The science of religion, however, it may be said, is concerned exclusively with the evolution, and not in the least with the value or validity, of the idea. But neither, we must remember, is it concerned to dispute its value or to deny its validity; and no man can help drawing his own conclusions from the established fact that the idea is to be found wherever man is to be found. If, however, by the idea of God we mean simply an intellectual idea, merely a verbal proposition, we shall be in danger of drawing erroneous conclusions. The historian of religion, in discussing the idea of God, its manifestations and its evolution, is bound to express himself in words, and to reduce what he has to say to a series of verbal propositions. Nothing, therefore, is more natural than to imagine that the idea of God is a verbal, intellectual proposition; and nothing is more misleading. If we start from this misleading notion, then, as words are but words, we may be led to imagine that the idea of God is nothing more or other than the words: it is mere words. If however this conclusion is, for any reason, displeasing to us, and if we stick to the premiss that the idea of God is a verbal proposition, then we shall naturally draw a distinction between the idea of God and the being of God; and, having thus fixed a great gulf between the idea and the being of God, we shall be faced with the difficulty of crossing it. We may then feel it to be not merely difficult but impossible to get logically to the other side of the gulf; that is to say, we shall conclude that the being of God is an inference, but an inference which never can be logically verified: the inference may be a correct or an incorrect inference, but we cannot possibly know which it is. From the idea of God we can never logically infer His being. Since then no logic will carry us over the chasm we have fixed between the idea and the being of God, if we are to cross it, we must jump it: we must take the leap of faith, we must believe the passage possible, just because it is impossible. And those who take the leap, do land safely--we have their own testimony to that--as safely as, in _King Lear_, Gloucester leaps from the cliff of Dover; and they well may 'Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours Of men's impossibilities, have preserv'd them.'