fhss JU~T" \ Book ' H % . GpigtaN?. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. THE NATURE OF GOD A Series of Lectures By J. A. HALL, D. D. PHILADELPHIA, PA.: THE LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY COPYRIGHT, I9IO, BY THE LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY ©CLA265508 ^N. To Her, whose Help and Companionship it has been My Privilege Daily to Enjoy, this Volume is Gratefully Dedicated PREFACE The following lectures were delivered before the students of Wittenberg Theological Seminary dur- ing the winter of 1908 and 1909. They are an attempt to present the Christian idea of God as opposed to that of philosophy. Between the two conceptions there is a fundamental difference. Philosophy conceives of God either from the stand- point of absolute transcendence or that of helpless immanence ; as utterly removed from the world, or as lost in it. To the hunger of the soul for a God with whom it may hold fellowship, and from whom it may derive help, philosophy offers a stone in- stead of bread. Man needs a God who in every sense of the term is near ; a Being capable of being touched with a feeling of our infirmities for the reason that He has Himself felt them. It is for a quasi-human God that the soul hungers. And such a God Christianity alone presents to the world. Its conception of God is that of a per- sonal Being, who, without doing violence to His nature, became incarnate in human flesh and lived VI PREFACE. among men. It sees in the man Jesus the " gen- uine " God, atid acknowledges no other besides Him. And just this is the secret of the power 'that Christianity has over the hearts of men. It is this that constitutes the vital element which has ^en- abled it to survive all the struggles for existence, and to dominate the most cultured peoples of the world. In a word, the power of Christianity is in its anthropomorphic conception of the Deity. To vindicate this conception, and, if possible, to make it more real, is the purpose of the following lect- ures, John A. Hali,. CONTENTS . LECTURE FIRST. PAGE The Failure of Philosophy 9 LECTURE SECOND. Reasons for the Failure 52 LECTURE THIRD. Religion 98 LECTURE FOURTH. The Origin, Seat and Content of Religion ..... 140 LECTURE FIFTH. The Certainty of Religious Knowledge 182 LECTURE SIXTH. Anthropomorphism 222 LECTURE SEVENTH. The Trinity 273 LECTURE EIGHTH. The Same Subject Continued 302 The Nature of God. LECTURE FIRST. THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. The belief that we are not alone in the world is practically universal. It would seem that no light other than that which " lighteth every man that cometh into the world," is necessary to convince man of this truth. To live in the world, to share its daily experiences, is to feel that we are in contact with a Being who is not of us, but above us. Promi- nent among these experiences, is the sense of our incompleteness. We are neither self-satisfied, nor self-sufficient. We need something beyond and above to complete our existence ; and this something the religious soul finds in God. It is altogether probable that, were it not that man is ever haunted by a sense of his needs, he would give himself but little con- cern as to who or what is above him. It is his needs that make him religious. Forces against which he is unable to match himself are in league to put (9) IO THE NATURE OF GOD. out his little life, and he must needs have a ref- uge. Though yearning for the permanent, he finds himself in the midst of the fleeting — his days " even as the grass when the wind passeth over it." Sur- prised at the fact that no human spirit is able to enter fully into his experiences, or even to under- stand his longings, he feels the need of an Almighty companion. The barrenness of life ; the hunger which consumes ; the labors which weary ; the fears which inhabit, make God a necessity to man. It is out of this sense of his incompleteness that the cry for the living God comes. But these needs, however profound or universal, do not of themselves constitute a sufficent proof of the actual existence of God. Taken in themselves, they give us no assurance that there is anything in the real world which corresponds to them. One and all they are subjective, they may or may not have their object, and all that we can say of them is, that we hope that they may find their answer in the outward world of reality. What religion seems to need in order that its belief in the existence of God may be vindicated is proofs objectively valid and which on that account are capable of carrying conviction to all men. THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. II Now, it is to this task that philosophy adjusts itself. It produces arguments for our beliefs, under- takes to vindicate them to the understanding, and by so doing attempts to establish faith upon a rational basis. And this it professes to do in the inter- est of religion itself. For if God exists, as religion affirms, ought not that fact to be once and for all established ? Ought it not to be made clear to all ? Ought not a fact which so vitally concerns man in all his relations to be logically demonstrated ; or, to say the least, made as palpable as are those of science or mathematics ? Yet it is not so. Face to face with a universe in which some behold God, others stand looking in vain for evidences of His presence. A Kepler, feeling himself to be "thinking God's thoughts after him " is followed by a Mill, to whom the world is devoid of either thought or purpose. To some God is most real ; the companion of their sorrows, the sharer of their joys. " Closer is He than breathing, and nearer Than hands and feet. ' ' To others no sign has ever appeared, no voice spoken, or presence made itself felt. To some the arguments for the Divine existence are logical and 12 THE NATURE OF GOD. seem to leave no way of escape. To others they have no meaning and are utterly without power to carry conviction. Yet there are facts concerning which all are agreed. No one denies the existence of those mate- rial objects by which our senses are affected. No one disputes the deductions of the mathematician who by logical processes reasons out his conclu- sions. These facts are universal ; they appeal to all, and the mind accepts them because it must. In these departments no one thinks as he chooses, nothing is obscure, there are no vital differences of opinion. And the reason is, that in both of these fields there is the possibility of demonstration and proofs are objectively valid. Mathematics proves itself and science verifies its facts by experiment. But it is not so with the great facts of religion. In the main they are subjective, private and even vari- able. Now, the attainment of just this objective and universal certainty for the facts of religion is the aim of philosophy. To find a way of escape from obscure and personal persuasion to truth objectively valid ; in a word, to redeem religion from privacy and to give public status and universal right of way THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 3 to its deliverances ; this is the task which philosophy assumes. It matters not that long ago, Job declared a knowledge of God to be beyond the realm traversed by the unassisted reason when he affirmed that by u searching " God could not be found. Nor is it sufficient that millions of the sanest among men and women have testified with Job, " I know that my Redeemer liveth." Nor is it even enough that many have willingly yielded the mystery of life in witness of the fact that, to them God has not been a mere vision, but a reality, more real than any object known by the outward sense. What philosophy seeks is not private testimony, but rational demonstration ; objective proofs which cannot be disputed and which are valid for all. Now, it may as well be admitted in the beginning that the existence of God cannot be logically demon- strated. We cannot deduce by self-evident logic that which has no self-evident axioms behind it. The world and self and God, are alike in being final postulates of thought, yet the existence of neither is capable of demonstration. Proofs there are in plenty ; but they are not those which hold in the realm of either mathematics or logic. But it is not our purpose at present to enter into a 14 THE NATURE OF GOD. criticism of the method pursued by philosophy in its attempt to prove the existence of God. It is rather that of showing what it has not done ; for it is certain that it has utterly failed in its aim. By searching it has not found out God, or succeeded in removing the thick darkness which has always hidden Him from the cold intellect of man. It has not convinced the skeptic of the truths of Theology, and men still, as in the past, are compelled to look to religion for whatever knowledge they may have of the being of the One who has ever hidden Himself from the "wise and prudent." In spite of its pretentions, philosophy has thrown but little, if any, light upon that most important question, Wliatis God? Un- able to satisfy itself even of His existence, it surely can have nothing to tell us concerning His nature. That it has failed to prove the existence of God, I think will be admitted by all who have made them- selves acquainted with its results. " I need not," says Professor James, " discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice to show that, as a matter of history, it fails to prove its pretensions to be objectively convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish differences. I believe, in fact, that the logical THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 5 reason of man operates in the field of divinity ex- actly as it operates in love, or patriotism, or in poli- tics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life in which our passions or mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our con- victions, for, indeed, it has to find them. It ampli- fies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it. It cannot now secure it." Let us now look at some of the more positive results which have been attained by speculative philosophy. As to its achievements, it has given to the world three arguments in proof of the neces- sary existence of God. They are known as the cosmological, the teleological and the ontological. Kant held that, in these three arguments there is summarized all the proofs that can be offered from the logical side for the existence of a Supreme Being. I quote from his " Critique." " There are only three modes of proving the existence of a Deity