When the moral and intellectual qualities of men constitute one part of the phenomenal manifestations which we adopt as the basis of reasoning to the existence of God, we are in danger of assigning to that being attributes of character which would be far from perfection. Nearly all the religions that have existed, and of which we have much knowledge--perhaps all of them but one--have displayed more or less of this tendency. It is only necessary to instance the Hebrew Scriptures, for there are parts of that narrative in which the Deity is represented as actuated by something very much like human passions and motives, and these representations are among the hardest things to be reconciled with the idea that those books were inspired writings. Every one knows with what effect these passages of the Hebrew Scriptures are used by those who reject both the Old and the New Testaments as inspired books. But is philosophy therefore to shrink from the use of materials with which the world is filled, and which lead to the conception of a being of infinite faculties and perfect goodness? Grant all that may be said of the stupid and fatal errors into which men have been led by likening the Deity to man: there remains a vast store-house of materials on which to reason to the existence of God, which philosophy can not afford to reject, which can be freed from the peril that has often attended their use, and which involve no "symbolizing" process of the kind which Mr. Spencer imagines. Let us again translate Mr. Spencer's language, and endeavor to analyze his position. There is, he says, a law of thought, which requires and depends upon certain elements of thought. By "thought" he means a conceivable idea, or one which the mind can represent to itself. By the elements of thought he means, I suppose, the data which enable us to have an idea of a product. The process of reaching this product is supposed to be conducted according to a law which requires us to have the data or elements by which the process is to be conducted. For example, in the process of reaching an idea of definite space as a product of thought, we take certain data or elements, by conceiving of space as divided into successive portions to which we give the name of feet or miles. The product of thought is the number of feet or miles into which we divide the definite space of which we form an idea. In this process we have conformed to Mr. Spencer's law of thought, because we have data or elements by which to conduct the process and reach the product.