Common Sense Applied to Religion; Or, The Bible and the People

by Catharine Esther Beecher

The position here maintained is that the human mind is so made that, whenever any kind of change (or effect) takes place, there inevitably follows a belief that there is some antecedent which is the cause of this change, or, in other words, that there is something that produced this change.

Now the question is not how this conviction first finds entrance to the mind, nor whether it is consequent on experience.

It is simply a question of fact. Men always do, whenever they see any new form of existence, or any change take place, believe that there is some antecedent cause that produced this change.

Moreover, if a man should be found who was destitute of this belief, so that in his daily pursuits he assumed that things would spring into existence without any cause, and that there were no causes of any kind that produced the changes around him, he would be pronounced insane—a man who had "lost his reason."

Here, then, we have an example of an intuitive truth, and also an illustration of the test by which we are to distinguish such truths from all others, viz.:

Any truth is a principle of reason, or an intuitive truth, when all men talk and act as if they believed it in the practical affairs of life, and when talking and acting as if it were not believed, would universally be regarded as evidence that a man had "lost his reason."

It will now be shown how a belief in this truth involves a belief in some great First Cause who himself had no beginning.

The atheist says thus: Somewhere, far back in other ages, there were no existences at all, either of matter or mind; but at a given period, without any cause at all, the vast and wonderful contrivances of matter and mind began to exist.

The first reply to this is, that it is an assertion without evidence, either intuitive or otherwise. No being ever was known to testify of such an event, and there is no proof of it of any kind.

Next, it is replied that placing such an event at distant ages does not render it any more credible than the assertion that worlds and intelligent beings are coming into existence at the present time without any cause. God has so constituted our minds that we can not believe that any curious and wonderful contrivance springs into being without a cause, either now or at any past period of time.