THE SACRED HEART GOD'S WAY OF LOVE. No man hath seen God at any time: the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him. S. JOHN i. 18. 'No man hath seen God at any time.' Therefore the fool said in his heart, There is no God;' for that which cannot be seen, to the fool does not exist. But if there be a truth certain to the reason, it is the existence of God. I am certain of my own existence because I am conscious of it. I need not reason about it; I make no syllogism; my existence is not a conclusion from premises. I know the existence of the natural world because my senses assure me of it, and I need no further evidence. My intellect tells me of the existence of God because it is a necessity of my reason to believe that, as the Apostle writes, "Every house is built by some man. He that created all things is God." And I could as soon believe that this cathedral in which 1 Heb. iii. 4. we are gathered together was reared by fortuitous action, or piled itself up by a spontaneous volition of its own, as that the world that we see had no Maker; and I am confirmed in this necessity of my reason by the fact that the whole race of mankind has believed in the existence of God. Men may have multiplied their gods; but that proves all the more. They may have distorted their conceptions of God, they may have depraved them, they may have weakened them almost to the verge of extinction; but there is not to be found a nation or a race in the whole family of mankind that has not had an idea of God to deprave; that is, a tradition of His existence. I say this, not to prove the existence of God by counting the number of votes, either of nations or of men; but I adduce it to prove the existence of a necessity of the reason, of a rational law by which an intelligent being is coerced by the very action of his intelligence to believe in the existence of God. Moreover, I find in myself, and I trace in the whole history of man, a consciousness of the distinction of right from wrong-a belief that there is a law of right, and that to transgress it is wrong; and as there is the notion of the law, so there is the notion of the lawgiver. And therefore I say once more that if there be anything certain to the reason, |