It is very true, nothing more true than that “the heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands,” but to him only who has the idea of God or already believes that he is. Nothing more true than God can be traced in all his works, or that “the invisible things of him, even his eternal power and divinity, are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made,” but only by those who have already learned that he is, are intent on answering the question, _Quid est Deus?_ not the question, _An sit Deus?_ Hence we so far agree with the traditionalist, not indeed that the existence of God cannot be proved by reason prior to faith, but that, as a fact, God revealed himself to man before his expulsion from the garden; and the belief, clear and distinct or dim and confused, in the divine being, universally diffused among all races and conditions of men, originated in revelation and is due to the tradition, pure or impure, in its integrity or mutilated and corrupted, of the primitive revelation made by God himself to man. In this way the fact of the universality of the belief in some form is a valid argument for the truth of the belief, and we thus obtain a historical argument to corroborate the already conclusive ideal or metaphysical argument, the principles of which we have given. We bear willing testimony to the good-will and laudable intention of our author, but we cannot regard him as able, with his mutilated theology and his imperfect and rather superficial philosophy--though less superficial than the philosophy generally in vogue among British and American Protestants--to carry on a successful war against the Positivists. We are almost tempted to say to him: Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis Tempus eget.