on the grounds of the speculative reason. All the paths conducting to this end, either begin from determinate experience and the peculiar con- stitution of the world of sense, and rise, according to the law of causality, from it to the highest cause 1 6 THE NATURE OF GOD. existing apart from the world — or from a purely in- determinate experience — that is, some empirical existence or abstraction is made of all experience, and the existence of a supreme cause is concluded from a priori conceptions alone. The first is the physico-theological argument ; the second, the cos- mological ; the third, the ontological. More there are not and more there cannot be." Later on we shall learn what Kant himself thought of these arguments. Meanwhile, let us get them before our minds, in order that we may see what they contain. Let us begin with the. cosmo logical. Reduced to its simplest terms it is this : The con- tingent world exists ; or the world of our imme- diate experience is contingent. Therefore, an absolutely necessary Being exists. For how is that which is dependent to be explained except in the light of that which is independent ; or how is that which is manifestly an effect, to be accounted for, except in the light of that which is uncaused ? The argument starts from the thought that the world, as presented to our experience, has in it not substantial- ity or independence. It exists ; but its existence can- not be explained from itself, and the mind, in trying to account for it, is forced to fall back on something THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 7 outside of the world and finds rest only in the idea of a Being, who is necessary, self-dependent and substantial. Permit me, if possible, to state the argument in a form a little less abstract. Experience proves that effects have their causes. We speak of any particular effect, and say that back of it there must have been a cause. We know that things do not happen of themselves ; they are not what they are for any reason to be found in them ; they suggest, even demand a cause. But we do not stop there, because we cannot. We inquire into the cause of any effect, and reason that it, too, must have had a cause. And so on, until we reach a cause which is not caused, or what is the same, a final cause. This final cause, we assume to be God. I do not mean to say that, we actually trace effects to their causes until we reach the primitive cause. That would be impossible. For in the regress we come to an abyss, an abyss which cannot be crossed except by a leap, and that leap the mind takes, because on this side and in the realm of the finite and contingent it cannot rest. And the essence of the argument is that the mind must rest somewhere. Thought cannot go on forever tracing effects to causes, only 1 8 THE NATURE OF GOD. to discover that these causes are themselves effects without end. Somewhere the process must end. Reason requires that it must end. Thought, in simple exhaustion, must pause ; and since it can pause nowhere else, it postulates a final cause and assumes it to be the cause of itself. God, then, is a necessity to thought. Looking out on the con- tingent, convinced that the contingent cannot rest on the contingent, but must have its explanation in the incontingent, thought affirms the incon- tingent and names it God. Of course, this argument is capable of being car- ried very much further. For the mind requires not only a cause ; it requires a sufficient cause. Accord- ingly it has been affirmed that, this final cause can- not, in the nature of the case, be a blind cause, but, on the contrary, one which is ever working to some conscious and rational end. By this is meant that it must explain all that is in the effect. If, for illus- tration, it is once admitted that the effect is intel- ligent, or moral, or good, the inference is that the cause must also have been intelligent, or moral, or good, as the case may be. And that is to say, that the cause of anything must at the same moment that it is a cause be also a sufficient cause. It must THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1 9 explain all that is in the effect. Accordingly, if the effect is intelligent the cause must also have been intelligent. If the effect is moral, the cause must have been moral, and so on. Standing in the presence of a statue of Michael Angelo, one needs not be told that the hand which guided the chisel was directed by intelligence and governed by imagination true to the highest art. The effect proves it. No blind force ; no force operating by chance, could have produced a work of art which so expresses thought or incarnates in- telligent imagination. No one needs to be told that the steamship, in every movement responsive to the helm, is the product of intelligence. The effect proves it. It is so everywhere. So far as our observation goes, we seem warranted in saying that, the cause of any effect must have been a suffi- cient cause ; that is, sufficient to produce that par- ticular effect. Thus, the one who on looking out on the world finds intelligence in it, is justified in the conclusion that its final cause must have been intelligent. The one to whom the world is good, seems to be warranted in the conclusion that the cause must also have been good ; for what is in the effect^must 20 THE NATURE OF GOD. have been first in the cause. And thus, to the final cause, has been attributed that intelligence, benev- olence and love which religion attributes to God. Of course, by the one who finds in the world no intelligence, to whom things appear unrelated and haphazard, the conclusion that the final cause must have been wise, will not be drawn. To a Schopen- hauer, or to one of his class, to whom the universe is faulty, a mistake or even a moral blunder, no proof of goodness or wisdom is to be derived from an out- look on the world. Rather the contrary. For it is not until you find intelligence or goodness in the effect that you are warranted in postulating it of the cause. Practically, therefore, the argument from sufficient cause can be of weight to those alone to whom the world is a product of goodness ; but it is utterly without meaning to the one in whose mind these supposed facts themselves need corroborative evidence. Indeed, it may be ques- tioned whether our knowledge of the universe at any point, is sufficient to warrant us in saying that its author is either good or wise. It is rather our confidence in His goodness and wisdom that fur- nishes the basis of our confidence in the goodness and wisdom of the world. As a matter of fact, we THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 21 believe in the goodness of the world, because of our belief in the goodness of its author, and not the goodness of the world that leads us to the convic- tion that, its author must have been either good or wise. Such, as briefly as I can state it, is the " cosmo- logical " argument for the necessary being of God, and such the highway, along which a certain school of philosophers would bring us to the height from which we may behold the One whom we name God. Let us now see what this argument is logically worth. Concerning its real significance we will have something to say further on ; for its value as a proof of the Divine existence is not in its logical force. And it is as a logical proof alone that we are to consider it. We have seen that it proceeds from effect to cause. It affirms that every effect must have its cause, and when carried further it arrives at the conclusion that every effect must have had an adequate cause. I think you will pardon me for saying that, all this is but assumption. It is true that so far as our experience goes, it may be affirmed with reasonable certainty that, every effect has had its cause. But who can affirm with cer- 22 THE NATURE OF GOD. tainty that, in the entire realm of realities or in all possible experiences this must have been the case? Besides, the argument is an appeal to ex- perience, the very thing above which philosophy seeks to lift us. But let that be as it may, the argument crum- bles under the vigorous grasp of the very logic to which it appeals. For what, at last, are these effects of which it is assumed that they point back to an infinite cause ? Are they not all finite effects ? Iyet us own that the universe upon which we look is vast ; vast beyond our comprehension. Still it is finite. And by no logic can an infinite cause be deduced from an effect which is finite. Finite effects at best argue only finite causes. They can- not prove more. An infinite cause may, indeed, go out in finite effects, but finite effects can never prove an infinite cause. You cannot in a syllogis- tic demonstration get into your conclusion more than the premises already contain. Beginning with an infinite or absolute cause, you may conclude finite effects ; but you can never reverse the proc- ess. All that you can infer from a finite or con- tingent effect, is a finite or contingent cause, or, at most, an endless series of such causes. But if be- THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 23 cause the mind cannot rest in this false infinity, you try to stop the regress and assert at any point of it a cause which is not an effect, which is its own cause, or which is unconditioned and infinite, the conclusion in this case is purely arbitrary. But that is not all. For when the question is asked, " By what right does the mind stop in its re- gress at some particular point and refuse to proceed further backward in its search for still remoter causes," the arbitrariness of the procedure at once appears. There is absolutely no valid reason which can be given to justify us in stopping anywhere. It is just as pertinent to ask the cause of this final cause as it is to ask the cause of any effect in the series. True, it may be said that the mind itself is unable to go further ; that it must rest somewhere, and for this reason it may claim the right to postu- late a final cause. But that is not admissible. To drag in, because of shere mental incapacity to go on thinking, that false infinity, which is merely an infinite series of unites, a name, which seems to indicate a true infinity, is simply to conceal under a phrase the breakdown in the argument. And then, too, as science has advanced, causes have been pushed further backward. The idea of 24 THE NATURE OF GOD. secondary causes was at one time foreign to men's thoughts. The thunder was God's voice ; the clouds His chariot ; the storm His breath. Every effect was directly traced to God, and