As, however, "creation" forms a part of "revelation," and as "revelation" appeals for its acceptance to "reason" which has to prepare a basis for it by an intelligent acceptance of theism on _purely rational grounds_, it is necessary to start with a few words as to the reasonableness of belief in God, which indeed are less superfluous than some readers may perhaps imagine; "a few words," because this is not the place where the argument can be drawn out, but only one or two hints given in reply to certain modern objections. No better example perhaps can be taken, as a type of these objections, than a passage in Mr. Herbert Spencer's First Principles.[246] This author constantly speaks of the "ultimate cause of things" as "the Unknowable," a term singularly unfortunate, and as Mr. James Martineau has pointed out,[247] even self-contradictory: for that entity, the knowledge of {246} the existence of which presses itself ever more and more upon the cultivated intellect, cannot be the unknown, still less _the unknowable_, because we certainly know it, in that we know for certain that it exists. Nay more, to predicate incognoscibility of it, is even a certain knowledge of the mode of its existence. Mr. H. Spencer says:[248] "The consciousness of an Inscrutable Power manifested to us through all phenomena has been growing ever clearer; and must eventually be freed from its imperfections. The certainty that on the one hand such a Power exists, while on the other hand its nature transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination, is the certainty towards which intelligence has from the first been progressing." One would think then that the familiar and accepted word "the Inscrutable" (which is in this passage actually employed, and to which no theologian would object) would be an indefinitely better term than "the unknowable." The above extract has, however, such a theistic aspect that some readers may think the opposition here offered superfluous; it may be well, therefore, to quote two other sentences. In another place he observes,[249] "Passing over the consideration of credibility, and confining ourselves to that of conceivability, we see that atheism, pantheism, and theism, when rigorously analysed, severally prove to be absolutely unthinkable;" and speaking of "every form of religion," he adds,[250] "The analysis of every possible hypothesis proves, not simply that no hypothesis is sufficient but that no hypothesis is even thinkable." The unknowable is admitted to be a power which cannot be regarded as having sympathy with us, but as one to which no emotion whatever can be ascribed, and we are expressly {247} forbidden "by _duty_," to affirm personality of God as much as to deny it of Him. How such a being can be presented as an object on which to exercise religious emotion it is difficult indeed to understand.[251] Aspiration, love, devotion to be poured forth upon what we can never know, upon what we