Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Hodge

Hodge’s line lands like a keystone in a carefully engineered bridge between the pulpit and the classroom: if you keep digging for the foundation of what you know and why you trust it, you don’t end up at “evidence” or “reason” in the abstract. You end up at a prior act of confidence in God. That’s not a retreat from intellect so much as a claim about its plumbing. Hodge is saying that skepticism doesn’t escape faith; it just relocates it. Everyone, even the self-styled rationalist, stands on an ultimate “because.”

The specific intent is defensive and ambitious at once. In 19th-century America, Protestant orthodoxy was being pressed from multiple sides: higher criticism, rising natural science, and a modernizing culture that wanted knowledge to answer only to the laboratory. As a Princeton theologian, Hodge helped define a Reformed “common sense” tradition that treated theology as a disciplined science, yet he insists here that the final court of appeal is not method but metaphysics. Knowledge, in his framing, rests on the trustworthiness of a Creator who made minds to correspond to reality.

The subtext is a quiet reversal of the era’s confidence in autonomy. Hodge offers a kind of epistemic ultimatum: if God is not the guarantor, then certainty becomes a mirage and morality a negotiated truce. The rhetoric is spare, almost legalistic, which is part of its force. He’s not selling a feeling; he’s staking a claim about what makes “knowing” possible at all.