< ^.2L .0/ PRESENTED TO THE LIBRARY OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY BY Professor flenry von Dyke, D.D., L1L1.D. BR 45 .B63 i 1895 Thompson, Hugh Mi Her, 1830- 1902. The world and the wres tlers THE BOHLEN LECTURES FOR 1895 THE WORLD AND THE WRESTLERS PERSONALITY AND RESPONSIBILITY BY , HUGH MILLER THOMPSON BISHOP OF-MISSISSIPPI & NEW YORK THOMAS WHITTAKER 2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 1895 Copyright, 1895, By Thomas Whittaker. The John Bohlen lectureship. John Bohlen, who died in Philadelphia on the 26th day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of One Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed to reli- gious and charitable objects in accordance with the well-known wishes of the testator. By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trus- tees, under the will of Mr. Bohlen, transferred and paid over to "The Rector, Church Wardens, and Ves- trymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadel- phia," in trust, a sum of money for certain designated purposes, out of which fund the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was set apart for the endowment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, upon the following terms and conditions: " The money shall be invested in good substantial and safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be applied annually to the payment of a qualified person, whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery and publication of at least one hundred copies of two or more lecture sermons. These lectures shall be de- livered at such time and place, in the city of Philadel- phia, as the persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from time to time determine, giving at least six months' notice to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same may conveniently be done, and in no case selecting the same person as lecturer a second time within a period of five years. The payment shall be made to said lecturer, after the lectures have been printed and received by the trustees, of all the income for the year derived from said fund, after defraying the expense of printing the lectures and the other inci- dental expenses attending the same. " The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the 'Bampton Lectures,' at Oxford, or any other subject distinctively connected with or relating to the Christian Religion. " The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of May, or as soon thereafter as can conven- iently be done, by the persons who for the time being shall hold the offices of Bishop of the Protestant Epis- copal Church of the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity; the Rector of said Church; the Pro- fessor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of System- atic Divinity, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical His- tory, in the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. " In case either of said offices are vacant, the others may nominate the lecturer." Under this trust, the Right Rev. Hugh Miller Thompson, D. D., D.C.L., Bishop of the Diocese of Mississippi, was appointed to deliver the lectures for the year 1895. CONTENTS. LECTURE p AGE I. Personality of Man 5 II. Personality of God 45 III. Responsibility of God 79 IV. Responsibility of Man in LECTURE I. PERSONALITY OF MAN, And Jacob was left alone ; and there wrestled a Man with him until the breaking of the day. And when He saw that He prevailed not against him, He touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with Him. Atid He said, Let Me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me. And He said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. And He said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel : for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked Him, and said, Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name. And He said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My name ? And He blessed him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel : for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. Gen. xxxii. 24-30. THE WORLD AND THE WRESTLERS. LECTURE I. PERSONALITY OF MAN. TT is my purpose in these Lectures — the duty of -*■ delivering which I have accepted with great diffidence — I will not say to discuss, I will much less say to explain, but to call attention to, and make suggestions upon, the fact of Personality, which is to me the most wonderful fact in my knowledge — I think, indeed, I may say in the whole circle of human knowledge. That I say "I"; that I speak to other " I*s " ; that I deal with them, meet them, talk to them, love some of them more than I love myself; that some of them have gone from my sight; that I have stood by the graves where we buried their material forms, and yet that they are living to me; will, indeed, never die to me; are more liv- 7 8 PERSONALITY OF MAN. ing and more dear and near to me than other "IV which are full of what we call life and action — these things, I say, which are facts, and to me, at least, are far more wonderful and closely- important facts than any others, must be, like other facts, accepted and dealt with. They are practically excluded from the circle of what, in our day, is called Science, which has taken for herself as yet a very narrow range. The science of man is not biology, nor even psychology, nor sociology. The most complete discussion of the physical make-up and bodily origin of man, the same discussion of his intellec- tual powers, and the added study of his social habits and conditions have not grasped the real question. One can, for instance, study biology in oysters, in barnacles, in mosquitoes. (And the biology of these last is, in some respects, far more curious than that of man.) One can study psychology in apes. I love to study it in dogs, and in them it is wonderful. One can study sociology in bees, and devote a well-spent life to it ; and one might — which nobody has yet done — devote a life to the study of sociology in ants, with great profit, perhaps, certainly with great interest to himself PERSONALITY OF MAN 9 and others. But none of these sciences touch at all the questions I have suggested. Shall we go on excluding from Science the most close, pressing, experienced facts with which we are familiar? How comes the "I"? What does it mean to be an " I " and say "I"? to stand by itself and separate itself from the entire universe completely ; yes, completely, and just as completely from all other "Fs"? How comes it to feel that it can stand alone, must stand alone, indeed, very often, and assert itself in the teeth of all circumstances and of all men, and say, " I will," or " I will not " ? How comes it most insolently, in one point of view, to stand before ten thousand other " Fs " and say in their scowling faces, " This ought to be," " This ought not to be;" " I will die, but I will stand by it, that this is wrong " or " this is right " ? How comes this ? Shall we ever have a branch of Science called " pneumatology " ? Science has never reached the pneuma yet. Hitherto she has dealt with men as animals, somata, psychai, bodies, living things — bodies in their biology : the way they live and continue their kind ; science of vegetables, of cab- bages and carrots ; science of cholera germs, diph- theria, and smallpox. 10 PERSONALITY OF MAN. With psychology, in a way : what sense the things and creatures have; how they manage to keep up the psyche, the life, the arrangements and provisions for existence and continuance. With sociology also : how the things and crea- tures live together and repel and attract each other; the sociology of cucumbers and squashes, which every gardener ought to know or he will spoil both crops. Indeed, a step farther, rising even to ourselves — a vast stride ; that higher races and lower races of men, both living together' in equal conditions, must strike a general average, and the high must go half-way down if the low is to come half-way up. But with pneumatology Science bows herself out. I believe Science is wrong by her own definition of herself. Why should she leave the pneuma to religion alone? Why abandon it in despair to what some of her disciples consider the dreams and imaginations of mere religion ? There are the facts! — facts evident, insistent, close about our paths and about our beds; facts of the "I" and its duties, its transgressions and their penalties, its days and its nights, its com- panionships and its loneliness, its awful experi- ences, its visions of the high, white heavens and PERSONALITY OF MAN. 1 1 of the awful, low-down, lurid hells. Why has Science walled all these facts out ? Will you pardon me for saying that I think Science is very small so far? Small, because she ignores the facts right at her door, puts on her spectacles, and goes round, like an ancient witch, in the dark and the swamp, to find " facts " which, if they be facts, are of no great vital conse- quence to men, and never deigns to deal with or help to explain the facts that stare me in the face at my hearthside, at my lying down, at my rising up. But Science is in her childhood yet, and must grow; or, to use her own phrases, ''develop" or " evolute." She has millions of long miles before her, and possibly thousands of long years, and she is creeping yet; has, perhaps, by God's blessing, in these last years, been provided with a go-cart (I hope so), that she may learn the sooner to walk — namely, the working hypothesis of evolution. So let us be very thankful that there is any movement at all, on the line of knowing things, by the human psyche — any movement beyond trying to know how to provide the human soma with better food, drink, and shelter. It is inevitable that, at last, there shall be some 12 PERSONALITY OF MAN. attempt to know something of man ; and that means, for us Nicene Christians, something of God. The Pneuma will seek to be known also. For man is pneuma, and God is Pneuma. The Lord put those two facts together long ago. " God is a Spirit [Pneuma] : and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." I believe there is a science of the pneuma pos- sible, and to be formulated sometime — a collec- tion and formulation of the facts concerning egos, Ts — that is, men and God. These are the only Fs that Science can recognize and investigate. I think these are legitimate subjects, too, of scientific investigation ; I do not mean speculative or metaphysical word-confusion, I mean scientific investigation upon the strictest and most peremp- tory lines. It will take many ages, perhaps, before Science, working up through bathybius, monads, and mol- lusks, developing slowly, as the law of development compels, will venture upon the study of an " I " even finite and earthly, and all the facts that " I " holds, and all that grow out of them. It will take, no doubt, endless myriads of ages, and in other worlds, before Science reaches the point of trying to study and understand the awful, PERSONALITY OF MAN 13 infinite, eternal " I Am that I Am." And yet " to know God, this is life eternal." But this will be science of the pneuma, not of the psyche. I believe there is no knowing man apart from knowing God. These two have always gone together — somehow are always bound together. You may know all about a horse, I think; all about a mule, even (a much more " differentiated " animal) — I was going to say, without knowing anything about God; but I doubt even that. I am sure you can know nothing about man, in the differentiation which makes him man and distin- guishes him from either the bird or the animal, without knowing a great deal about God. You certainly cannot know much about God unless you know a good deal about man. For these two are " I's," and, as far as we can study them in this visible world, are the only "I's." I hesitate to say it, yet why should I? In scientific speech I should be compelled to say it. In Nicene speech I say it continually. These two "I's" are of one species! From the one I can at least begin the study of the other. " All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth." A Man, remember, said this. He is a Man to-day, as He was then. He will remain a Man forever. 