secondary causes were unthought. But God has now been found to stand further back, if indeed He stands anywhere. The thunder has been traced to natural causes ; the clouds and storms have been traced to agencies other than supernatural, and those phe- nomena which once heralded the approaching foot- steps of the infinite God, have themselves been found to have been caused by agencies purely natural. By what authority, then, does the mind stop at any point and say, " Here secondary causes end ; this is the first ; back of this there is no re- moter cause." The method is purely arbitrary ; or, perhaps it would be more charitable to say, as I have already indicated, that this pause in the regress marks the utter exhaustion of the mind. But is there in that fact any logical authority ? Just as well might one, looking out on the horizon which shuts out his further vision, affirm that, beyond no sky stretches and no landscape lies in the sunlight for the reason that, he is unable to see further, as to affirm that, because the mind cannot follow a series THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 25 of infinite causes, there is none beyond the one which he arbitrarily names the first. That may prove that limits are set to the mind ; but the proof of that is one thing, and the proof of a final cause quite another. And so the cosmological argument is powerless to force conviction. As an objective or logical proof it utterly fails. Of course, to one already possessed of a belief in the existence of a Divine Being, it may be helpful, for it may serve to corrobo- rate a fact already accepted. But to one devoid of such conviction it is without value. The truth is that, this argument has been scorned by skeptics and flaunted in the face of religion as an illustra- tion of the insecure rational basis upon which, as we are told, the whole fabric of religious belief rests. But we must now take up the second argument, in which a logical demonstration of the being of God is attempted. In our books of theology it is usually designated as the teleological proof. Per- haps by no writer has it been set forth with great- er skill and power than by the eminent divine and philosopher, Archdeacon Paley. You will re- call the numerous instances of design to which he 26 THE NATURE OF GOD. calls attention in the human body, in plant and in- sect life, and more especially in his argument from the watch ; for until recently his works, along with those of Butler's, were the text-books in most of the English and American institutions of learning. It cannot be denied that in the realm of apologetics he did valiant service. For while on its practical side it was the great religious awakening which be- gan in the work of the Wesley s and Whitfield, yet on its intellectual side, it was the works of Butler and Paley that broke the power of Deism in Eng- land. But it was in his " Evidences " that Paley did his best work. Nevertheless, in the realm of philosophy, in which he became the champion of the argument from design, he left the world little, if indeed anything, of permanent value. His reason- ing, as all reasoning based on a particular class of facts, is one-sided. It makes the most of those in which design seems to be present, and utterly ignores the opposite, in which it seems just as cer- tain to be wanting. It was the pictorial representa- tion which he gave to his argument rather than his fair dealing with the facts, just as they present themselves, which gave to his treatise its hold on the popular mind in the century just past. THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 2*] Stated in its simplest form, his argument is this : Design points to a designer ; thought to a thinker ; purpose to a purposer. Wherever thought, design or purpose can be shown in a product, we may logic- ally infer that such thought or purpose or design must have existed in the mind of the thinker before it took shape in the product. Now, it is assumed that the universe about us in- dicates such purpose or design. Harmony exists everywhere. Part fits into part, just as the various parts of the watch fit into each other and all con- tribute severally to the end which the watchmaker had in mind at the time of its construction. From the plant to the insect ; from the insect to man, and from man to the universe, it is possible to trace the golden thread of design, running through all and binding all together. As in the watch, there is pre- sented a mechanism in which wheels and pinions and springs are related and in which each con- tributes its individual part, so in the world. Specific instances of design are emphasized. The eye, with its wondrous lenses, able so to adjust themselves to varying distances as that a perfect image is always produced on the retina. The ear, marvelously adapted to the work of receiving as well as record- 28 THE NATURE OF GOD. ing impressions. The plant, powerless to roam from place to place in search of food ; yet so con- structed as to be able to secure it from the air and soil. The insect, riding on swift wings, carrying in its little form a mechanism more wonderful than any which the skill of man has yet achieved. In the seas, kissing the continents ; the titanic mount- ain condensers which force from the laden clouds their moisture ; the positions which they occupy in relation to the continents — yea, in everything it is possible for the mind to trace the evidences of de- sign, the proofs of the wisdom and the skill of the Being who is the author of all. Let us own that, devout minds everywhere have been impressed by the, same thought when con- templating the universe. In the rocks, a Hugh Miller finds the " Footsteps of the Creator." In the flowers, a Ruskin traces His pencil, and a Tennyson His tender care. In the worlds, keeping time in the mighty chambers of the invisible, a Kepler, sees the wisdom of a Supreme Being and feels himself to be " thinking God's thoughts after Him." But since thought argues a thinker, since design argues a designer, and purpose a purposer, how are these evidences of purpose and design to be explained THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 29 except on the admission of an intelligent designer back of all, and who, before the morning stars sang together, thought out the vast scheme ? Just as the watch proves the thinker, so the world, teem- ing with exhibitions of thought, proves the infinite thinker. Such is the argument from design and such the method of the teleological argument. I almost wish that fidelity to the truth would permit of our passing this argument by without adverse criticism. To me, as a boy, it gave speech to the world, and to many it has served as a sheet anchor which has preserved faith when threatened by the mad waves of skeptical criticism. Yet for all that, it is not with beautiful theories that the citadel of religion is to be defended against weapons wrought in the furnace of hard facts. Pictorial, spectacular, re- quiring but little effort on the part of the mind to grasp its significance, the argument from design has now been laid aside, like some old piece of armor, good enough in its day, but of little value as a means of defence against weapons of modern warfare. I think I am safe in saying that, it has been abandoned by most, if not all, thinkers who have kept pace with the march of investigation and 30 THE NATURE OF GOD. who have been willing to allow rigorous logic to do its work with the fondest of their theories. For it must not be forgotten that, the real purpose of the argument in question is not that of confirming an opinion already held, but, on the contrary, of con- vincing the skeptic. And for this purpose the design argument has ceased to be of service. In- deed, in the form in which it was formerly pre- sented it is no longer of value. As a logical argu- ment — and this is what it was meant to be — it proves nothing. Indeed, on the contrary, it is capable of doing immense injury to the very faith which it is meant to defend. L,et me remind you again that logically no con- clusion can be drawn from any syllogism which is not already contained in the premise. No castle has ever yet been built in the air. It needs the solid ground upon which to rest. It is so with any conclusion which may be drawn from premises. It must rest solidly in them, be contained in them. The premise must first be true, or at least accepted as true, before it can be expected to bear the weight of the conclusion. Now, in this argument from design, the premise is the very thing that needs to be proven. It must THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 3 1 not be assumed. It is true, if the universe contains design, the conclusion is warranted that it must have had a designer. But are we certain of that ? Are we certain that, we have not read into the world and into our own lives an idea which has existence in the mind alone ? Coming to nature with the belief that, an All-wise Being has created it, it is easy enough to see multitudinous evidences of creative skill, for it is never hard to find that for which we are seeking. It is not hard for one to whom life has brought its numerous charms and to whose labor a harvest of reward has been given, to see design, or what he calls providence, in all his affairs. Few among those who have been fairly successful and of whose creed the being of God is a part, would deny that they have been greatly favored of heaven. Such are sure to speak of providences in their life and to point to many instances of a kind and wise providence. But how is it when the contrary has been the case ? How is it when the experience of Job is repeated and the swift mes- sengers come bearing heavy tidings of combined misfortune ? How is it when our harvests are smitten with blight and our cattle w T ith murrain and the fire from heaven hath burned up the sheep 32 THE NATURE OF GOD. and the servants and consumed them ? How is it when sore boils cover the body, turning our days into nights and our hopes into despair ? How is it when the fruits of our toil vanish as the smoke and hope dies into embers and then into ashes upon the hearth ? I know that, even such experiences do not disprove a providence, and that through joys and sorrows, through sorrows and joys, this providence must lead if we are to come out of the furnace purified as the gold. I know that our " light afflic- tions which endure but for a moment work for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." But that is dragging into the discussion something which is utterly foreign to it. For we are not now speaking of what revelation teaches, but of what nature teaches concerning this matter of design. For how is it, when the one who is not convinced of the existence of a wise and good God turns his eyes to the world and to our experiences in it ? To such a mind design is by no means obvious, or at least not intelligent or benevolent design, and this is the only kind of design which can be taken into account in the argument. To some the world is a great blunder, and to others existence is unbearable. Man, in the words of the Psalmist, " is born to THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 33 trouble as the sparks fly upward." In pain we are born into the world. Our first vocal utterance is a cry, and from the cradle to the grave sorrow, dis- appointment, heaviness of heart and pain, which at times amounts to agony, are the experiences of the noblest and the best. Riches take wings and fly away ; fame is a breath ; youth and health and pleas- ure vanish. Back of everything, is the great specter of universal death — the all-encompassing darkness. No wonder that the wisest of the ancients asked, " What profit hath a man of all the labors which he taketh under the sun ? