Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/93

 in degree and power, not in kind; and his material-world grounds give him no reason, in his strict reasoning process, to conclude that the divine intelligence, or intelligences, which he deduces from them, are exempt from the passions or frailties of the intelligences he is acquainted with. He attributes, therefore, to his gods, the passions and motives of men; and the Christian philosophers, who reason from the same grounds to prove the existence of the Deity, do not reason half so correctly as the pagan; for these grounds will carry human reason no farther than the pagan goes,—and there Paley, prize-essay divinity, and paganism stick together neck and neck. The material-world grounds prove the existence only of creative power. The goodness, mercy, omniscience, all the attributes of God, are in the innate sentiment of the human mind of an existence of Supreme Divine Power; and upon this innate sentiment or spirituality the material-world argument has to fall back, to rescue itself from mere paganism. The distinctive characteristics of paganism and Christianity are, that the former rests entirely on material-world grounds—and from these grounds reasons strictly and correctly, its conclusions being correctly drawn, but from imperfect premises; the latter rests on the spiritual evidence of the innate sentiment of a Divine Existence, of which every human mind is as conscious as of its own existence—and on Revelation. Paley, the Bridgewater Bequest philosophers, and all that school of Christian reasoners, have, in fact, done infinite mischief to religion, by throwing out of view the innate sense, the spirituality of the human mind, on which pure religion is founded; and by resting its evidences on material external objects, from which the deist, the polytheist, the Odin-worshipper, if such now existed, might draw conclusions in their own favour more strictly logical than this kind of Christian rea-