14 PERSONALITY OF MAN We start with that and all its consequences (and they are overwhelming) as a matter of faith. In the end it will be a matter of Science — that Man governs the universe. The end of all living, saving faith is knowledge. Faith is tentative, helps you to scientia ac last — the outcome of faith, that for which faith was given. Faith in this realm furnishes, that is, the " working hypothesis." I have therefore decided in these Lectures to ask you to let your thought play about the sub- ject of Personality. It will, in the ages coming, be a subject of scientific investigation. It is, I need scarcely say, not such a subject yet, and never- theless it lies at the basis of all Science. Unless there be an " I " to know, there can be no know- ledge. Of course I am aware that " metaphysics," as it is called, studies and has studied the ego. But I am using the word " science " here in its strict meaning — the gathering and coordinating of as- certained, visible, hearable, or tangible facts. In that sense Science has declined, so far, to deal with the " I " — much to my surprise, and your surprise, if you will consider all that the neglect implies. But, as I say again, Science is yet in the germ, and will develop into somewhat really vital PERSONALITY OF MAN. 15 as man develops and becomes more a man and more an " I." My line is the humble one of suggesting. I have no theory. I have no science myself. I am not anxious to have you agree with me. I am desirous to set you thinking. To think is itself an end, and a great one. To think on high things is a noble end and a sufficient, whether or not you come to a logical, formulated conclusion. Indeed, logical, formulated, walled-in, and fin- ished conclusions on the essentials of things are sure to be false. They are only true in the count- ing and arranging and measuring of the outward relations of things. For instance, you can weigh an alleged ton of coal, and come to an unerring logical and mathe- matical conclusion that eighteen hundred pounds is not a ton, although you may have paid for a ton ! But you cannot weigh a spiritual or even an in- tellectual force, and decide how many foot-pounds of such energy were exhausted by the dealer in cheating you out of those two hundred pounds of coal ! To say what I have to say on this subject of Personality, I make my starting-point one of the 1 6 PERSONALITY OF MAN. most illogical and, to the lower intelligence (the psyche of St. Paul, the invisible part we share with our dogs and horses), the most mysterious of all the incidents in the Old Testament. It appeals entirely to the pneuma, as you will see — the spirit- ual understanding ; that which differentiates man. You cannot bring to its full understanding the psychical intelligence at all, which is nevertheless so imperative — that intelligence which the horse exercises when he goes to the watering-trough, and man exercises when he decides that one thou- sand dollars at ten percent, per annum is just as profitable, as an investment, as two thousand dollars at five percent, per annum, supposing the security be equally good. The incident is outside all that, though all that lay near it, as it always does — in this case very close. It is in the realm of the pneuma ; deals with pneu- mata, " Fs," personalities ; and is discerned only in the realm of realities — the kingdom spiritual. The incident is wholly mysterious — dark with the night and the desert silences, awful with the loneliness of the midnight stars and the empty world, burst into at the last with the red shafts of the dawn. But the mystery throws no shadow upon the PERSONALITY OF MAN I 7 central fact. Two " I's " are here, two " thou's," two persons. They are at grips with each other. Each clasps, holds, strains, questions the other. There is the sense that each has a hold upon the other. The hold may be for good or for ill. But it is a wrest- ling hold ; contains the power to question, and to lame or to bless. One of the wrestlers we know. He is just a man, and by no means a noble or a strong man. His life has been a mean, tricky life from the be- ginning. He cheats his father, old and blind ; he turns deaf ears to the cry of his starving brother for food. He has it, but refuses to share it save at the price he may wring from utmost need. And the brother is his twin brother, and he has already cheated him out of his father's blessing. The man has fled from the face of the angry brother — am I wrong in saying the righteously indignant brother? All times are alike to men, since men are found the same in all times. And to take advantage of a brother's need, to traffic in his want and hunger, to forestall the market and make one's self rich out of his misery, to play upon his simplicity and trust, even play upon his weakness and his sins, is as old as brotherhood, you see. 1 8 PERSONALITY OF MAN There is nothing of this sort in our dealings in produce exchange or coal market that was not at work in this man — the supplanter. He had bad blood in him. The law of heredity is tyrannous. He had been taught his trickery by his mother, who came by it legitimately. It is bad enough to be taught ill by one's father — to inherit evil from him. Greatly worse is it to in- herit wickedness from, or be taught wickedness by, one's mother! The serene, stately, dreamy desert prince Isaac, who walked abroad in the splendid eventides of the Orient to muse in the meadows alone, was true son of his princely father. But this wrest- ling, straining man, caught at last in his own evil nets, owed it to the bad strain from his beautiful mother's Mesopotamian kindred. Nay, Science does not teach us anything that we do not read on the pages of these old Biblia, these books which the spiritual consciousness of the ancient children of God selected, and by that consciousness canonized, and held, by whomsoever written, edited, or revised within her, as sacred and inspired upon God's nature and man's, and the ethical relations between these two. Evil fruit from evil seed always ! Wrong work- PERSONALITY OF MAN 19 ing out further wrong! Bad children from bad fathers ! The terrible persistence of the evil thing done, and the glorious blessing of the thing well done ! The awful abiding of the fact, and the fruitfulness thereof forevermore ! From the face of the brother the prescient mother sent her favorite to her own kin. ■ Some- how it always goes so. It is the ethical law. The liar goes to liars, the trickster finds himself among tricksters, the knave among knaves. One goes to his own place in this world. Shall he not go to his own place in all worlds? Even Judas has friends somewhere and finds society. He goes " to his own place." Yet even to such an one as Jacob come, in the loneliness of the night, the visions that tell him of a loftier life and a higher order. 1 Wheresoever he comes into nature and her silences the upper realm breaks on this man strangely. " Strangely," do I say? Is it not the rule? Alone on the mountain summit, alone with the stars, alone with the sea, what does the soul not utterly gone to the other side care for flocks and herds, for stocks or bonds or bank-accounts, so only he sees once that the real eternal home lies above, and one must 1 Gen. xxviii. 10-15. 20 PERSONALITY OF MAN. climb, not crawl, and the long, strange ascent must be toward the everlasting light ! So what we call " nature " — which is God's ex- pression of Himself to His child while man stays His child — calls him to worship, and in her vast aisles and naves, which we but poorly imitate in our noblest architecture, lifts him to the splendor of what lies above all summits, and the worship that chants its liturgies beyond the gold-and-pur- ple rood-screens of all earthly dawns, where he makes the snow-crags his altars. God walks the mountains. God dwells in the thick darkness. God speaks in the thunder, in the roar of the cataract, in league-long breakers thundering on the shore. One meets His foot- steps on the loneliness of the illimitable sea, comes near Him in the vast silences of desolate lands. The grand nature-liturgy of the old Hebrew books is reverent as it is true, fearless as it is spiritual. It is chanted from Moses to David, from David to the prophets. They all have caught the stately rhythm of the worship of the living God, who is present, ruling, working, revealing Himself in star and flower and little bird, in ava- lanche and ice summits, in the little rivulet singing PERSONALITY OF MAN. 2 I low through the clover, in the roar of the cataract plunging from the steep. So it came even to this man, who still remained, notwithstanding his sin, a child of Abraham, to see his vision in the desert as he fled to Padan-aram. But in the vision he saw only what he was able to see. It is thus always. The divinest vision reveals what the seer is capable of seeing. In the ladder let down from heaven, in the angels ascending and descending, he sees only what he is capable of see- ing, hears only what he is capable of hearing. The ladder, you will observe, suggests no climb- ing for him. The voice of the Lord from the summit has no call to a nobler life. That life has run on low levels thus far, and still, even from opened heaven, this man hears only of flocks and herds and increase and an earthly success. And still, even so, it was much. There was a world higher than this. There was a God who could bless, and from whom one could seek good things, and who loved to give them. He was good, at least to some men, and would give them many good things and keep old promises, for He was true and righteous — so only men served and loved Him. There were steps up to Him, and messengers to come and go. 22 PERSONALITY OF MAN There are profound lessons in that first desert vision, though I cannot dwell upon them here. One of them is that God necessarily meets men on the levels where they stand ; that to raise them He stoops — must finally stoop to Gethsemane and the cross, indeed ; and also that, with heaven opened, they have eyes to see only what they can see, and ears to hear only what they can hear. The man rises in the morning and tries to make a bargain with Him whom he has seen in the vision. It is a pledge of so much offering and so much service for so many sheep and oxen, kine and camels. It reveals the spiritual nature at its lowest. Still it is a spiritual nature, and believes in a spiritual world above sheep and oxen. And the man goes on his journey, and it fares with him according to the vicissitudes of an en- tirely earthly life. The life for twenty years thereafter was lived on exceedingly low levels. It was a war of wits between himself and his uncle Laban; and the wives he married seem to have been true daughters of their father, and thoroughly fit for the husband. One does not wonder that the elder brother, impetuous, imperious, princely, preferred the daughters of Heth, the princesses of the desert, to PERSONALITY OF MAN. 23 these scheming relatives of his, who could help the husband to cheat the father, and in their elope- ment should even rob the poor old semi-idolater of his ancestral images — fetishes, teraphim, what- ever they were — on which he thought his luck depended. It could not be that the beautiful Rachel stole them and lied about them because she put much faith in their power herself, after seeing how poorly they had served her father against the schemes of her husband. It is sad to think they must have been of silver (there was no gold in cir- culation in those days — no question of " bimetal- lism "), and that she stole them for their intrinsic value. It is not at all, you will say, an edifying story ; and certainly the family arrangements and the shrewd trickery of Padan-aram hold no example