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For what befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts ; as the one dieth, so dieth the other. Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. But if a man live years, and rejoices in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they are many." And such, has been the experience of many among those whose lives of unselfish devotion to others, have sweetened suffering and made experi- ence bearable. Robert Louis Stevenson thus writes : " There is 3 34 THE NATURE OF GOD. indeed one element in human destiny. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed. Failure is the lot allotted." Think of Dante, solitary of soul on account of his lost Beatrice. So much the victim of sorrow as that even the children of Florence said, " If anyone has ever been in hell he has." Think of the noble Kossuth, sacrificing all for the sake of his country, yet receiving the reward of banishment. Think of the Italian patriot, Mazzini, on whose soul rested the bleeding form of oppressed Italy. Of Gustavus Adolphus, dying on the bloody field of L,utzen, offer- ing his life for that, which as it would seem should be the inalienable right of every man. Think of Washington, kneeling amid the snows of Valley Forge, with soul pierced through by the suffering of the heroes of the Revolution, yet suffering all for the sake of that which ought to be man's without the price of blood. Think of the holiest of the Holy, crying out in the garden, " My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death "; and later on the cross, though most innocent, yet speaking His agony in the words, " My God, my God, why hast Thou for- saken me ? " Think of all the noble whose lives have been a THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 35 tragedy ; and then ask, what becomes of the argu- ment that, life and the experiences which enter into it, attest a benevolent and merciful Being who is the author of all that comes to man ? The truth is, that 11 History's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness twixt false systems and the word. Truth forever on the scaffold; wrong forever on the throne." I know the answer which will come to all this ; and which has a right to come from the religious side. I know that one who had suffered much spoke of the effect which his afflictions would have in the working out for him " a crown of righteousness." But it was because he already believed in the exist- ence of a benevolent Being who was able to bring such a result out of his bitter experiences. It was that fact, already accepted, which shot its rays of light into the terrible darkness and which enabled him rightly to interpret the meaning of his trials. But Paul never reasoned, nor has anyone ever reasoned from his suffering to the being of a benev- olent God. It is the being of God already accepted that reconciles us to the strange fact of suffering, and not the suffering that points to a benevolent and all perfect Being. $6 THE NATURE OF GOD. But what is more, each specific instance of de- sign may be opposed by another in which, to say the least, no benevolent purpose seems to be present. It cannot be denied that nature is full of anomalies and maladaptations. In every part of the animal world we find implements of torture surpassing in devilish ingenuity everything that was ever seen in the dungeons of the Inquisition. We are introduced to a scene of incessant and universal strife of which it is not apparent on the surface that the outcome is the good or happiness of anything sentient. Often we find the higher life wantonly sacrificed to the lower, as instanced by the myriads of parasites apparently created for no other purpose than to prey on creatures better than themselves. Well, in the face these facts, what is to be thought of the argument from design? L,et us own that instances of wondrous skill are not wanting which seem to point to an intelligent designer. But what is to be said of those instances in which such design seems not only wanting but which even go so far in maladaptation and cruelty as to lead to the conviction that if purpose existed at all that purpose must have been misery and wretchedness instead of happiness ? As a matter of fact, this argument from THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 37 design is a sword with two edges capable of cleaving in a direction trie very opposite of that intended by its advocates. For if order, according to the logic of the argument, points to a God of order, does not disorder point with equal certainty to a God of disorder ? If happiness suggests a being delighting in the joy of His creation, does not pain, with the same logic, suggest a God cruel, delighting in the wretchedness of His creatures ? Mill, was logically right in holding that the argu- ment proved too much, and when he pointed out the fact that the design argument was destructive of the very cause which it was meant to defend. Moreover, the argument is defective for another reason. For when evil is taken into account, one or the other horn of the dilemma must be chosen ; either that God is not benevolent or that, He is not omnipotent. For if He is omnipotent, why did He not exercise His omnipotence in the prevention of evil ? The fact that He has not done so, to say the least, awakens suspicion that He is not benev- olent ; and contrariwise, the fact that evil exists, admitting that God is benevolent, throws suspicion on the claim that God is omnipotent, either of which conclusions leaves Him a being unworthy 38 THE NATURE OF GOD. of our trust aud devoid of a just claim upon our worship. Nor. does it help the case to say that, evil has its origin in the material with which God had to deal and out of which all things have been formed. It is true that, in the case of a finite mechanic, intract- able material may hide a multitude of sins. All would accept the excuse of a mechanic were he to say in apology for his defective work, " I could do no better out of the material at hand." But not so in the case of an Infinite constructor. Such a one is responsible for the nature of the material as well as for what He makes out of it, for He alone has created both the material and fashioned it. He cannot so excuse Himself for the fault or blemish for the reason that both are his own. Face to face with the old problem of evil, the design argument breaks down. Logically it cannot be made to sustain the weight of the terrible fact that evil is everywhere. And so the carpenter theory of the world has to be abandoned. Its inherent weakness has retired it from the arena in which it once figured in defence of the Christian faith. Even among those who yet look upon it with favor it is rapidly giving way THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 39 before a better conception of the divine method in relation to created things ; I mean the conception which gives ns an immanent God, a God never apart as is the carpenter from his work, but, on the contrary, ever present in it as its director, as well as transcendent as its creator. But this brings us to the last argument in which a logical demonstration of the existence of God is attempted ; I mean the ontological. Now, I have no hesitancy whatever in saying that, when rightly understood, the ontological is the most profound of all the proofs which have as yet come from the side of philosophy in defence of the great truth of religion. But it is not such for the reason that it looks outward, for this is its weakness. In- deed, the value of the ontological defence is to be found in the fact that when rightly interpreted it does not look outward, but, on the contrary, inward on the human spirit, the realm to which the mind must at last look if it is to behold the vision of God. My purpose in calling attention to it here is, however, to present it solely on its logical side and to range it with those proofs which a rational phi- losophy has thought out in, defence of the divine existence. Presenting it, therefore, as a logical 4-0 THE NATURE OF GOD. argument, the substance of the ontological defence is this. Man thinks God, and the thought of God is itself a demonstration of His actual existence. Because we think Him He is, for were He not, the mind acting under the laws which govern thought could not think Him. By different writers the argument has been presented in different forms. As stated by Anselm, it amounted to this : The idea of an absolutely perfect being exists in the mind. The idea is real accordingly. What stands for the idea is also real. He actually exists, for if He did not we could conceive another who does exist and' who would, therefore, be more perfect. As stated by Descartes, it takes the form of an argument from efficient cause. We have the idea of infinite perfection. But how came we to possess this idea ? It is certain that it has not been sug- gested by anything in the world or by our sensuous experiences. All with which we are brought into relation is finite and imperfect. The eye has never beheld a perfect object, the ear has never heard a perfect harmony ; perfection is not in the world. " The depth saith it is not in me, and the sea saith it is not in me. It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof." THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 41 And so the