3. Man's emotional and voluntary nature proves the existence of a Being who can furnish in himself a satisfying object of human affection and an end which will call forth man's highest activities and ensure his highest progress.
Only a Being of power, wisdom, holiness, and goodness, and all these indefinitely greater than any that we know upon the earth, can meet this demand of the human soul. Such a Being must exist. Otherwise man's greatest need would be unsupplied, and belief in a lie be more productive of virtue than belief in the truth.
Feuerbach calls God "the Brocken-shadow of man himself"; "consciousness of God = self-consciousness"; "religion is a dream of the human soul"; "all theology is anthropology"; "man made God in his own image." But conscience shows that man does not recognize in God simply his like, but also his opposite. Not as Galton: "Piety = conscience + instability." The finest minds are of the leaning type; see Murphy, Scientific Bases, 370; Augustine, Confessions, 1:1--"Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless till it finds rest in thee." On John Stuart Mill--"a mind that could not find God, and a heart that could not do without him"--see his Autobiography, and Browne, in Strivings for the Faith (Christ. Ev. Socy.), 259-287. Comte, in his later days, constructed an object of worship in Universal Humanity, and invented a ritual which Huxley calls "Catholicism _minus_ Christianity." See also Tyndall, Belfast Address: "Did I not believe, said a great man to me once, that an Intelligence exists at the heart of things, my life on earth would be intolerable." Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 1:505,506.
The last line of Schiller's Pilgrim reads: "Und das Dort ist niemals hier." The finite never satisfies. Tennyson, Two Voices: "'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want." Seth, Ethical Principles, 419--"A moral universe, an absolute moral Being, is the indispensable environment of the ethical life, without which it cannot attain to its perfect growth.... There is a moral _God_, or this is no _universe_." James, Will to Believe, 116--"A God is the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. Anything short of God is not a rational object, anything more than God is not possible, if man needs an object of knowledge, feeling, and will."