I took the ground, and I still take the ground, that there is nothing in the Constitution that cannot on occasion be enforced by the army and navy--that is to say, that cannot be defended and enforced by the sword. Suppose God is acknowledged in the Constitution, and somebody denies the existence of this God--what are you to do with him? Every man elected to office must swear or affirm that he will support the Constitution. Can one who does not believe in this God, conscientiously take such oath, or make such affirmation?
The effect, then, of such a clause in the Constitution would be to drive from public life all except the believers in this God, and this providence. The Government would be in fact a theocracy and would resort for its preservation to one of the old forms of religious persecution.
I took the ground in my article, and still maintain it, that all intelligent people know that no one knows whether there is a God or not. This cannot be answered by saying, "that nearly all intelligent men in every age, including our own, have believed in God and have held that they had rational grounds for such faith." This is what is called a departure in pleading--it is a shifting of the issue. I did not say that intelligent people do not believe in the existence of God. What I did say is, that intelligent people know that no one knows whether there is a God or not.
It is not true that we know the conditions of thought. Neither is it true that we know that these conditions are unconditioned. There is no such thing as the unconditioned conditional. We might as well say that the relative is unrelated--that the unrelated is the absolute--and therefore that there is no difference between the absolute and the relative.
The Bishop says we cannot know the relative without knowing the absolute. The probability is that he means that we cannot know the relative without admitting the existence of the absolute, and that we cannot know the phenomenal without taking the noumenal for granted. Still, we can neither know the absolute nor the noumenal for the reason that our mind is limited to relations.
* "An Address delivered before the State Bar Association at Albany, N. Y., January 1, 1890."