1. Its universality.
That the knowledge of God's existence answers the first criterion of universality, is evident from the following considerations:
A. It is an acknowledged fact that the vast majority of men have actually recognized the existence of a spiritual being or beings, upon whom they conceived themselves to be dependent.
The Vedas declare: “There is but one Being—no second.” Max Müller, Origin and Growth of Religion, 34—“Not the visible sun, moon and stars are invoked, but something else that cannot be seen.” The lowest tribes have conscience, fear death, believe in witches, propitiate or frighten away evil fates. Even the fetich-worshiper, who calls the stone or the tree a god, shows that he has already the idea of a God. We must not measure the ideas of the heathen by their capacity for expression, any more than we should judge the child's belief in the existence of his father by his success in drawing the father's picture. On heathenism, its origin and nature, see Tholuck, in Bib. Repos., 1832:86; Scholz, Götzendienst und Zauberwesen.
B. Those races and nations which have at first seemed destitute of such knowledge have uniformly, upon further investigation, been found to possess it, so that no tribe of men with which we have thorough acquaintance can be said to be without an object of worship. We may presume that further knowledge will show this to be true of all.
Moffat, who reported that certain African tribes were destitute of religion, was corrected by the testimony of his son-in-law, Livingstone: “The existence of God and of a future life is everywhere recognized in Africa.” Where men are most nearly destitute of any formulated knowledge of God, the conditions for the awakening of the idea are most nearly absent. An apple-tree may be so conditioned that it never bears apples. “We do not judge of the oak by the stunted, flowerless specimens on the edge of the Arctic Circle.” The presence of an occasional blind, deaf or dumb man does not disprove the definition that man is a seeing, hearing and speaking creature. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 154—“We need not tremble for mathematics, even if some tribes should be found without the multiplication-table. … Sub-moral and sub-rational existence is always with us in the case of young children; and, if we should find it elsewhere, it would have no greater significance.”
Victor Hugo: “Some men deny the Infinite; some, too, deny the sun; they are the blind.” Gladden, What is Left? 148—“A man may escape from his shadow by going into the dark; if he comes under the light of the sun, the shadow is there. A man may be so mentally undisciplined that he does not recognize these ideas; but let him learn the use of his reason, let him reflect on his own mental processes, and he will know that they are necessary ideas.” On an original monotheism, see Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Max Müller, Chips, 1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, No. 11; Legge, Religions of China, 8–11; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:201–208. Per contra, see Asmus, Indogerm. Relig., 2:1–8; and synopsis in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1877:167–172.
C. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that those individuals, in heathen or in Christian lands, who profess themselves to be without any knowledge of a spiritual power or powers above them, do yet indirectly manifest the existence of such an idea in their minds and its positive influence over them.
Comte said that science would conduct God to the frontier and then bow him out, with thanks for his provisional services. But Herbert Spencer affirms the existence of a “Power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, of which all phenomena as presented in consciousness are manifestations.” The intuition of God, though formally excluded, is implicitly contained in Spencer's system, in the shape of the “irresistible belief” in Absolute Being, which distinguishes his position from that of Comte; see H. Spencer, who says: “One truth must ever grow clearer—the truth that there is an inscrutable existence everywhere manifested, to which we can neither find nor conceive beginning or end—the one absolute certainty that we are ever in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed.” Mr. Spencer assumes unity in the underlying Reality. Frederick Harrison sneeringly asks him: “Why not say ‘forces,’ instead of ‘force’?” While Harrison gives us a supreme moral ideal without a metaphysical ground, Spencer gives us an ultimate metaphysical principle without a final moral purpose. The idea of God is the synthesis of the two—“They are but broken lights of Thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they” (Tennyson, In Memoriam).
Solon spoke of ὁ θεός and of τὸ θεῖον, and Sophocles of ὁ μέγας θεός. The term for “God” is identical in all the Indo-European languages, and therefore belonged to the time before those languages separated; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:201–208. In Virgil's Æneid, Mezentius is an atheist, a despiser of the gods, trusting only in his spear and in his right arm; but, when the corpse of his son is brought to him, his first act is to raise his hands to heaven. Hume was a sceptic, but he said to Ferguson, as they walked on a starry night: “Adam, there is a God!” Voltaire prayed in an Alpine thunderstorm. Shelley wrote his name in the visitors' book of the inn at Montanvert, and added: “Democrat, philanthropist, atheist”; yet he loved to think of a “fine intellectual spirit pervading the universe”; and he also wrote: “The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly.” Strauss worships the Cosmos, because “order and law, reason and goodness” are the soul of it. Renan trusts in goodness, design, ends. Charles Darwin, Life, 1:274—“In my most extreme fluctuations, I have never been an atheist, in the sense of denying the existence of a God.”
D. This agreement among individuals and nations so widely separated in time and place can be most satisfactorily explained by supposing that it has its ground, not in accidental circumstances, but in the nature of man as man. The diverse and imperfectly developed ideas of the supreme Being which prevail among men are best accounted for as misinterpretations and perversions of an intuitive conviction common to all.
Huxley, Lay Sermons, 163—“There are savages without God, in any proper sense of the word; but there are none without ghosts.” Martineau, Study, 2:353, well replies: “Instead of turning other people into ghosts, and then appropriating one to ourselves [and attributing another to God, we may add] by way of imitation, we start from the sense of personal continuity, and then predicate the same of others, under the figures which keep most clear of the physical and perishable.” Grant Allen describes the higher religions as “a grotesque fungoid growth,” that has gathered about a primitive thread of ancestor-worship. But this is to derive the greater from the less. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 358—“I can find no trace of ancestor-worship in the earliest literature of Babylonia which has survived to us”—this seems fatal to Huxley's and Allen's view that the idea of God is derived from man's prior belief in spirits of the dead. C. M. Tyler, in Am. Jour. Theo., Jan. 1899:144—“It seems impossible to deify a dead man, unless there is embryonic in primitive consciousness a prior concept of Deity.”
Renouf, Religion of Ancient Egypt, 93—“The whole mythology of Egypt … turns on the histories of Ra and Osiris. … Texts are discovered which identify Osiris and Ra. … Other texts are known wherein Ra, Osiris, Amon, and all other gods disappear, except as simple names, and the unity of God is asserted in the noblest language of monotheistic religion.” These facts are earlier than any known ancestor-worship. “They point to an original idea of divinity above humanity” (see Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 317). We must add the idea of the superhuman, before we can turn any animism or ancestor-worship into a religion. This superhuman element was suggested to early man by all he saw of nature about him, especially by the sight of the heavens above, and by what he knew of causality within. For the evidence of a universal recognition of a superior power, see Flint, Anti-theistic Theories, 250–289, 522–533; Renouf, Hibbert Lectures for 1879:100; Bib. Sac., Jan. 1884:132–157; Peschel, Races of Men, 261; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688, and Gott und die Natur, 658–670, 758; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:377, 381, 418; Alexander, Evidences of Christianity, 22; Calderwood, Philosophy of the Infinite, 512; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 50; Methodist Quar.