Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. J. THEISM OF THE SCRIPTURES. II. ATHEISM OF THE PITAKA8. I. THEISM OF THE SCRIl'TUKKS. The most ancient writer whose works have come down to our own time enters into no argument to prove that there is a God, nor does he represent God as- preparing man for the birth of revelation by any solemn announcement of this primary truth. Unlike other cosmogonies the biblical record takes it for granted as a fact requiring no demonstration. The voice of God, and the glory of the divine presence, were in themselves proof of His existence, majesty, and power. " That God is, and that He is arewarder of them that diligently seek Him," must have been made known to man at the earliest dawn of his being from the circumstances in which he was placed ; as we cannot suppose that God would' fling him into existence without teaching him all that it was absolutely necessary for him to know. The knowledge thus conveyed at first by immediate revelation would afterwards be communicated by man to his fellow man. It is long before we have any intimation that the existence of God was either denied or forgotten. The thought would linger long in the minds of men, and there would be glimpses of the fact when a clear knowledge of its reality was beginning to fade away amidst the deepening darkness and uncertainty of tradition. It seems never to have been regained by the exercise of unassisted reason, when once lost ; nor have all the thinkings of the sage ever added one single attribute to those which are ascribed to God in the Scriptures: whence we may infer, that we are indebted to revelation for our pro-son t knowledge of the very existence of God. But though man cannot " by searching find out God," he has in his own heart, in the rule of the world, in the earth upon ...