idea of infinite perfection, since noth- ing in the world can possibly have originated it, is held to imply the existence of a perfect being as its author and inspirer. As to this idea of a Being abso- lutely perfect, Descartes held that it is innate. " I have not drawn it," says he, "from the senses, nor is it even presented to me unexpectedly, as is usual with the ideas of sensible objects when these are presented or appear to be presented to the external organs of sense. It is not even a pure production or fiction of my mind, for it is not in my power to take from it or to add to it. And consequently there remains but one alternative, that it is innate in the same way as the idea of myself. And in truth, it is not to be wondered at that God at my creation implanted the idea in me that it might serve, as it were, for the mark of the workman impressed on his work." To be sure, in a statement necessarily as brief as the present, the full force of the ontological argu- ment cannot be brought out. It is only as one fol- lows its development as carried forward in the medi- tations of Descartes that its full significance as a logical argument can be appreciated. But logical as it was, it failed to carry conviction. For five 42 THE NATURE OF GOD. hundred years after its statement by Anselm no notice was taken of it, and it was the influence of Descartes that gave it its rank among the arguments for the being of God. But its weakness is at once apparent when the question is asked, whether there exists a necessary relation between our ideas and outward realities. Let us own that the mind pos- sesses the idea of infinite perfection ; that in thought we are ever referring the imperfect to an ideal which is perfect. Does that fact prove that, this perfect idea has in reality an objective existence? In other words, is there such a relation between subjective thought and objective reality as that, that which is clearly thought must in reality also exist? Are there not many ideas present to the mind for which no corresponding realities are to be found ? Now, if somehow a necessary relation could be established between the subjective ideas of the mind and object- ive reality, so that what is thought becomes actual in fact, it would be easy enough to proceed from the thought of God to His actual existence. But, alas ! no such necessary relation exists. In his famous illustration of the " Lost Island," Gaunilo once and for all broke the force of the ontological argument. " Some say," says Gaunilo, THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 43 " that there is somewhere in the ocean an island which, as it is difficult, or rather impossible, to dis- cover what does not exist, is known as the Lost Island. It is fabled to be more amply supplied with riches and all delights in immense abundance than the Fortunate Islands themselves. And al- though there is no owner or inhabitant, yet in every way it excels all inhabited lands in the abundance of things which might be appropriated as wealth. Now, let anyone tell me this and I shall easily understand all that he says. But if he then pro- ceeds to infer : " You can no longer doubt this most excellent of islands, which you do not doubt to exist in your understanding, is really in existence somewhere, because it is more excellent to be in reality than in the understanding only, and, unless it were in existence, any other land which does exist would be more excellent than it, and so that which you have understood to be the best of isl- ands would not be the best." If, I say, he wishes in this way to compel me to assent to the existence of this island and to suppose that there can be no more doubt about it, either I shall consider that he is in jest, or I shall not know which I ought to consider to be more foolish, myself if I grant it to him, or 44 THE NATURE OF GOD. him if he thinks that he has, with any certainty at all, proved the existence of that island. He must first have shown me that its very excellence is the excellence of a thing really and indubitably exist- ing, and not in any degree the excellence of some- thing false or dubious in my understanding." Nor does it seem that, even Descartes himself was persuaded of the validity of the argument. The struggle which he had to convince himself of its soundness is almost pathetic. Sometimes we find him staking all knowledge simply on the clearness and distinctness of the deliverances of reason. And then again, we find him losing his anchorage in reason and confessing, " I trust to clear reason, be- cause it is from God, who, being perfect, cannot deceive." At last he owns that, it is from a belief in God's existence already within him that he started out to find by reason the proofs of His actual exist- ence in objective reality. That, instead of reason finding its own way to the being of God, it is at last a God, already postulated, that gives to reason its authority to affirm His real being. And so this argument, like all others based on the deliverances of reason alone, fails to carry con- viction. It points to the darkness rather than to THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 45 the light in which God dwells. Kant laughed the argument out of court on its logical side when he said, that the notion that he might have of three hundred dollars did not put them into his purse. Of course, it must not be thought that this great thinker did not see more in the ontological argu- ment than one would infer from the sarcastic way in which he dealt with it. For he did. He made the truth which it contains, the foundation of the argu- ment which he built upon what he calls the " prac- tical " reason. It is of its value measured from the logical side, or, if you please, as a purely logical proof that he speaks lightly of it. And in this judg- ment Kant was clearly right. An idea is one thing, objective reality another, and the mere notion of anything cannot of itself be accepted as a proof of its objective reality. The thought of food which a hungry man may have cannot furnish bread, nor can the idea of clothing provide means of protection from the winter's cold. Constituted as we are, we cannot accept notions for substances, or persuade ourselves that, because we possess an idea that that which corresponds to it exists in the outward world. And thus it stands ill with this as with the two 46 THE NATURE OF GOD. former proofs offered by philosophy in favor of the existence of God. Logically they all fail us in the end. They leave ns precisely where we were when we took them up. If we come to them with the conviction that God exists, they serve to con- firm the conviction. But if we come as one lost in intellectual darkness, hoping by the logical method to find our way into the light, we will be disap- pointed. Ratiocination is at last a relatively superficial and unreal path to the Deity. " I will lay my hand upon my mouth. I have heard of Thee by the hearing ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee," said Job. But it was in the moment when he learned the vanity of life ; when nothing was left but his own soul and the Being with whom his trials brought him into communion. An intel- lect perplexed and baffied, yet with a trustful sense of His presence, that was the experience of Job. And such has always been the case with the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still. I promised, a short time ago, to tell you what Kant thought of these three arguments. I need hardly remind you that no philosopher before or since, so thoroughly, measured the powers of the THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 47 speculative reason or so accurately set limits to its legitimate investigations. It is with the three ar- guments which we have just been considering that he deals in his " Critique." He affirmed that in the realm of speculation these three arguments alone were possible. But his conclusion in respect of them all is that they are insufficient. He con- tended that the reason is forced to seek somewhere a resting place in the regress of the conditioned — that if something exists it must be admitted that something exists necessarily, for the contingent exists only under the condition of another thing as its cause, up to a cause which does not exist con- tingently. Yet, for Kant, these statements carried with them no theological significance. One by one he examines the arguments on which Iyocke and L,eibnitz had relied, and this is his conclusion : " The attempt to reach the Infinite Being, whether by the empirical or the transcendental method, must prove abortive, and the reason stretches its wings in vain to soar beyond the world of sense by the mere might of speculative thought." In sum- marizing his conclusions, after a criticism of the three arguments, he says : " A Supreme Being is, therefore, for the speculative reason, a mere idea, 48 THE NATURE OF GOD. though a faultless one, a conception which perfects and crowns the system of human cognitions, but the object of which can neither be proved nor disproved by the reason." Holding, as he did, that our con- ceptions always require a sense content to work with, and as the idea of God contains no such con- tent whatever, he could come to no conclusion other than the one to which he actually came. It is true that Kant left room in his system for what he called the " practical reason." " We act," says he, "as if there were a God ; we feel as if we were free ; we regard nature as if she were full of special design ; lay plans as if we were immortal ; and thus our faith that these intelligible objects exist, practi- cally makes amends for the inability of the specula- tive reason." Thus in the practical reason this great thinker found the proof of the being of God, so far as he found such proof, and ends by appeal- ing to the moral faculties as affording assurance for the Divine existence, which no effort of the specu- lative reason is able to effect. It matters little that by some Kant has been deemed inconsistent. It matters not that Spencer declares his " Critique " to be a "philosophical humbug." That work stands to-day as the best exhibition of the logical THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 49 powers of the mind to deal with abstract questions, and the most convincing proof of the inability of the unassisted reason to make the being of God ob- jectively valid. Let us own that these arguments, of which Kant made so little, have not been with- out value. They have been helpful. But they have been helpful to those alone who, either