The idea of God may be
obscured and lost, but conscience is the surviving trace of it; the
circumference that accounts for the broken arc.]
It is an objection of the same order that applies to the other theory
(Mr. Spencer's). There can be little doubt that in many respects it is
true: as an account of all _human_ systems of religion it is adequate
and natural; but it breaks down hopelessly when we try to use it to
explain how the conception of God originated in the mind. Just as there
is a felt difference--not of degree or in form, but essential and
radical in its nature--between the _undesirable_ and the _wrong_, so
there is a difference between the idea of a mysterious thing towards
which apprehension or awe is felt, and the conception of God. Granted
that man believed in his own spirit or double, and attributed similar
immaterial motor powers as a cause for the wind and waves, and so forth;
granted that he at last "refined" this into the belief in one Spirit
whose power was necessarily great and varied--the origin is still
unexplained. How did man get the idea of a personal spirit or double--no
such thing, _ex hypothesi_ existing? How did he get to formulate the
idea of a _God_ when he had simplified his group of many spirits into
one?
If man is created with a consciousness of his own inner-self, _as a
self_, he is able naturally to imagine a like self in other beings; if
he has an idea of God innate in him, he can assimilate the truth when it
is at last presented to his mind; and that is why he feels that it _is_
a refinement; a rising from the lower to the higher (because from
falsehood to truth), to let the many gods give place to the One God.
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