I. A religious nature and destination appertain to man, so that the purposes of his existence and the perfection of his being can only be secured in and through religion.
II. The idea of God as the unconditioned Cause, the infinite Mind, the personal Lord and Lawgiver, and the consciousness of dependence upon and obligation to God, are the fundamental principles of all religion.
III. Inasmuch as man is a religious being, the instincts and emotions of his nature constraining him to worship, there must also be implanted in his rational nature some original _à priori_ ideas or laws of thought which furnish the necessary cognition of the object of worship; that is, some native, spontaneous cognition of God.
A mere blind impulse would not be adequate to guide man to the true end and perfection of his being without rational ideas; a tendency or appetency, without a revealed object, would be the mockery and misery of his nature--an "ignis fatuus" perpetually alluring and forever deceiving man.
That man has a native, spontaneous apperception of a God, in the true import of that sacred name, has been denied by men of totally opposite schools and tendencies of thought--by the Idealist and the Materialist; by the Theologian and the Atheist. Though differing essentially in their general principles and method, they are agreed in asserting that God is absolutely "_the unknown_;" and that, so far as reason and logic are concerned, man can not attain to any knowledge of the first principles and causes of the universe, and, consequently, can not determine whether the first principle or principles be intelligent or unintelligent, personal or impersonal, finite or infinite, one or many righteous or non-righteous, evil or good.
The various opponents of the doctrine that God can be cognized by human reason may be classified as follows: I. _Those who assert that all human knowledge is necessarily confined to the observation and classification of phenomena in their orders of co-existence, succession, and resemblance_. Man has no faculty for cognizing substances, causes, forces, reasons, first principles--no power by which he can _know_ God. This class may be again subdivided into--
1. Those who limit all knowledge to the observation and classification of _mental_ phenomena (_e. g_., Idealists like J. S. Mill).