con- sciously or unconsciously, have already accepted the facts which by laborious arguments they seek to prove. Who can read, for illustration, the aspiration with which Anselm begins his rational proof for the being of God without seeing that he already accepted by faith the very fact which by argument he attempts to prove ? Here is his prayer : " L,ord, teach me to seek Thee, for I cannot seek Thee unless Thou teach me, nor find Thee unless Thou show Thyself. May I seek Thee in longing for Thee and love Thee in finding." Or, again in his " Proslogium," " Therefore, L,ord, Thou who hast given understanding to faith, grant to me that so far as Thou knowest to be expedient I may under- stand that Thou art as we believe and that Thou art what we believe Thee to be. Our belief is this ; Thou art a being than whom none greater can be 4 50 THE NATURE OF GOD. conceived." Is such, a one really seeking to reach the goal of his search along the highway of the unassisted reason ? Or, is he not, on the contrary, seeking to find a rational basis for a belief of which he is already in possession? In fact, it must, I think, be admitted that all these so-called rational proofs are but attempts to account for and to justify a belief which already exists, and that it is perfectly safe to say that they have seldom, if, indeed, ever, carried conviction to anyone not already biased in their favor. Philosophy has found reasons for our convictions because it had to find them. It has vindicated faith where such faith has already existed. But it has never en- gendered it. It has furnished no proof objectively convincing. On the contrary, it has left man, weary with the toilsome journey along which it has led him, still gazing out into the impenetrable darkness, asking the same questions with which he began. Let us hear, then, the conclusion of the whole matter. Philosophy has nothing to tell us concern- ing the nature of God. In spite of its pretentious claims it has failed either to find Him or to satisfy the reason even of His existence. From such a THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY. 5 1 source we will look in vain for an answer to our question, What is God ? Elsewhere, we may per- haps, find a competent reply to our question. LECTURE SECOND. REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. Confessedly, then, philosophy has failed. De- spite of the long and weary search it has not found God. Long ago, Job predicted the result. Medi- tating beside his tent door, he ascertained for him- self the limits of the logical reason, and found a true knowledge of God to be beyond its reach. Speaking of such knowledge, he says : " It is high as heaven, what canst thou do ; deeper than hell, what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth and broader than the sea." And yet Job did find God. But not along the highway of intellection. He learned what all men of his class have since learned, that to the mere intellectual searcher " Clouds and thick darkness are round about Him," and that a true knowledge of God is the portion of those who seek Him with the whole heart. And such was also the conclusion of Paul. Though living in an age long preceded by one, the splendor of whose intellectual achievements has (52) REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 53 never been surpassed, he yet takes his stand with the man of Uz and affirms that " the world by wis- dom knew not God." It is the old story. One generation goeth and another cometh, and in each, man with unaided vision has striven to penetrate the darkness that hides the Almighty ; but always with the same result. Every purely rational at- tempt that has yet been made has ended in failure. Philosophy has left us on the top of Pisgah, with the desired land far in the distance, itself yielding to the stern decree, " Thou shalt not go over this Jordan." But why has philosophy failed ? Why, in spite of these long and weary years of searching, has it not fotmd God ? I think that in justice to phi- losophy we should first hear its own account of its failure. If the reasons presented appeal to us as valid, we are bound to accept them ; if not, we are then at liberty to go on to discover, if possible, such as are more satisfactory. You are doubtless aware that, philosophy puts the entire blame for its defeat on the nature of the task itself. It affirms that, because man is finite and God ^infinite, He is in the nature of the case un- knowable. As infinite God is ever beyond us, liv- 54 THE NATURE OF GOD. ing His life in utter remoteness ; strive as we may, we cannot pass the boundary that marks the limit of our outlook. What may lie beyond the horizon we do not and cannot know. We may, indeed, speculate, guess if we choose, but so far as real knowledge is concerned we are shut up to the finite. Such is the apology that philosophy offers in ex- planation of its failure. And if it be true that our finiteness excludes a knowledge of the infinite, then we are bound to accept the apology. No one is to be blamed for not doing that which prima facie is impossible ; what cannot be known cannot be known, and that is the end of the matter. But is it actually true that man is incapable of divine knowledge? And are we finite, in such a sense as to shut us out from all possible knowledge of God ? It will be worth our while to look crit- ically into this sweeping declaration for the reason that, it carries with it conclusions which we are by no means willing to admit. In fact, a denial of the possibility of divine knowledge involves a denial of the possibility of all knowledge. Whatever militates against the one militates against the other. There is no way of dividing the world of reality REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 55 into distinct and separate departments. Facts, do not stand alone and out of relation to other facts. The universe is a whole. Whatever may be said in the interest of any particular thesis, the finite and the infinite touch each other, and are so related as that each is known in the light of the other. To hold that a knowledge of God is impossible, for the reason that He is infinite, is not only to fly in the face of facts, but also to shut our eyes to a number of logical contradictions. For instance, it is a contradiction of terms to affirm that God is infinite and yet limited. To an infinite Being there can be no limitations save those that are self-imposed. Such a Being will do what- soever is pleasing to Himself. Around Him no circle can be drawn, and to Him no leashes may be attached. Whether in the realm of the limitless or in that of the limited He is alike free. A lim- ited infinite is unthinkable ; it involves a contra- diction of terms. Accordingly, the possibility of entering the realm of the finite, living in it, and even under its conditions is essential to the very conception of an infinite Being. Unrestrained power is not infinite power. It is rather its nega- tion. The highest form of power of which we can 56 THE NATURE OF GOD. conceive is that, of a power unlimited indeed from without, but at the same time capable of self-limit- ation. Almighty will, is mightier than the mightiest of physical powers, for the reason that it is capable of self-control. Apart from this ability, power becomes the victim of its own resistless might and ceases to be infinite. The ability of self-limitation, or if you please, of self-control, is the sine qua non of infinite power. And so, for the very reason that God is infinite in power, He may, if it pleases Him, enter the realm of the finite, live under its conditions, and so make Himself known to man. With Abraham in his wanderings ; with Moses in the solitudes of Horeb ; with Elijah, in the lonely vale of Cherith ; or with Daniel on the banks of the Chebar, He may, if he chooses, hold fellowship. He may even take upon Himself a human form, may live with men, share with them their lot, for nothing is or can be impossible to a Being who is really infinite in power. Accordingly, if God is not known it is not for the reason that He is infinite. Were He less we might, indeed, search in vain for Him. But for the very reason that He is what He is, He may bring Himself within the realm of our knowledge. Indeed, it is the very limitlessness of His power REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 57 that makes such a manifestation of Himself pos- sible. No, we shall have to discover some other reason than this of the infiniteness of God if we are serious in our attempt to find the reason for the failure of philosophy. Nor is it true that man is finite in such a sense as to shut out a knowledge of God. Your devout soul will testify not only that God has entered into his consciousness, but that he is also more certain of the fact than he is of most of those that enter into the experience of his daily life. In fact, the absolute certainty of our knowledge of God is the basis of religion and just as certainly of all morality. The conviction of millions of the sanest and most trust- worthy among men is that, they not only know God but that they have also communed with Him even as a friend communes with a friend. From this conviction no danger, no pain, in short, nothing " whether height or depth, principalities or powers, things present or things to come," has been able to separate them. To millions, the fact of such com- munion has been the most real experience of life ; to as many it has robbed death of its terrors and turned the martyr's flame into a halo of glory. To affirm that God is unknowable for the reason 58 THE NATURE OF GOD. that He is infinite and we finite, is to beg the ques- tion and to set ourselves at variance with the most palpable of facts. Nor is this all. We remarked a moment ago that the denial of the knowableness of the infinite carried with it a denial of the possibility of all knowledge. Now as a matter of fact, a knowledge of the infinite is inseparably bound up with our knowl- edge of the finite. Indeed, if we have ever put to ourselves the question, " how do we know what we know ? " we have discovered that much of our knowl- edge of particular things is derived from what we call their correlatives ; that is to say, that we know things in the light of their opposites. We know the light, as light, for the reason that we are able to to put it over against the darkness. Except for the darkness we could not know the light as such. The same is true of heat and cold, of evil and good, of love and hate, of truth and falsehood. Each are intelligible through reference to the other, each