the Supreme Being, worshiped by most civilized nations. The Christian God is an infinite and absolute being; a perfect personal spirit--eternal, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good, true and righteous. The arguments for the existence of God have been divided into the ontological, the psychological, the cosmological, the physico-teleological and the moral. The ontological argument starts from the idea of God itself and professes to demonstrate the existence of God as a necessary consequence from that idea. The manner in which it was stated by Anselm, in the eleventh century, is this: "God must be thought of as that being than whom none can be thought greater; but this being, the highest and most perfect that we can conceive, may be thought as existing in actuality as well as in thought--that is to say, may be thought as something still greater; therefore God, or what is thought as greatest, must exist not only in thought but in fact." This argument has been presented in other forms. Descartes, while refuting Anselm's form of the ontological argument, revived it himself in another form. Applying the test of truth which he derived from his celebrated formula--"I think, therefore I am"--that whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to the true and unalterable nature of a thing may be predicated of it, he found on investigating God that existence belongs to his true and unalterable nature and therefore may legitimately be predicated of him. Another argument, called the psychological, was adduced by Descartes to prove the existence of God, which, although not the same as the ontological argument, appears to resemble it. It starts from the idea of a supreme and perfect being, but it does not assert the objective existence of that being as implied in its idea, but infers such objective existence on the ground that we could have acquired the idea only from the being which corresponds to it. The cosmological argument starts not from an idea, but from a contingent existence, and infers from it an absolutely necessary being as its cause. The argument is: Every new thing and every change in a previously existing thing must have a cause sufficient and pre-existing. The universe consists of a system of changes. Therefore the universe must have a cause outside of and before itself. The argument called the physico-teleological is that which is commonly known as the argument from design and has been fully illustrated by Paley in his Natural Theology. It is simply this, that in nature there are unmistakable evidences of the adaptation of means to ends, which lead us inevitably to the idea of one that planned this adaptation, that is, of God. The moral argument is derived from the constitution and history of man and his relations to the universe, being based on such considerations as our recognition of good and evil, right and wrong, the monitions of conscience and the fact that a moral government of the world may be observed. Another argument is based on the alleged fact that a belief in the existence of a supreme being is everywhere found to be implanted in the breast of man. This argument is used among others by Cicero, and many thinkers are inclined to give a good deal of weight to it; still it is pronounced by others to be at best only a probable argument, if it may be accepted as valid to prove anything at all. Others argue the existence of God from the manifestations which he has made of himself to men, but these, as well as miracles, it is admitted even by Christian theists, can only be accepted as real by such as previously believed in the divine existence.