Faith, or reasonable and effective belief in God, proceeds, undoubtedly,
from this first instinct; but in proportion as intelligence develops
itself, and human thought expands, it goes from knowledge to knowledge,
from conclusion to conclusion, from light to light, from sentiment to
sentiment, infinitely farther and higher, in the idea of God. It does
not see him with the eyes of the body, because the Infinite is not
visible by a narrow window of flesh, pierced in the frontal bone of an
insect called Man; but it sees Him, with a thousand times more
certainty, by the spirit, that immaterial eye of the soul, which nothing
blinds; and after having seen him with evidence, it reasons upon the
consequences of his existence, upon the divine aims of His creation,
upon the terrestrial as well as eternal destinies of His creatures, upon
the nature of the homage and adoration that God expects, upon his moral
laws, upon the public and private duties which he imposes on his
creatures by their consciences, upon the liberty He leaves them; so that
with the sufferings of conflict He may give to them the merits and the
prize of virtue. Thus in man does the instinct of God become Faith. Thus
man can speak the greatest word that has ever been spoken upon the earth
or in the stars, the word which fills the worlds by itself alone, the
word which commenced with them, and which can only end with them;--
"I believe in God!"