to you or me. But they hold this. Critics tell us to throw away these old Biblia because they are clearly not of God, in that they relate such doings by people asserted to be under God's special charge and benediction ; that, indeed, they are immoral in such assertion, and unfit to be supposed the revelation of a righteous God. I confess the strength of a part of the objection 24 PERSONALITY OF MAX. from the standpoint of merely literary criticism, lower or higher. Of course the Biblia — the collection of books — history, poetry (dramatic, idyllic, lyric, epic), law, ritual, folk-lore, prophesy — may be, and I, for one, frankly concede ought to be, from one side, treated simply as literature and nothing else — a collection of ancient books. Only one must not carry into them the ethics and opinions of this century, and criticize them on those grounds. That is not lit- erary criticism at all. We must understand that the literary critic must remain content with his chosen occupation. He has nothing whatever to do with the ethics, the manners, or the opinions of the book he criticizes. He deals with it simply as a piece of written matter about whose age, author- ship, and literary style alone he is concerned. I think you will concede that this is not a very lofty, though it may be a necessary and very useful, business. Take an illustration. A critic who would spend his time on minute examination of the let- ters and words of Shakespeare's dramas, and who might even finally reach the conclusion that former editors were all wrong in the arrangement of the dramas, and that " Hamlet " was written before "Timon," and that "rare Ben Jonson " redacted PERSONALITY OF MAN. 2$ " King Lear " — that, indeed, Shakespeare did not write " Lear," " Macbeth," or " The Tempest " at all, but another man of the same name did — might be a very useful man, and, in his own opinion, imagine he had done the world service ; but just as a bit of common sense and general usefulness, we would hardly call him a high critic, much less a "higher" critic than the man who taught all readers and lovers of the mass of literature we call " Shakespeare " to find subtler meanings, deeper philosophies, profounder insight into man and nature and the nature of the Lord of them both, than they had ever before seen or even suspected. It abides with me as one of the queer, topsy- turvy puzzles that crop up outside the country of the Sphinx, that the term " Higher Criticism " should have been arrogated for themselves and conceded by others to gentlemen whose business upon a body of ancient literature begins and ends with criticizing its words and letters, and deriving thence its supposed dates and origins, and who have never set themselves by one flash of intelli- gence to deal with its meaning and its purpose! And this literature, mind, the unspeakably most influential, formative, commanding, and control- ling literature known since time began ! 26 PERSONALITY OF MAN. I concede the usefulness of the alphabet critics ; but why call them "higher critics"? Thomas a Kempis was a higher critic than all of them put together! But to turn to the objection that these things are not of God because our higher sense condemns the actions related. You ask, " Is Genesis inspired?" I should an- swer you, " Yes ! Inspired ! Profoundly inspired ! Inspired as long as the world lasts!" Does anybody say " invented, forged " ? I ask, " Where is the inventor or forger so much an im- becile as to write out the story of this man Jacob — to go no further — and then to seriously dare tell us that this poor creature was ' chosen of God' ? " Suppose the story of Jacob and his father and grandfather an epic, invented by a poet, a saga- man, a scribe idealizing. Can you imagine such inventor writing out Jacob ? You have examples in all literature, from Gautama Buddh to Tenny- son's Arthur. Try Homer, try Virgil, try Milton's Satan, if you wish ; can you find any sane inventor setting out his hero in such phrase and guise as Moses (or some other man of the same name) sets out Jacob ? Can you imagine any critic, from Celsus to Vol- PERSONALITY OF MAN 2*] taire, who would propose to write you down their own lives — even their own lives most loftily ideal- ized — as a permanent book of human ethics in the way Moses, or the other man, writes the story of the man whom God says He " loved " ? When your metaphysician, your philosopher, your scientist, your poet, your autobiographist, your historian, your dramatist, from Shakespeare down, gives you a hero, do they not all tell you what they think a man, a hero, a father of hu- manity ought, in their conception, to be — not at all what he is? The only book that ever dared to write down men, heroes, demigods, beginners of races, fathers of ages, " friends of God " just as they were and as they are is the one book and the sole book of epic and drama true to God, because it is true to man — these Biblia. The life of George Washington is a myth as it is read to-day. The life of Abraham Lincoln is fast becoming a myth. No historian has dared to tell us, or ever will dare to tell us, the real story of these two lives. The life of Napoleon Bonaparte is getting itself republished, with the republication advertised in all the papers, as a new and more rational form 28 PERSONALITY OF MAN. of the Napoleonic myth, which it is proposed to impose on civilized consciousness in lieu of the " Sunday-school teacher and member of the Young Men's Christian Association " myth which Dr. Ab- bott wrote out, when I was younger, in Harper's Magazine, to the fatal misleading of the mind of one generation in the United States. I mean to say no writer of the life of Washing- ton, Lincoln, Grant, Jefferson, Bonaparte, or Wel- lington would dare to write the true life of any one of them, as this Biblia writes out the life of Abra- ham, Jacob, Moses, or David. Therefore they are human, and therefore false. They are not inspired. An inspired story is the only true story ever written, or ever capable of being written, because written from the overworld oifact — just plain, bald, shameless, sometimes hor- rible fact. Every mere z/^-inspired writer, infidel or believer, pagan or Christian, feels it bounden on him to deny or pass over facts. There is no man who would dare to put in print the life of any man, or his own life, as this most inexorable writer writes down the life of Jacob and other people, under the cold mercilessness of fact, which is just revelation — fact, the thing that is, re- lieved from your poor beclouded conceptions of PERSONALITY OF A/AM. 29 what you think the fact ought to be, or even now might be, if eternal God would only take your advice ! Secular history is a collection of myths. We can see that in our own experience. There is not a man who has passed from our land during even the last half- century whose real life exists in any history. As soon as even a small member of our Con- gress is dead, his fellow-members hold a session over him, and a half-dozen gentlemen elocutionize about him and formulate a mythus officialis! Of course, being a small person, the myth-faith ex- tends only, as a rule, to his wife and children; and they, in spite of their own knowledge that he was small — very small indeed — accept and are de- lighted with the myth, and make it a part of their household worship. That is the way myths are made. In fact, as far as my personal experience and knowledge go, I should say that, by account of writers and biog- raphers, gentlemen whom I have known — and some of them intimately — have never existed on this earth at all ; and that those I thought I knew best were shadowy ghosts waving white arms on misty mountain summits in some far land to which 30 PERSONALITY OF MAN no man has ever gone, and from which (it might be inferred) no man has ever come. The only hard, practical, unmythical history or biography in all literature is contained in these old Biblia the church holds "inspired." So the hero Jacob has all his life told out no concealment, no reticence, no invented or stolen pretty story like that about George Washington and his hatchet ; no glossing over of his sins or his family's sins. At this time he is on his way returning to his own land under what he chooses to consider the commandment of God. It is not in his day only that men think their own desires, or what looks like their own profit, is the commandment of God ! Numbers of us, and, curiously, the more pious of us, always are apt to hold our own decisions for the commandment of God. Especially when we have prayed over the matter, and asked for light, we are very sure we have that commandment ! I was once consulted by a gentleman who was greatly troubled in his mind, almost to the brink of black doubt, because in a change he meant to make in his business he had made the subject a matter, as he told me, of earnest prayer, and he PERSONALITY OF MAN 31 was clear, after that, that it was God's will that he make the change, and behold, the change had resulted in the loss of half his fortune ! He was very much annoyed about it — even somewhat indignant with God about it! I suggested that the Lord had left him, in all that kind of action, to decide for himself, having given him presumable sense, and allowed him a tolerable education and some experience in his special business ; and that if I were in his place I would not be angry with the Almighty because He declined to go into the wholesale grocery business with me for money in another part of the country. I have no doubt of this man Jacob's sincerity. That is all the record vouches for. He believed he was commanded, and therefore, as far as he was concerned, having a conscience illuminated up to its capacities, he was commanded to return to his kindred and his father's house. But he has some lessons to learn, which will split that very poor conscience wider open before he is much older. Esau, the wronged brother, has to be met and settled with somehow. Every wrong done has to be settled at the last ! So, as he approaches the border of the land to- 32 PERSONALITY OF MAN. ward which he travels, he sends messengers to the brother. The brother has prospered, in his way, too. Those outside " the covenant" prosper, as this world goes, observe, as well as those inside. The elder brother has taken his own line, and he is what we would call now a Bedouin chief and a man of considerable consequence. He can march at the head of four hundred armed men ! A very important brother if one have played the knave with him! He had chosen his course also ; the man of the fields, the desert, and the mountains; the hunter, the warrior, the desert prince — driven from home by the mother who could not understand and never loved her strong, rude, but tender elder son, with the old fiery Abrahamic blood in him — he too had prospered, and he was coming to meet the brother who had cheated him and mocked his father's blindness and age. Angry ? I should think so ! The desert prince comes to meet the fawning, intriguing, smooth- tongued brother who had chosen flocks and herds instead of honor and manliness, and had cheated him out of his highest, if only his ideal, pos- session. So Jacob prays again ; thanks God for his sue- PERSONALITY OF MAN 33 cess : " With my staff I passed over this Jordan ; and now I am become two bands" — makes God, that is, the partner in all his knavery with Laban, and thanks Him that He has helped his trickery to a great fortune ! Is it all passed away ? I think I have heard gentlemen thanking God for the success already attained, and praying for further success — pious gentlemen, who paid tithes even — and who hon- estly believed that they and their knavish ways were under direct protection and direction of Almighty God because they decorously attended church and paid their pew-rents. The Old Testament is still a part of the reve- lation — an essential part. We cannot dispense with it, even if Moses did not write this particu- lar book, nor Isaiah