throws light on its opposite and is known by means of its opposite. It is so also with the infinite and the finite. Each is known in the light of the other. They are correl- ative terms, each of which carries with it a reference REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 59 to the other, and the idea expressed by each is intelli- gible only in the light of that which apparently de- nies it. In the words of John Caird, " In order to pro- nounce that we know only phenomena, we must be aware that there is something other than phenomena; we must, at least, know of the existence of things in themselves, realities behind phenomena from the knowledge of which, in the full sense of the word, our intelligence is debarred. If we know no other than finite and phenomenal existences, then we should never know or be able to characterize them as finite and phenomenal. To pronounce, in short, that our knowledge is in any sense limited, we must have access to a standard to which that limited knowledge is referred ; we must be aware, at least, of the existence of something beyond the limit which to our intelligence is inaccessible." And that is to say that, knowing the finite we must needs know the infinite, for the reason that a knowledge of the one involves a knowledge of the other. Nor has man in his search for truth at any time acknowledged the limits of the finite. Never yet has investigation, except in the interests of material- istic or agnostic philosophy, paused even on the 60 THE NATURE OF GOD. remotest shores of the sensuous, or confessed its in- ability to go beyond. Indeed, the very question, " Can man know the infinite?" proves that he does know it. Otherwise the question could have no meaning. It cannot be answered either in the affirmative or the negative except on the admission that we are already possessed of a knowledge of that to which the question refers. For how, let us ask, is the fact to be explained that a term which, as we are told, carries with it no intelligible mean- ing, has been chosen by the mathematician, the poet, yea, by all who have sought to put in speech man's loftiest and truest thought ? Are we to sup- pose that intelligent beings know not that of which they speak ? Or are we to think that, in the mind when the word is spoken there is present no idea that corresponds with it, or that thought ceases when the pen writes or the lips pronounce the familiar word? Do not conceptions antedate articulate speech, and do not words stand for ideas already possessed? Before the word is spoken the idea for which it stands must needs have preceded, for the reason that speech is but the feeble and oft inadequate attempt to express ideas already present to the mind. Language is REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 6 1 not first and then thought, but, contrariwise, man speaks what has already been in the thought. Astronomers tell us that the universe is limit- less ; that the worlds perform their revolutions in space to which no bounds can be set. And the words are not meaningless. We know what the limitless in space is. Beholding the far-away star, man asks himself the question, u What is beyond that?" and answers his own interrogation by say- ing, " The infinite in space." And thus, when on the wings of the morning, investigation takes its flight to the uttermost verge of the known uni- verse, it yet looks beyond, conscious not only that it is looking on the infinite, but also certain that it knows that upon which it is looking. The same is true in respect of the infinite in time. Sweeping backward, thought easily com- passes the brief period that we call the historic. Man speaks of these remote times, transports him- self to them, lives in his imagination in them, thinks of them as though they were but yesterday. In thought, he puts himself in touch with the remote past and communes with the builders of the pyramids. With ease he oversteps the ages as though they were but nothing, and brings himself 62 THE NATURE OF GOD. to the time when the morning stars sang the cre- ative hymn. Nor does he pause even here. In his regress, he rests not until finding himself on the shore of a limitless ocean, still looking outward, conscious that that which he now contemplates is nothing other than the infinite in time. Though seeing in the limitless beyond no resting-place for his thought, he is not surprised for the reason that he expects none, knows that there is none. Truly, the soul of man circumscribeth all things. It con- tradicts all experiences, abolishes time and space, and sees in both the inverse measure of its own power. A man is capable of eliminating both, for the human spirit sports with time. It " Can crowd eternity into an hour Or stretch an hour to eternity." Thus the fact that man speaks of the infinite, thinks it, takes it into his reckoning, is proof sufficient that he knows it. Of course, in saying this, we do not mean that it is possible for us to form a mental picture of the limitless. What is indeterminate, in the nature of the case, transcends the limited out of which we construct our mental pictures. But, though inca- REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 63 pable of representation, the infinite is not, for that reason, beyond our knowledge. We know things of which we can form no mental picture. The mind knows truth and lays hold of realities apart from their representations. It knows beauty, al- though it is incapable of framing for itself a mental picture of it. It knows truth, in spite of the fact that it is impossible to -represent it to the imagina- tion. It knows love, though it is unable to trans- late it into form. And so, too, though it is impos- sible for us to form a picture of either the limitless in space or time, we yet know them, because they are necessities of thought ; we are persuaded of them no less than we are persuaded of our own ex- istence. Face to face with the facts, we are hardly justified in accepting the apology offered by phi- losophy in extenuation of its failure. As a matter of fact, we do know the infinite ; we know it for the reason that a knowledge of the infinite is of neces- sity included in our knowledge of the finite. But we must now look a little more critically into the merits of the statement in which the finite- ness of man is so unqualifiedly affirmed. I need hardly remind you that it bears on its face the im- press of that school of thought which persistently 64 THE NATURE OF GOD. refuses to see anything but the material in man. Now, whatever may be our estimate of this particu- lar school of philosophy, it will not be denied that, it utterly fails to give a satisfactory account of man. It leaves out of consideration the most significant fact of his constitution — I mean the fact, of his self-conscious personality. Materialism, affords but a partial view of things. It sees in the world nothing but matter, and mis- takes the tenement in which man dwells for the man himself. To be sure, if we are content with the belief that we are one with the brute, that our beginning as well as our ending is the dust, materialism may satisfy us. But the moment man lifts his head or becomes possessed of the belief that his origin has been in the heavens rather than in the mire, he must part company with materialism. Nevertheless, let us hold the materialist for a moment to his dictum. Let us accept as true his statement that a divine knowledge is beyond the possibility of finite beings. Let us own that to the finite no vision of the infinite may come, and that God, if known at all, is known alone by beings who bear His likeness and share with Him His essence. Let us admit all that. What, then, is to be thought REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 65 of man in view of the fact that he does, as we have just seen, know the infinite ? Does not that fact make short work of the assumption that man is finite ? If a knowledge of God is possible only to beings whose nature is one with His own, does not the fact that man does possess such knowledge lift him out of the mire in which materialism places him and vindicate his right to call himself a kin of the Being whom he calls God ? In the light of the facts, the conclusion cannot be escaped. If you start with the premise that the infinite cannot be known by the finite, then the fact that man does know the infinite proves that he is more than finite. We cannot escape the conclusion, however at variance we may be with the philosophy. Nor is it true that man is finite in the sense in which materialism affirms that he is. He is more than finite and knows himself to be more. Of course, in saying this, we are not to be under- stood as affirming that he is infinite in the sense in which God is infinite. In the nature of the case there can be but one infinite Being. But while not infinite in the sense in which God is, it is just as certain that he is not finite in the sense in which the brute or things are finite. In his innermost 5 66 THE NATURE OF GOD. fiber man is spiritual, self-conscious and free. In all that really makes him man, he is the direct an- tithesis of the material. And it is of the very essence of man as a spiritual and self-conscious be- ing, to transcend the finite, to rise above the world of inner and outer experiences, seeing that neither would have meaning or reality if they did not rest on and imply a consciousness deeper than the con- sciousness of nature. It is this capacity of tran- scending the finite, this affinity to that which is universal and infinite, that constitutes the latent grandeur of man's nature and that has been the secret impulse to all that is great and noble in the individual life and in the history of the race. Nor does it at all vitiate this conclusion that man on the material side finds himself limited. What matters it even, if ages ago, these bodies were derived from animal or vegetable life through descent ? It is not with the tenement that we are concerned. It is rather with the tenant, the self- conscious being who inhabits the body and who for a time makes it his dwelling place. Nor is it a new discovery that the body is subject to the laws that govern in the realm of all things earthly. " Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth," is REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 67 indeed the certain doom of the fleshly house, since from whence it came thither shall it return again. But " Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not written of the soul." The solemn terms of the commitment have no