All unbelief begins in a distrust of the goodness of God. To be able to say ‘I believe in God’ is to have a religion, nay, if the truth be told, it is to have all religion. That majestic article of belief is so high a triumph over the apparent faults, schisms, lapses, miseries, agonies of Nature, that he whose heart can say ‘I believe that God is good’ is prepared for other beliefs as developments of that. Consider how great a belief it is--great in its difficulty, great in its august beneficence. ‘I believe in the All-Good,’ or, as Christ put it, ‘I believe in God the Father.’ Marvellous it is that _Theist_ or _Deist_ should have been a term used reproachfully. To believe in a superintending gracious Providence; to believe that in life’s sorrowful straits an Everlasting Eye oversees us, an Almighty Voice still bids us be of cheer; to believe that there is a soul of goodness in things evil, that life is a riddle of which the key is held in divine invisible hands, and that we see as yet but a fragment of the scheme that extends from eternity to eternity--is not this the heart of religion? is it not a solace, guidance, discipline of the soul? ‘I marvel,’ says Gerald Eversley in one of his letters, ‘that the mere faith in God, apart from prophets, priests, mediators, revealers, has not exercised a more sacred, divine influence among men. But I marvel yet more at the tenacious strength with which men in all ages and in all quarters of the world have adhered to that belief, so antithetical as it is to moral experience. The warrant of it lies not, methinks, in the phenomena of Nature or Life. It lies in the constitution of the human heart. _Fecisti nos ad Te_, as St. Augustine says, _et cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in Te_. We cling to the faith in God, not because it is open to no objection, but because, when our vision is clearest, not chequered or distorted by pride, passion, cupidity, self-deception, no other faith than that is possible. I believe in God.’ When Gerald Eversley in his lonely meditations found that the belief in God (which he had always taken as axiomatic) was gravely questioned, it was as though the earth were quaking under his feet. The extinguishing of the sun or moon in the heaven would not be a more terrible shock than is the loss of God to a young soul. It is altogether desolate if bereft of Him. It is so trustful, so generous, so positive; it leans so hard upon its faiths, and is so sure of their ability to endure whatever assault of criticism may be opposed to them, that to lose aught is to lose all; and, when the faith in God fails, the man, from a sentiment of having been abused and cheated, plunges many a time headlong into sin. Oh! the pity that God should fail men in their bitter need of Him! I find this passage in one of Gerald Eversley’s papers, written, it would seem, not long after the date of his leaving St. Anselm’s. It is like much that men have thought and written since the world was.