that special chapter. It is such a particularly close, practical, revealing book ! Such a true-to-man book, and therefore such a true-to-God book! The character of the younger son of Isaac re- mains such a genuine character, for four thousand years, of religious people, and of prosperous men " chosen of God," that, having been true for so many centuries, and nobody disputing the fact that it is true now, I am, as it were, obliged to be- 34 PERSONALITY OF MAN. lieve that no popular novel-writer in an illustrated magazine of ancient Syria could have invented it! There is no human experience that makes such zvriters possible. All human experience makes the character possible, permanent, familiar, and all alive with us now. The man's arrangements to meet his wronged and outraged brother are entirely natural from his character. He sends " presents " before him. The desert free-lances are always hungry. They have been hungry for four thousand years ! The sheep and cattle will appease him. Three cattle-droves with herdsmen, all to repeat the same abject lie, " A present for my lord Esau, from his servant Jacob," are to meet the chief and his hungry horde. The capitalist Jacob offers that kind of blackmail which capital, in its supreme need, will always abjectly pay to dinnerless force. The world is a very young world after all — in its babyhood, I think. We have scarce advanced in very vital things for forty centuries. The capitalist was a coward — we say still that " capital is timid." The capitalist himself is timid, fearful, cowardly. Several of them have volun- tarily exiled themselves in these last years from iiur own peaceful, happy, and prosperous land. PERSONALITY OF MAN 35 When blackmail must be paid it is a very shak- ing time for the capitalist, and this man of ours is scared. He is worse — he is an abject coward. He sends his presents before him, then his cattle and servants, then his wives and children. The story is a very pitiful one. The whole conduct of the man is unmanly, fawning, mean, and lying — the only kind of bearing which wealth in the last battle can oppose to force. It is all very low. When all had passed over the ford of the brook Jabbok, this man remained alone, far from the danger before him. The night was one of fear and trembling. "Jacob was left alone." His cowardice com- pelled him to be alone. Once again in the si- lences, once more under the watching stars! The old memories come back to him : the tent of his father; the sports of his boyhood, the face of the brother he had loved and with whom he had shared them; his beautiful mother's eyes upon them both ; his stately father's presence, serene always, and always princely, whom now, tottering under his century of wintry years, he is soon to meet. He and the brother he had wronged alone left to close the eyes of the blind chieftain of their 36 PERSONALITY OB MAN. race, and they, wronger and wronged ! They two alone in all the world of the legitimate seed of the great prince and sage — " the friend of God." It was an hour of heart-searching for this man. Flocks, herds, servants, family — all his wealth might have already vanished before the wild chil- dren of the waste and their fierce lord, for aught he knew, and he left, as when he fled a score of years before. Conscience comes to close quarters with a man at such a time. Jacob's conscience, you may be sure, was busy with him. In the few strong strokes which paint the scene this lies outlined. The worth of his life, its hard, uncompromising reality, comes to him. He takes stock of himself. It is in such supreme moments that a man is compelled to weigh his own worth and the worth of his life. In the dark of the world he sees, in the silence of the loneliness he hears. But a man, in the hour that shakes his soul to its center, has not alone his own conscience to deal with. " God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things." Settle with myself as I may, how shall I settle with another? There is immanent in conscience another Man, a strange Man, not myself, not any other man I ever knew ; PERSONALITY OF MAN 37 awful, singular, lonely, and yet persistently near. I must also settle with Him! " What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?" cried Pilate, in mortal terror, ages after this. " What shall I do with this strange Man, who comes and goes about me and about my fathers, who is the eternal measure and rule of righteousness? How stand I with Him, and what shall I say to Him? " It is the mystic question heard on all the winds of Palestina, heard in all the solemn silences of time. This Man, immanent, present at any hour, shadowy in dreams, plain at Abraham's tent-door, forever ready to judge, forever ready to help! The eternal presence of this Man walks the hills of the world in these old Biblia! And He is here on Peniel. " There wrestles a Man with him until the breaking of the day." It is grim and awful to come to grips with this Man. But the lonely man is going to have it out once for all. The hour is a supreme hour. Here and henceforth it must be blessing or cursing. " Let Me go, for the day breaketh," cries the Wrestler. Already the lances of the sun flash red upon the hills. The night-fears, and the wrestle of lonely self-examination, and the bitterness of si- 38 PERSONALITY OF MAN lence with one's own soul will fade into the cares and fears of the breaking day. " Let Me go." The man must have grown wonderfully. He is changing fast. Already he is lame. The strange midnight Antagonist has touched him. He is branded, and shall stay branded all his life. Yet, " I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me!" "What is thy name?" Mark the question. A name describes. In old days they were always given to describe, to reveal character, to tell what the man, the animal, or the thing is in its utmost purpose and meaning. This man's name did re- veal. His name rang true. " He said, Jacob" — supplanter, knave, defrauder, cheat! And then clangs out to the rising dawn and the crimson spears of the hosts of the morning the blessing : " Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel " — prince of God ! Let the new day hear the new name. " The night is far spent, the day is at hand." All the long night of the ages man has wrestled with the awful, eternal, omnipotent Man — wrestled undismayed, with straining limbs and palpitating muscles and throbbing heart, all the night of doubt and fear, of pain of memory and stings of con- science. PERSONALITY OF MAN. 39 Lamed by the mighty touch, branded forever by the finger of the awful Wrestler they have dared to grasp; yet because He is a Man they have wrestled on, and behold, the cry tingles to the fleeing starlight of time, and peals in the vast halls of the abiding morning, " Thy name is prince of God"! I am not going to attack, sneer at, or despise my own day. It is good enough for me and you — perhaps better than we deserve. But I should sneer at it and belittle it, and tell it to go about its wretched business and betake itself to the limbo of all things forgotten in any sane universe, if I believed it for one moment to be only what its current talk and writing makes it. Man must have his Mahanaims, where the angels of God meet him. He must have his Peniels, where he meets God face to face and lives. He must have his nights of wrestling, and bear the brand of the awful touch burned into him body and soul, or he has not reached man's sta- tion in this world — the place God has prepared for him. And mark : to get that — there is no vagueness about it — he must tell his name. The small per- sonality, the finite individuality, has its own abid- 40 PERSONALITY OF MAN ing permanence, and must stand by itself, endure toil, weep and rejoice by itself. The secret of the burden and sorrow of our years is that we must say "1." No wonder the poor Buddhist prays for Nirvana — just to drop into the infinite ocean and be lost, and leave all oughts and responsibilities behind one forevermore! But this terrible religion of the Old Testament and the New keeps on, as it has kept on for all these awful centuries of human story, insisting on the "I." "What is thy name?" What is thy meaning? What is thy character? What art thou doing? Naming men, individualizing men out of all combinations and associations, insisting on the individual, and demanding that the individ- ual shall answer for himself. I do not know in what personality consists. I am aware that many philosophers think they do know and could make their knowledge clear to me were it not for my own stupidity. I regret that stupidity profoundly. But it is not so great as to conceal from me this : that personality is the most wonderful and awful thing in this whole universe, as far as I can see ; and that while I know as little about its essence as I do about the essence of any- PERSONALITY OF MAN. 41 thing else, the personality, the I-ism, of the beggar is a loftier thing than Chimborazo, and a more beautiful and terrible thing than Niagara with all its thunder and its foam. I know, too, that it is in the eclipse, in the hour of destiny and the dark, that the personality stands most sharply cut in white or black, and that the terrible " I " paints itself upon the heavens in glory or in shame. For the world is an awful world after all. No man would ever have been fool enough to live in it, I think, if he had been given the choice. It is a dreadful, just, far-searching, and testing world, where no tares will, under any supposition, produce wheat, and no thistles bear grapes. And this, not because it is itself unchangeable — for it spins like a top through measureless space — but because there are " I's " upon it which are not of it, which amid its changes are changeless, amid its passings permanent, and amid its deaths immortal ; and who, amid its harvests of a summer, sow and reap the sheaves of eternity ! And rising from all its voices, of the night or the busy day, of the moaning tides or the sough- ing forests, of the wind in the long prairie-grass or the roar of burning pine-woods, in the cry of 42 PERSONALITY OF MAN the panther watching on the bending bough or the song of the thrush in the thicket — from all voices of star and sea and woodland comes the question to this strange wayfarer whom none know, "What is thy name?" Nature presses him with his personality ; torments him with it ; allows him not for one moment to forget it while he wakes; profanes his very rest in sleep, and whispers or thunders in his dreams to scare : " Yes, thou art an 'I.' What is thy name?" Well, we might even endure what we call na- ture ! But there is no end. We ourselves cry to ourselves, "What is thy name?" And we are dimly conscious that there is somewhere and some- how a Power behind all powers, out of space, out of time, but immanent and abiding near by our side, who, at any hour of day or night, in blessing or in life-and-death wrestle, may demand, " What is thy name ? " The consciousness of their rela- tionship to the Powers unseen, gross as it may be among some, crude as it is among all, is a fact universal among all who say " I." But that this Power is a Person, and this rela- tionship so close that it takes the form of clasping hands and straining arms and laboring muscles in the wrestle for life and lifting, for princedom and PERSONALITY OF MAN 43 for crowning, which can come only in the dawn- ing of a new day — this is the conviction which scorches the human wrestler with its touch of fire, brands him with the brand of the infinite and eter- nal Personality which declares him His own; in the doctrine of Divine Evolution, a prince and son of God! LECTURE II. PERSONALITY OF GOD. 45 Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My name ? Gen. xxxii. 29. 