If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a [Greek: zôon logikon] in his highest faculty, a _ratiocinative_, but rather an emotional and imaginative animal; and if to start from, as to end, in mere reason, be in human psychology a gross one-sidedness, much more in theology is such a procedure erroneous, and altogether perverse. If not the smallest poem of a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, but from something deeper and more vital, much less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, the deep-seated convictions of religious faith in the inner man, to be spoke of as things that mere reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we see, when we look narrowly into the great philosophical systems that have been projected by scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each man out of his own brain, that they all end either in materialism and atheism on the one hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other. All our philosophers have stopped short of that one living, personal, moral God, on whose existence alone humanity can confidently repose--who alone can give to the trembling arch of human speculation that keystone which it demands. The idea of God, in fact, is not a thing that individual reason has first to strike out, so to speak, by the collision or combination of ideas, the collocation of proofs, and the concatenation of arguments. It is a living growth rather of our whole nature, a primary instinct of all moral beings, a necessary postulate of healthy humanity, which is given and received as our life and our breath is, and admits not of being reasoned into any soul that has it not already from other sources. And as no philosopher of Greek or German times that history tells of, ever succeeded yet in inventing a satisfactory theology, or establishing a religion in which men could find solace to their souls, therefore it is clear that that satisfactory Christian theology and Christian religion which we have, and not only that, but all the glimpses of great theological truth that are found twinkling through the darkness of a widespread superstition, came originally from God by common revelation, and not from man by private reasoning. The knowledge of God and a living theology is, in fact, a simple science of experience like any other, only of a peculiar quality and higher in degree. All true human knowledge in moral matters rests on experience, internal or external, higher or lower, on tradition, on language as the bearer of tradition, on revelation; while that false, monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the pride of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of