The truth just stated is, as I have said, of universal application. But it is nowhere more applicable than in the inquiry on which we are engaged. The great idea of God--the sublimest and most important of all ideas--has come to us in a wondrous manner through the minds and hearts of countless generations which it has exercised and sustained, which it has guided in darkness, strengthened in danger, and consoled in affliction. It has come to us by a long, unbroken tradition; and had it not come to us, we should of a certainty not have found it out for ourselves. We should have had to supply its place, to fill "the aching void" within us caused by its absence, with some far lower idea, perhaps with some wild fiction, some foul idol. Probably we cannot estimate too humbly the amount or worth of the religious knowledge which we should have acquired, supposing we acquired any, if we had been left wholly to our own unaided exertions--if we had been cut off from the general reason of our race, and from the Divine Reason, which has never ceased to speak in and to our race.
While, however, the idea of God has been brought to us, and is not independently wrought out by us, no man is asked to accept it blindly or slavishly; no man is asked to forego in the slightest degree, even before this the most venerable and general of the beliefs of humanity, the rights of his own individual reason. He is free to examine the grounds of it, and to choose according to the result of his examination. His acceptance of the idea, his acquiescence in the belief, is of worth only if it be the free acceptance of, the loving acquiescence in, what his reason, heart, and conscience testify to be true and good. Therefore, neither in this idea or belief itself, nor in the way in which it has come to us, is there any restriction or repression of our mental liberty. And the mere rejection of it is no sign, as some seem to fancy, of intellectual freedom, of an independent judgment. It is no evidence of a man's being freer from incredulity than the most superstitious of his neighbours. "To disbelieve is to believe," says Whately. "If one man believes there is a God, and another that there is no God, whichever holds the less reasonable of these two opinions is chargeable with credulity. For the only way to avoid credulity and incredulity--the two necessarily going together--is to listen to, and yield to the best evidence, and to believe and disbelieve on good grounds." These are wise words of Dr Whately. Whenever reason has been awakened to serious reflection on the subject, the vast majority of men have felt themselves unable to believe that this mighty universe, so wondrous in its adjustments and adaptations, was the product of chance, or dead matter, or blind force--that the physical, mental, and moral order which they everywhere beheld implied no Supreme Intelligence and Will; and the few who can believe it, have assuredly no right, simply on the ground of such ability, to assume that they are less credulous, freer thinkers, than others. The disbelief of the atheist must ever seem to all men but himself to require more faith, more credulity, than the beliefs of all the legends of the Talmud.[6]