46 LECTURE II. PERSONALITY OF GOD. / T A HE prayer was natural. Jacob had given his -*- own name. Why should he not know, also, the name of this strange Antagonist? That He was from beyond the world was clear. Some Power, some Existence from outside the common experience and life of men had been wrestling with him, had branded him, lamed him, at last blessed him, and made him a prince of God. That the Man was no man of his measure Jacob was sure without an answer. For he calls the name of the place Peniel — " the face of God," the face of one of the Elohim he had looked upon and yet lived. But what was His name? The inmost charac- ter, nature, and personality — what was that ? That He was a Person there was no question. Jacob was sure of that. And he got no answer. Virtu- ally it is, "How does My name concern thee? Why askest thou after My name? " 47 48 PERSONALITY OF GOD. And this night's question has been the question of humanity always. Jacob spoke for all men and all times. For in the night of the years, on the lonely plains of time, some Power, strange and awful, some gigantic Force with suggested human or celestial semblance, has been wrestling for good or ill with men. In the long years of bitter struggle in which men have been straining toward the dawn, some Power beyond their own, beyond anything from the earth, has grasped them, dragged them, gripped them, to lame or to bless ; and in the agony of the wrestle the passionate cry has tingled to the darkened skies, " Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name." Who is it that governs the earth and men, and conducts the processes of the years? For our strength avails not, nor our riches, nor our wisdom. Still the world is an awful place and our life has awful possibilities. Ruin waits upon the march of men, and ruin, many times, from the hands of brothers. Plan as we will, our plans go to wreck by the stroke of a Hand out of the darkness. Build as we will, and our towers and palaces are shivered by a blow from a Hand unseen. The mightiest growths of time in institutions, in laws, in constitu- PERSONALITY OF GOD. 49 tions and social order, watched, guarded, buttressed by all care, crumble under a touch we know not whence — the touch of a Hand out of the thick darkness. The sense of the mystery that inwraps the uni- verse ; of the ever-present mystery that clothes and masters human life; of the ever-brooding Power that dwells in the dark around us, closing us into our small span — small, though it be a span of cen- turies — the universal sense and conviction, which may verify itself by all experience till the instinct is confirmed by the calmness of a rational judg- ment, makes atheism impossible. It is no longer a question of a Power that rules, do what we will, do what all men will. Outside there in the dark lies Power. Power that whirls the generations onward as the cataract whirls the brown leaves in the rushing November spate — that all men, savage, civilized, ignorant or wise, feel to the marrow of their bones. You may gather in one congress the statesman- like wisdom and controlling guidance of the earth, and the wisest-laid plan formulated and decided upon, every man present knows, and every thought- ful man besides knows, may be blown like a thistle- down upon the wind that rises and rushes onward 50 PERSONALITY OF GOD. from the awful hills where the unseen Powers drive their chariots of the dark or the dawn. " The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." " He taketh the wise in their own crafti- ness." He charges the loftiest imaginable intelli- gence with folly. The old Hebrew speech carries the conviction of the ages. No, it is not a question of a Power straining and wrestling with human nature from the beginning, and branding or blessing it. There has not been a race of men discovered yet that has made any question of such a Power. And we may be sure that the higher the race climbs, the farther its out- look over the loneliness, the more it will confess the insistence and persistence of this Power. It is only in the effervescence of early youth, conceited with its discoveries and its rapid gains, that men have for one half-intoxicated hour dreamed that they could rule alone and gain the daybreak without the wrestle ! Such a wild hour came, and naturally very early — before the Flood — when there were giants upon the earth, and a whole new world lay open for the conquest of the race in its prime. God had turned them loose to conquer ; and they conquered — those demigods of the elder day — in a way of whose PERSONALITY OF GOD. 51 magnificence we can scarcely dream, I think, while we find the mighty ruins of their glory un- derlying our oldest civilizations. But the Power they had forgotten, in the long reaches of human life and human triumph, lay yet behind, and the unseen Forces burst upon the earth in its pro- foundest security, and "swept them all away." The story of the Flood has deeper meanings in it, I think, than any likely to emerge in the mere physical discussions about it — meanings which will yet flash, I doubt not, into light and leading, as truths abiding forever in an ethical world. No, the question is not about the existence of the Power. It is about its nature and its mean- ing. "Tell me Thy name." It is a present, living cry to-day in every living land of living men. It lies at the base of all questions, and is the first demand of all thinking. All philosophies, all religions, all governments and social life, all laws, all business among men, have their rise out of this demand — as old as man, as abiding as time, perhaps as eternal as eternity. For it means, "Tell me the world's meaning; tell me mine own. Tell me life's purpose, and death's. Tell me what time is, and eternity; what 52 PERSONALITY OF GOD. right is, and wrong; what truth is, and lies. Tell me what heaven is, and hell!" For to know the Master of the universe, the Power that lies behind all power and that builds and destroys as it will, is to tell man all things, that he may give names like the Son of God. It is no cry of curiosity only. It comes less from the intellect than from the heart. God pity the man who has only seen in it a question of philosophy for his study and his metaphysics! That men do so treat it is one of the most pitiable things I know in the story of human intelligence. It never has gotten an answer, put as a curious question, and it never will. " By searching canst thou find out God?" — by search of intellect, the same curious search that finds out the nature and gives the name to a beetle! I say it is humanity's cry. But not out of its brain, not from its study. It is a cry, a passionate prayer, to the dark and the dawn, to the night on which the blood-red banners of the unknown day are even now advancing, from the knees, from the lamed and worn wrestler in the midnight mystery, half- dream, half- waking, of time — a pitiful cry and a prayer: "Tell me Thy name." Art Thou good? Art Thou evil? Art Thou PERSONALITY OF GOD. 53 neither? Art Thou good to-day, evil to-morrow? Blessest Thou by night, cursest Thou by day ? From the trampled battle-plain, where the dy- ing moan and the dead look with blind eyes to a dumb heaven — " Tell me Thy name." From a city wrecked by fire, and gutters reeking with blood — " Tell me Thy name." From cities rich and fair, where stately homes mock the splendors and the ease of the barbaric kings of old ; where also the starving mother holds to her dying heart for warmth the freezing child, that shall be found dead there in the morning — " Tell me Thy name. " From Christian cities where fifty thousand dollars a year is counted respecta- ble poverty, and where men and women starve in hovels notwithstanding, and children grow up half human in noisome filth and hopeless misery, not man only, but the overlooking angels, with angelic tears, cry, " Tell me Thy name." When the land waves yellow with its bending harvests, and the summer light sleeps golden in the orchards and the woodlands ; when the happy homes of men stand thick over all the happy land, one answers the cry. It is a lovely world ; the birds sing in the branches, the bees hum in the flowers, the white sails glimmer from light to dark 54 PERSONALITY OF GOD. along the brimming river, the harvestman sings as he gathers in, the sun sinks from a happy day, the yellow moon throws up her golden shield upon the breast of a happy night — "Tell me Thy name." The answer seems easy : " Thy name is good- ness." But look again. The floods are out! The har- vests are whirled away ! Down the flood rush the results of the summer's toil in mingled ruin of homes and barns and stacks, of beasts and cattle ; and the valley is a desolation. There is something still to come. The bodies of men and women and little children swirl down in the whirling flood. " Tell me Thy name now." Oh, so many homes of men ! So many happy homes of happy men! The shouts of children in the streets! The rose-grown cottage door! The stately mansion amid its gardens and its greenery ! The cry of sailors in the ships! The clank of hammers and the hum of wheels! The cheerful faces in the sunny streets! The friendly words from lips of friends ! The lighted windows in the gloaming! The music through the open doors! The happy moon and stars looking down on all! "Tell me Thy name." Behold, the bells toll, the death-cart rumbles PERSONALITY OF GOD. 55 through the silent streets, the diggers dig hasty graves ! The cottage door, the palace door, wear crape. Under the brazen sunlight, under the piti- less moonlight, the pestilence is abroad, and Death reaps his awful harvest. " Tell me Thy name." It is, I have said, an awful world, and a terrible life, take it at its best. A few days of shine, many days of gray clouds and rain. A little fairness of balmy mornings, many storms of lashing sleet and freezing hail. Out of the dark, into the dark again, and our poor little story is told, and the world of living men knows our names no more. There is a possibility of what is called " opti- mism." That the possibility of the blackest " pes- simism " lives beside it has overwhelming and shocking evidence in the self-destroyers, who seek by their own hands to escape the hell of this pres- ent life, at the risk of the hell of any other. The years grow more serious as they go on. A boy dances along the road one morning gaily enough. How sweet a thing just to be alive! A man sits by a desolate hearth one night, and the eyes of the boy, his first-born and his pride, are closed forever on this earth in the room beyond. The leaping feet lie pale and still and ice-cold side by side. He has tried all human skill. He 56 PERSONALITY OF GOD. has used all resources of knowledge and wealth. He is a man who believes in God, too, and he has prayed for the life that has gone. He has wrestled with God for it. You tell him he must submit. Of course he must! His pastor comes and tells him he otigJit to submit. Ah, that is quite another matter ! He is down among the grim things of life's utter loneliness — the old gaunt, gray, ancient questions which man has found ever new since his first child lay dead. Conventionalities count for little. Do you wonder he cries out in the night the old cry of humanity? The beggar's boy is living; the little barefoot gutter-snipe runs by his door. The ragged little wretches will throng to see the show when his son is carried out to-morrow. He is a reticent American — one of the race that " always grimly accepts the inevitable." His eyes are dry. He will sustain calmly to-morrow the drooping figure of his boy's mother in decorous fashion, as becomes him. He will return the day after to his office, and seat himself as usual at his business, and give no sign. But to-night and to-morrow night and many a lonely night thereafter the cry rings all the more terribly out of the dark of his silent and lonely wrestle, " Tell me Thy name." " What kind PERSONALITY OF GOD. 57 of Power is it — good or bad, divine or diabolic — that has gotten me and my life in its pitiless grasp ? " But it is not merely loss of one's dearest, the sore pain and bitterness of life which comes from outside a man, even from his nearest. The awful endowment of personality needs not for its profoundest, grimmest wrestling-pain any stroke from without. A man sits alone with himself. He needs no coffined form of dearest child or tenderest wife or heart's close brother across the threshold. He is sufficient to himself when he enters the awful chambers of darkness, where his own past, his own present, his very self sit down beside him and question him. God help the poor, starved, cowardly, aborted " I " who has not gone off alone, with the coffined dead of his own murdered resolutions, the living ghosts of his own sins and failures, and has not dared to look the ghastly dead and the ghastly living squarely in the face! Where the " I " is strongest, where the " name " is answered to the call and question most emphat- ically, there only is the darkness darkest, and the awfulness most awful, in the wrestle that breaks the bones and blasts the sinews. 