UNIVERSITY

OF CA FON

BELIEF IN GOD.

CHAPTER I.

THE DESIRE FOR GOD.

HE religious sentiments are so common, that

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they may be considered practically universal. They are absent in certain individuals, no doubt, just as the faculty of sight is sometimes absent; but their absence is exceptional and rare. They existed in the earliest ages of which we can obtain any information, and there is every reason to believe that they will continue to exist to the end of time. We find, for example, Homer saying, "As young birds open their mouths for food, so all men crave for the gods." And in the 'Vedanta' an Indian thinker—a very different type of man from Homer-expresses the same sentiment in very similar words. "As birds,"

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he says, "repair to a tree to dwell therein, so all the universe repairs to the Supreme Being." Though differing much in their general views of life, the Greek poet and the Indian philosopher are both convinced as to man's profound need of God.

By the help of philology we can go back further still. Long before the time of Homer, long before the dawn of history, men had learnt to believe in God and to love Him. When the ancestors of Greeks and Indians were yet dwelling in the centre of Asia as a single and undivided nation, they had in their language a word which meant "Heaven-Father." And Max Müller has found traces of the same idea in the Semitic languages. The founder of Buddhism, it is true, is generally thought to have disbelieved in God; but his followers have very seldom preserved a strictly atheistic religion. It may be asserted without fear of contradiction that, generally speaking, all the world over men believe in a supernatural being, or in supernatural beings, with whom they desire to enter into communion, or whose favour at any rate they are anxious to obtain.

Of course religious conceptions have often been degraded. Men have frequently imagined