable, or as the Substance which is the identity of thought and extension, or as the external world itself? All have not sinned in this way, but some have, and they are not men whom we can ignore. If we turn from all such notions and, in harmony with the faith of the great body of religious men in the ages past, some of whom were philosophers but most of whom were not, cling close to the notion that God is a mind or spirit, and must be conceived according to the analogy, at least, of the human mind, the mind we most directly know--if we do this, we are still confronted by problems to which the thoughtful man cannot refuse attention.