58 PERSONALITY OF GOD. There have been men who have made repen- tances not to be repented of ; men who have had opened to them in the lonely dark the lurid fires of God's and nature's and our own poor world's ever- lasting wrath against the base, the foul, the false ! Yes, there have been true repentances, true wrestlings with conscience and the eternal verities, " when the wickedness of a man's heels have com- passed him about;" when not man's judgment, but eternal God's has blasted him ; when he has cried in agony to the awful Power that gripped the heart of him, "Tell me Thy name." Man's judgment, man's law, man's convention- alities, man's praise or blame — what are these with the Power that has strode out of the ever- lasting shadow where the realities hide, straining me in His terrible hands! My poor conceits, my wretched speculations about religion, my senti- mental woes, and my childish whinings because God has not explained to my babyishness the mysteries of His universe — where are these, and what, when the smoky darkness of the awful night is lit only by lurid faces that grotesquely mock my own, and while the overshadowing Power holds me, accuses me of all I have been and all I am, and my own conscience records the accusation, PERSONALITY OF GOD, 59 and the awful whisper moans out of the night, 'a^apn^a 'aicoviov. Possible? Yes, possible — "eternal sin." To the soul who has gone through such wrestle, what wretched babble must much of our religious literature, and our preachings and supposed de- fenses of the faith, be ! Let us be thankful if we ourselves have not wrestled on the brink of eternal hells and looked into the rolling waves of eternal sorrow. But men have so wrestled, men are so wrestling now ; and there is an awful grotesqueness in hearing your lily- handed, dilettante preacher gesticulate and elocu- tionize his charming platitudes melodiously — a boy, perhaps, who has never known a sorrow or a repentance — for the edification of men who have wrestled with the eternal Powers on the brink of the eternal fires, for life, for help, at cost of branded, limping body and limping soul, that they may escape 1 'ajiapryjjia 'aiamov. The answer to the cry in Jacob's case was, " Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My name?" No reply came, no explanation. Has any man, to his intensest prayer, ever yet received an answer? 1 Mark iii. 29. 6o PERSONALITY OF GOD. Our library shelves are filled with a mass of so-called Natural Theology grown utterly mean- ingless. The men who wrote on Natural Religion, and made Christianity a supplement or an extension, had clearly never wrestled. They were dealing with questions of the intel- lect alone. There is, indeed, a Natural Theology in revelation. " The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork." But the heavens declare and the firmament shows only to him who already believes in God, and that He has a glory and has a handiwork. By no possible examination, by no closest study of what we call " nature " can the human intellect answer the prayer, "Tell me Thy name." Is " the Power behind phenomena" a name? All men have acknowledged a Power behind phe- nomena. But is that Power's name Terror or Joy ? Is it Wrath or Pity? Is it conscious of itself or not? Is it merely electricity? Has it any moral quality whatever? Has it a Personal Name? And if our speculations on the phenomena of nature give us no answer, shall it profit us to turn to the metaphysicians — the human spiders who spin out of themselves those vast webs of words, PERSONALITY OF GOD. 6 1 the words themselves used in arbitrary senses, which tangle up the intellect in a confusion like madness, each filmy thread promising to lead the searcher out of the tangle into light, while he creeps round and round an endless labyrinth of artificial phrase ? The " ego " and the " non-ego," the " absolute " and the " related," the " unknow- able " and the " conditioned " ! Through what a maze have men groped since the vortices of Descartes even to our day, finding only words ! And what have they reached? The know- ledge or the name of the Powers that wrestle with humanity ? Is He one or many ? Has He an in- dependent existence at all? Is He conscious of Himself, if He be a self, or does He make Himself conscious only in His creation? Can we know Him, or does He even know Himself, except in us? The wild insanity which makes men think the finite can define the Infinite, that the human in- tellect which does not understand what itself is can construct and define the Eternal, creeps even into theology that claims to be revealed, and puts down its shallow conclusions as eternal verities. Take our First Article of the Thirty-nine. It undertakes to define God philosophically in poor 62 PERSONALITY OF GOD. babbling speech; to give us the definition of His character and nature — reverently done, of course, by reverent Christian men ; and yet see where it lands us : " He is without body, parts, or passions." That is merely, you see, the definition of what men think God ought to be, what they have de- cided He must be out of their own thinking. Go on ! Take the Second Article, wherein God tells for Himself some little about Himself. This Be- ing, " without body, parts, or passions," has a Son, " very God, of one substance with the Father," who has a body, even a human body, with all its passions, hunger, thirst, weakness, and who suffers " the passion " of death by crucifixion. That is God's account about Himself. For unless He tell us His name we cannot find it. And from the first, as here with the wrestling Jacob, to know or hear His name we must get down and ask Hun; ask Him praying, "Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name." We here are all agreed as to one name of this midnight Wrestler. We recognize Him across forty centuries by that name, and yet, strangely enough, it is a name no man has ever uttered, and of which no man knows the syllables. There are, in various places of Old Testament PERSONALITY OF GOD. 63 story, accounts of the appearance upon the scene, and always to deal with men, of a Man who speaks, acts as a man, and at the last by a sudden revela- tion and conviction (as was long after the case at Emmaus, when the two disciples recognized Him and He vanished out of their sight) is known to be God. He is so recognized by Israel : " I have seen God face to face." This Man appeared to Abraham as " he sat in his tent door in the heat of the day." Abraham talks with Him. He and two with Him eat with Abraham ; and they walk forth together and talk of the awful woe that waits over the cities on the plain below, and Abraham pleads with Him, and calls Him by a name. Long after He appears to Moses in the flaming acacia- bush in the desert, and Moses asks His name. The name is a strange one — " I Am." Again, Moses begs to see the face of Him who gave the law in the mount. God covers him with His hand in a cleft of the rock. He sees Him only as His glory passes by ; " for there shall no man see My face, and live." And yet afterward, by the walls of beleaguered Jericho, Joshua sees a Man standing " with His sword drawn in His hand." And Joshua goes to Him. " Art Thou for us, or for our adversaries ? " " Nay," is the answer ; " but as 64 PERSONALITY OF GOD. Captain of the host of the Lord am I now come. . . . Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy " — just the warning to Moses before. This Man, appearing, disappearing, speaking, warning, revealing, delivering, judging, is always recognized at last, worshiped, and called upon by a name. No man can tell you the name. But wherever you find the word LORD in capital letters in our English version, that name stands in the Hebrew. I say no man knows its sound. The Hebrew never uttered it. When he came to it he read another word, Adonai, which we translate " Lord." The other is the "incommunicable name" — the name especially peculiar and appropriate to the awful God. " No man hath seen God at any time ; the only begotten Son, . . . He hath declared Him." " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." " All things were made by Him." The mystic, unutterable four Hebrew consonants, whose vowels are lost, which no man has ever spoken, spake the name of the Man who talked with Abra- ham, wrestled with Jacob, gave the law through Moses, drew His sword by the walls of Jericho. Mark now — for that is the point of the argument PERSONALITY OF GOD. 65 — He is a Person. He has a name. It seems the main point of the teaching, the purpose of all those Old Testament revelations, was to make men under- stand that God is a Person. There shall be no abstraction set before them to worship under vague sign and symbol ; no Being or mere expression of power or of justice, much less of wrath and fury. There shall be a definite conception of the Power invisible, as One, and as a Man, whatever else He is, with a drawing toward men, and a possible, even loving, communion with men. He shall appear as a Man, and give His messages as a Man, and walk in the garden in the cool of the day ; and yet the trailing glory of His departure shall proclaim the Bearer of the unknown name " of the mystic letters four." Yet in the religion thus illuminated, taught, and impressed there shall be no similitude. I dare to say it is unexplainable by any thinkable law of development. Why did not the children carve an image of the Man their fathers believed to be God, and set it up as a memorial ? In the places of His appearing it is the rude stone-heap, the cairn or cromlech, or the anointed pillar which marks the memorial. But " make no similitude ; take heed to yourselves " — " no likeness of anything in 66 PERSONALITY OF GOD. heaven, or in earth, or in the water under the earth." The Greek did it, and made his deities persons, but finite persons, with more power of hand and brain, but shameless of all passion and crime. The Egyptian believed in divine personality, and taught it in monstrous forms. The Hindu did the same, and in forms more monstrous and more bestial tried to realize the personality of the Powers spiritual. One moves through these Egyptian, Assyrian, Hindu personalities divine as through a nightmare dream of hideous faces and bestial conceptions, in a madhouse universe. The vague phantasms of the brain, Ormuzd or Ahriman ; the formless, shapeless, shadowy Brahm of Eastern pantheism orWestern dream ; the Power that is no Power with any sense but what it finds in its own creatures — even these cloud-vanishing phantasms are a relief from the dog- headed, cat- headed, elephant-headed deities in which the na- ture-worshiper sought to express the personality of the invisible Powers. Whence got the Hebrew Scriptures that bald and bold realism which personifies God as a Man, and yet never mistakes Him for a mere man ? which gives Him human arms and hands and eyes and PERSONALITY OF GOD. 6j heart, a house, a throne, a footstool, a crown and a scepter, a sword and a bow, and yet sternly for- bids any likeness, any image, any imagined re- semblance ? They go farther. They give the awful Power unseen every intellectual and moral trait possessed by man. He is loving, He is angry ; He is wrath- ful, He is pitiful ; He swears, and stands by His oath ; He repents, and changes His decree ; He is utterly human, only without sin. There is no more intense, individualized, clear-cut personality in all history or drama than this God of the Old Testament, with the incommunicable name. The utmost stretch of human genius in the crea- tion of character has never yet approached the vivid individuality and personality of this Person, marked in those old books by the name forever hidden in the " mystic letters four." 1 There is a wonderful thing extant for some years now, born in Germany — in whose theologi- cal schools Christ and His gospel are still on trial, as if Pilate's court were a perpetually sitting tribu- nal — and imported free from tariff or duty into England and America, called by somebody — for what reason I know not — u the Higher Criticism." 1 nj.T 68 PERSONALITY OF GOD. One might ask, If this be higher criticism, what is lower criticism, and what the very lowest at last? Well, it is all pure guesswork, let me say at once, and in its most characteristic development may be understood from a learned book published in this country, called "The Shakespeare Cipher," by a very able man ; and also by a new and better " Shakespeare Cipher," published by a learned doctor of medicine, to show that the whole mass of poetry we call Shakespeare's was written by Francis Bacon to abuse Queen Elizabeth, and send her down branded to all time, because she refused to acknowledge him, Francis Bacon, as her son by a secret marriage with his father when she was only the princess, the " Lady Elizabeth " ! In these two cases the Shakespearian critics know the language in which the book was written. It is their mother-tongue. It was written three cen- turies ago. In the other case there is not a man living who could pronounce a speech in Hebrew so as to be understood by Isaiah or Daniel (sup- posing there ever was an Isaiah or a Daniel ! ). It is a sad thing to be idle, especially in a land where there are only books, pipes, and beer, and where a paternal government presides over a man's PERSONALITY OF GOD. 69 birth, education, religion, occupation, marriage, sickness, death, and finally his tombstone. Turn him loose with the conception that all things — government, social order, politics, science, and the rest — are settled, untouchable even — in- deed everything taken out of the arena of in- telligent discussion except Christ and the Bible — and he must necessarily turn critic, and, if he has little to do, " higher critic." The point I am desirous to emphasize is that this criticism, in the necessitudes of its conclusions, requires us to believe that a great many of the ideas, influences, and practices in the Old Testa- ment came from Egypt, Chaldea, and Persia. Of that, happily, you and I are just as able to judge as any critic; for it is not a thing of Hebrew- consonants or masoretic vowels or accents, but of history and common sense. Did the Hebrews, upon their return from cap- tivity, reedit or rewrite and reorder their sacred books under the influence of the Persian dualism? And do you so account for the final bitterness against all images, and the intensity of the mono- theism thenceforward? Well, I think you and I are quite competent to examine that, if we do not understand a word of 70 PERSONALITY OF GOD. Hebrew. Ormuzd and Ahriman, the gods of eternal light and eternal dark, eternal good and eternal evil, are no more persons than the cloud that floats across the sky. They have not a single quality of personality. They are prin- ciples, whatever you may mean by that; names to express what the old Aryans believed they saw in life, time, the world, in the present and in the past ; principles contending with each other, each now victor and now vanquished ; but being Aryans, " children of light," having still retained enough of the old divine tradition to hold that men were on God's side and right's side and truth's side, and that the right would be master in the end, they stood by Ormuzd and exhorted men to do the same, and called their land Iran, " the land of light," and the Tartar world, the devil- serving world opposed to them, Turan, " the land of darkness." They were our ancient cousins, and they be- lieved in light, and taught their children to ride boldly, shoot straight, and tell the truth; and so let us honor their memory ! But from no notion of their vague principle Ormuzd can you derive the clear-cut, realistic Personality, the Man whose name is so awful that PERSONALITY OF GOD. ]i you may say God (El), or gods (Elohim), but you must not utter His, for one syllable of it spoken out would rend the heavens! Are we afraid of anthropomorphism? It is a long word, and long words ought to scare un- learned people. You will find the word a terrible one, and a sect-brand and heresy name in church story. But I want you to notice that neither Old Testament nor New is in the least degree dis- turbed by what the word means. It is, after all, only a Greek compound ; and our new dictionary- makers are putting such — thousands of them — into our dictionaries of English, so that the big- gest English dictionary of this year will be supple- mented next year by a new one advertised to con- tain "one thousand new words not to be found in any other dictionary." These additional words are all Greek compounds — or slang ; and the Eng- lish dictionary " up to date " contains about five complete and distinct languages; and yet there is one entire English language — even two — which has never yet been put into any dictionary, and this to my personal knowledge ! 1 1 The negro dialect of the South and the negro dialect of the writers of Southern stories. -j 2 PERSONALITY OF GOD. Now man was made in the image of God. That means (real, profound, spiritual theologians will tell you) in the image of the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity — such a transcendent and overwhelming Personality that He has two natures : the infinite and awful nature of God, and the poor finite nature of man, each in its utmost fullness and perfection ; and yet both these natures make but one Person! That is the Nicene Creed upon Personality. That is the immensity of what our poor little An- glicized Latin word " person " means at its high- est. Heaven help our human stuttering! but that is the best we can do. "Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name." It could not be told then. It is only half understood now. Years after, a man of Jacob's family — a greater and a better man — was riding through the same land, but on another errand. He was son of Jacob's best-beloved, of the tribe of Benjamin, and his name was Saul. He was on his way to Damascus to arrest and drag forth men and women charged with the crime of worshiping, in the way men called heresy, the God of their fathers. He was to bring them bound to Jerusalem to be tried by the sanhedrim. PERSONALITY OF GOD. 73 And on the road he too meets the Wrestler. The contrast is remarkable. Jacob was left alone ; Saul was surrounded with armed men. Jacob's meeting was in the night ; Saul's was in the high noontide. Jacob's Antagonist appears mysteriously and silently out of the dark; Saul's smites him to the earth with one burst of overpowering light, and calls him by his name. But Jacob's question and Saul's are the same: "Who art Thou, Lord?" Jacob got no answer because he could not understand the name. It was ages too early. Saul gets his promptly : " I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." Jacob was lamed by the touch of the awful Wrestler. Saul was blinded. Jacob went limp- ing over Peniel; went limping all his life; bore the brand of the wrestle. Saul went with those poor scalded eyes of his — his " thorn in the flesh " — all his days, when the scales of total blindness fell from them, and pitifully begs consideration from the Galatians when he has no amanuensis like Luke or Mark or Timothy : " See with how large letters I have written unto you with mine own hand;" the straggling, clumsy, uncial letters — like a child writing "large hand." But the answer — "Jesus whom thou persecut- 74 PERSONALITY OF GOD. est." Now Jesus is just the Greek, Latin, and English form for the Hebrew Joshua — " He who saves," or " God who delivers," or " God's De- liverer." And nozv He can be understood in part. The awful Wrestler with the souls of men in midnight loneliness of the desert, or in burning noon on the world's crowded highways, wrestles to save. Our God is the Deliverer. If He wres- tle and lame, He wrestles to make a prince of God out of a knavish Jacob. If He wrestle and over- throw and blind the man stricken amid trampling horse-hoofs to the sand, He smites to save. His name is Joshua; and Saul rises smitten blind, as his great ancestor was smitten lame, but an apos- tle henceforth, a selected prince in the kingdom of heaven ! We are slowly coming to see that the spiritual law in the natural world is that there is no advance save by wrestle and pain, by bloody sweat and groaning agony. So men have developed. So the lowest forms of life have risen to the higher. So nations have builded themselves and become " the chosen people," to do the chosen work, the princely work of God! But this law is an eternal law in the world PERSONALITY OF GOD. 75 spiritual, and therefore its manifestation in the world we call natural. The development of the man Jacob into Israel, the prince of God, is by anguish, sorrow, bitter pain — Gethsemane's blood-drops; the blinding on the road to Damascus, the laming on Peniel. Be- cause there is no development of the pneuma but by these and the bitter cross, so there is no development of the psyche but by toil and suffer- ing. Nay, no development of even the soma, the mere body, but by the same. One might, if he had ears to hear, write, I think, the most wonderful poem on the sorrows of the material world, whose groans God must hear as it struggles upward. " The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." 1 The spiritual law is an awful law when set to work in the natural. I do not wonder we have pessimists. But the law is not the expression of blind force. The birth-pains and writhing agonies of the regen- eration of a world are not the tyrannous inflictions of brute power or blind machinery. Behind all, over all, in all, rules and reigns the 1 The victory and the redemption of the pneuma must precede the deliverance of the psyche and soma. The struggle of the natural must continue until the victory in the spiritual world, according to St. Paul. 76 PERSONALITY OF GOD. Person, the Humanity, in whose image we are made, and whom we can understand. Even that He declared of old in every vision of every seer. He came appearing in the likeness of the nature He was to take unto Himself forever in the mystery of the incarnation, consummated nineteen hundred years ago that December night under the Syrian stars. He had His name in all the old story ; an awful, mysterious name, declaring eternal existence and eternal power ; but a name, a Person. Taking on the reality of human nature and mak- ing that a part of the infinite Personality, He takes a name all men can utter, and all men understand ; a name near and dear to souls blinded, staggering, struggling, hard-bestead ; a name of victorious hope; a triumph cry to the muster, the march, the battle, and the victory, for a world groaning and travailing to the birth of the new day — " I am the Deliverer." And He proved the name His own! Let us lay our earthly fancies down. We are Christian people. There are things on which our earthly philosophies babble — the best of them. The world is a world of onwardness ; a world where every to- morrow is better than to-day ; a world struggling PERSONALITY OF GOD. JJ up to the eternal daylight. That is our hope. It is more — it is our faith. We wrestle on. We will not let Him go till the blessing comes. And the faith weakens not, and the hope dims not, in all the sorrow of the burdened years, for we have now the name of the Man who is wrestling it into light. His name is JESUS ; proved before our eyes in life and death. One far more than philosopher — though no philosopher greater — Sage and Seer of our own kindred, put our Christian thought in form for us all — the final proof to earthly sight of the name's truth. " I am Jesus," He cried, and " Those blessed feet Full eighteen hundred years ago Were nailed for our advantage On the bitter cross." LECTURE III. RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 79 / am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God besides Me : I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me; that they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none besides Me. J am the Lord, and there is none else. L form the light, and create darkness : L make peace, and create evil: L the Lord do all these things. ISA. xlv. 5-7. 80 LECTURE III. RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. /^ OD, as the books of the Bible represent Him, ^ is One. That One is a Personality ; but of such enormous personality that He is three Per- sons, and yet one God. There are those who stagger at this. I confess I cannot understand their mental condition. I am a poor little limited, finite existence ; as far as anything I can see in this world, scarce a square inch in size or mean- ing. My poor little time is a few years between the eternal past and the eternal future; and a large number of those years are spent in uncon- sciousness, infancy, and childhood. A good share of the hours that are mine, when I really am con- scious, are spent in unconsciousness. The night comes — an apparently arbitrary arrangement — and I am practically non-existent during many hours of the short period when I have some force of body and of mind. Si 82 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. And then comes the other dark again, and I am lost from all men's knowledge and memory as far as this life goes. Out of the dark, into the dark again. A few years between, of light and dark, of consciousness and unconsciousness, of doing and being tired of doing, the whirling spokes of light and dark spinning me on and away. There are a few things I can do, millions of things I cannot do. Some few things I know or think I know ; and if I am a writing or speaking man I try to write them or speak them, and suc- ceed in some small measure. All the books ever written, all the speeches ever spoken, cannot con- tain the things I do not know ; the things Plato and "broad-browed Verulam " did not know, much less the Parliament of Great Britain or the Con- gress of the United States ! I have seen great libraries — enormous provision of space for the collection of human knowledge. But you would be obliged to attach them all to- gether — the Bodleian, the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Royale, the Astor, the Lenox, and, the grandest of them all for architectural dignity and spaciousness, the Public Library of Boston, and all the libraries of all the colleges in existence — to hold the books containing what the profes- RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 83 sors in all the colleges and universities in Europe and America do not know ! And yet, being only this, I have the dignity of personality ! Am I to be startled, amazed, when I am told that the Power which makes, orders, and guides the universe is one God, and yet in that divine nature three personalities? If I were told there are a hundred or a thousand, I do not see why I should be at all staggered. When I apply my logic or my metaphysics to the infinite, I am as a beetle undertaking to lecture on astronomy. There is no common measure between the finite and the infinite. The infinite is not merely an in- finite number of finites. Endless eternity is not an infinite number of days of twenty-four hours each. There is but one possible point of touch between the finite and the infinite, and that point is ethical. There is no point common of power, of size, of extension, of force, of abidance, of knowledge. There is no point of comparison, no place or ground logical, where you can bring these two to- gether, except the point of moral obligation. And this moral obligation rests alone upon the fact of personality — no person, no obligation ; no person, no responsibility. Mark it well, and it will save you from endless confusion. 84 RESPONSIBILITY OF COD. There is no responsibility, no moral obligation in a cyclone ; none whatever in a hurricane ; none at all in the great sun over your heads; not the shadow of a moral responsibility in all the infinites and all the eternities. Power behind phenomena expresses nothing but power if you leave it with that definition. As a being with moral responsibility, sense of duty and obligation, and conscience telling me " You must," I have a supreme contempt for all the infinites and all the unconditioneds, for sun, moon, stars, and all powers behind them ; for I am far better than they, as the man is better than the brute. I have no reverence, and can get up none, and I certainly have not an atom of fear, for the power behind phenomena, unless that power can prove to me most unmistakably that it has sense, decency, some regard for right and truth, and, in fact, is using its faculties to do the best it can in its place. Do not get scared, and do not abdicate your awful right of judgment in the face of mere brute force. It is man's prerogative to say, " This is right, this is wrong; this ought to be, this ought not to be;" and to say so at the mouth of a thousand bellowing cannon. And man has done it, and is doing it, and will keep straight on doing till he ends. RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 85 You cannot frighten us by your power behind phenomena, no matter how infinite and almighty that power is. I am a good deal better and bigger than that power, and pass judgment upon its per- formances, and praise or condemn them at my will, knowing that my judgments shall stand, and know- ing that if the power behind phenomena is power only, I and my judgments shall still stand when phenomena and that sort of power behind them or in them have vanished into nothingness. The power behind phenomena, to come into contact with men, must come as a person. There is that strange power in personalities that they can understand one another. And the essence of per- sonality is moral responsibility. A person stands under obligation. It makes no difference whether he be a finite or an infinite person ; he is under obligation ; he is bound by law and duty. Does it startle you to say that Almighty God is under obligation? Unless He is, you and I can have no spiritual relation with Him whatever; nay, not even an intelligent relation. We cer- tainly can have no moral obligation toward any Being who has no moral obligation toward us. That is what makes the God of Calvinism, by His very definition, forever impossible. A Being whose 86 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. sole motive of action is His own good pleasure is a Being with whom we have no common bonds. The only feeling would be one of abject, unreasoning terror. For the brave and the true it might some day be imperative duty to defy and resist Him in spite of the terror. But the God who wrestles with man, and wrestles with him as a Man, reveals Himself as a Person, and as such in relations and under names of relation ; and relations carry responsibility. The unrelated can have no responsibility. He is a Maker, and a maker is responsible for what he makes. A man cannot make a wheel- barrow without assuming the responsibility of see- ing that it will work, and that in working it will do no harm to anybody. God reveals Himself as a King. It is another name of relation, of duty and responsibility. A king must govern his people. He must suffer with his people. He must keep watch and ward for his kingdom's safety. He must govern firmly, right- eously, helpfully, mercifully. He is bound by webs of moral bonds to those over whom he rules, as they are bound to him. God reveals Himself as a Father. Surely there is a name of obligation and responsibility here ! A RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. $y father — we all know a father's duties. And it is in such common household and familiar names that He tells men His character. A father must take care of his family ; guard, shelter, feed, provide for, help his family, his children, his helpless ones. Why are we afraid to take God at His word? Why shrink from the names He uses to reveal Himself? Why always fall back into the vague- ness and inanity of our metaphysical irreverence — as if we thought God did not know Himself, and our spider-web words added somehow to His glory as Father and King? Does He not know? Creator, King, Father, Householder, Shepherd, even Employer paying wages for a day's work — these are His chosen names ; and these, you see, are all names of rela- tion, and so of responsibility, obligation, and there- fore of Personality. Thus in a moral world we live moral beings, under a moral Lord and Government. The "Ought" rules over all, transcends all; reigns in the Personality of the Father and King. It is an instinct with us to help the Almighty all we can. There is something in the fact that we are made in God's image that leads us, I suppose, to try to create even a universe, no matter how 88 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. fantastically. And facing the fact of a world full of evil, pain, and sin, we want to explain it all in some way to save God responsibility. Now observe He does not thank us! He has no wish to shirk any part of the responsibility. He has made the universe, and He stands by the con- sequences, and asks not the help of your meta- physics to argue Him out of His responsibility, nor your sentimentalities or theologies to apologize for Him! The Persian dualism was a philosophy to ac- count for the existence of evil, and yet hold to a good God. For myself, I confess that as a mere working hypothesis, apart from revelation, explan- atory of facts as they are, it is the only hypothesis I as a reasonable man could admit. It is plain, direct, deals with the facts, and puts man on the side he, as a moral being, should occupy. But — the Almighty, the Personality with the awful name, declines, by the mouth of the prophet, to be relieved of His obligations as Creator! In the summons to " Cyrus, His anointed, whose right hand I have holden," the prophet proclaims the Personality, the unity, and the responsibility, in the face of Zerdusht and his two Principles : " I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 89 God besides me. / form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." "Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour." It is only, I take it, the same desire to shield the Almighty from responsibility — a very amiable if a very weak and superfluous desire — which prompts some good people to hold such notions as restora- tionism — that is, that evil men and devils will find another chance somewhere, in some other world of trial, and be all " saved," as they call it, sometime ; and still other good people to hold that all the un- converted will just pass into an eternal sleep, and only the righteous be immortal. I have no quarrel with the temper of these dreams; but they make no appeal to my intelli- gence, and rather seem impertinent. The eternal Wrestler can take sufficient care of His own repu- tation ; and if He declares Himself responsible for the evils of this world, and makes no excuse, re- sponsible for the pain, misery, torment, and wretch- edness of this world — I cannot doubt but He will justify Himself in any world, as He justifies His ways here, more and more, to human faith and human reasonableness. At all events, my poor, 9