reference to the being who during the brief period of his earthly pilgrimage makes the body his home. To the person, the body has always been regarded as but a temporary dwelling-place. The real man knows that he but inhabits it and that he is inde- pendent of it. He sees it growing old and weather- beaten at the very moment that he knows him- self to be youthful in thought and love and every power that belongs to the true self. L,et us own that, for the genesis of these tabernacles, evolution offers a plausible theory. Nevertheless, it stands to-day as it has always stood in the presence of the human spirit, with its hand on its mouth. For the spirit there is no explanation possible from the ma- terial side. It is upon this persistent something, this resident of the material body, this " I " of which man speaks whenever he makes reference to his true self, upon which evolution as a universal formula is wrecked. It is this self, this spiritual 68 THE NATURE OF GOD. being possessed of power to know and to know that it knows ; to feel and to know that it feels ; to will and to know that it wills, that is the despair of materialism. Yet jnst this is the real man. Noth- ing less, for nothing besides is essential to his be- ing. And this Ego, this spirit, transcends the finite and knows itself to be capable not only of a knowledge of God but also of actual communion with Him. And thus it appears that nothing either in the Divine nature or in our own is sufficient to bar out a knowledge of God. As a matter of fact we can and do know the infinite and are conscious that it sustains such relations to us as that we are com- pelled to find in it at once the presupposition and end of all finite thought and life. Once and for all, we must refuse to accept the apology of philosophy for its failure when it affirms that, since God is in- finite He cannot be known. That He is infinite no one will deny. But that He cannot on that account be known is a non sequitur, which, in the the interest of truth, we are bound to reject. But why, then, has philosophy failed ? I think that there are two reasons. First. Because of its refusal to deal honestly REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 69 with the problem of the world, in that it ignores the differences presented by it. Second. Because of its rigid adherence to the logical method. L,et ns now see in how far these indictments may be sustained. It may, I think, be assumed, that when once the true ground of the world is found, God will also be found. So far, at least, religion and philosophy are in accord. To find an ultimate in the light of which the world may be unified, is to end the search. But no ultimate can be accepted as final which fails to unify the diverse or present a conception in the light of which the world may be regarded as a whole. A true ultimate must afford a rational interpretation of the facts just as they are, rid them of their sensible diversity and reduce their manifoldness to simplicity. Now, the discovery of such a world-ground is the task of philosophy. It begins with the assumption that the world is knowable ; in other words, that it is a unit. It assumes this because it must. A world that is knowable must in the nature of the case be a unit. It cannot be many. And yet the world does not present itself as such. It is not the unity of things that most impresses 70 THE NATURE OF GOD. one when standing face to face with realities. On the contrary, it is their manifoldness, their diver- sity. Things are not alike either in reality or ap- pearance. Laws that hold in respect of a particular class of facts do not seem to hold in respect of an- other. Truths apparently contradict, and the aspect of the world is that of a chaos rather than that of a harmonious unity. Now, when these real- ities are classified they arrange themselves under two distinct categories. We speak of them as belong- ing either to the world of mind or of matter, to the world of spirit or of substance, the world of thought or that of sense. Both of these worlds are real ; with both we have to do, and by no trick of speech can their differences be eliminated. No one needs be told that the objects that pre- sent themselves to the eye or to the touch are real. They prove themselves by every test of reality. We believe that the world in which we live is an honest world ; that it does not deceive us. We believe that when our eyes rest on the forest, the distant hills, the landscape, that we behold realities and not phantoms, or even the projections of our minds. We are satisfied that the world of matter, at least, is real. We cannot persuade our- REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 7 1 selves that we are living in a world of mere appear- ances, that we behold nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. But the world of thought is no less real. In fact, we know it as we know nothing else. We know it better than we know those grosser forms of matter that we see with our eyes and handle with our hands. Thus there are two distinct classes of real- ities, or, if you please, two worlds. And what is more, these worlds cannot be identified. They be- long to two separate classes, possess different qual- ities, in short, have nothing in common. The world of matter is extended ; that of spirit is devoid of extension. The one is the world of freedom, the other that of necessity, and any theory in which these distinctions are ignored or their realities iden- tified, denies the trustworthiness of experience and deals unfairly with the facts. If we are to find our way into the light instead of the darkness we must deal honestly with the facts and reckon with them just as they are. Now, in the light of these considerations we are able to see what is essential to a true ultimate. It must do two things : First. It must take into account these distinct 72 THE NATURE OF GOD. worlds of spirit and matter, of thought and of sub- stance, and deal with them just as they present themselves ; and Secondly. It must present a conception in the light of which the diverse may be eliminated and the world conceived as a unit. That alone can be a true principle of unity and at the same time a true world-ground which is able to meet and to satisfy both of these requirements. A little further on we shall examine the world- ground as presented by religion and submit it to both of these tests. Meanwhile, let us see in how far the various world-grounds proposed by philoso- phy have been able to meet them. Allow me once more to state the problem. Given a world made up of the diverse, to find a ground in which these diversities may be reconciled and the world conceived as a unit. You will grant, I am sure, the impossibility of our taking into account the entire range of philo- sophical literature. I shall accordingly select from its numerous systems three, in which an answer to our problem is attempted, and which at the same time represent the non-religious thought of the present. Let us begin with Pantheism. REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. J$ Its father was Benedict Spinoza. Born in the city of Amsterdam, in the year 1632, he yet stands as the best exponent of the school of thought of which he was the originator. Spinoza, finds the unifying principle of the world in the idea of " Substance." With Spinoza there is but one real thing, and this thing exists in itself. It needs nothing else to explain it. This is the conception which needs no other conception in order that it may be conceived. This one and universal sub- stance is the real ground of everything else. Mat- ter and mind are simply attributes of this one single substance and belong to its essence. In themseleves they have no reality and exist only in appearance. Matter, or extension, exists in modes. It may be at rest or in motion. So also does thought. The modes of thought are intellect and will. But all modes and attributes belong to the one substance and are but its different manifes- tations. They have no separate and independent existence. Thus you see how Pantheism solves the problem of the diverse and by what means it arrives at unity. It does it by denying the existence of the diverse. Mind is not, matter is not. There is, ac- 74 THE NATURE OF GOD. cordingly, no dualism in the world that needs to be explained or resolved. Its dualism disappears in the single idea of "substance." It will not, I think, be denied that we have here a short and easy way out of our difficulty. It is that of denying that the difficulty exists. If you can persuade yourself that neither the outer nor the inner worlds are real, that both are but appear- ances, the mere shadows of something real that lies back of them, you will have but little diffi- culty in unifying the world or of finding the ulti- mate which thought demands. But if you believe that the world is an honest world, that it does not present shadows instead of substances, and if you are convinced that in so far as we know the world we know it as it really is, you will find it impossi- ble to rest in the conviction that our problem is to be solved by the simple process of eliminating its troublesome factors. It is true that Pantheism has its fascinations for many minds. Like all systems of thought which have occupied the attention of men, it contains its grains of truth. It serves as a healthy antidote to that bald Deism which would rule God out of His world and seat Him upon some icy throne far away, an indifferent spectator of the REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 75 world which He has created, and then abandoned to itself. Nevertheless, there is a sin of which no sys- tem of thought may be found guilty if it is to com- mand the attention and confidence of the great body of thinking men, and that sin is the one of manipulating the facts as we know them. And of this Pantheism stands convicted. It does not leave matter and mind as distinct realities but makes them coalesce into the single idea of sub- stance, of which they are but the double shadow. But in doing this Pantheism violates the first prin- ciple of science, which requires that we leave the facts just as we find them. A philosophy that would command the confidence of men must not in its own interest juggle with the facts or ignore dif- ferences where such differences actually exist. And so in our search for the ground of unity we are compelled to part company with Pantheism. We must rest satisfied with no ultimate in which the diverse cannot be reconciled and the world as it is be conceived as a unit. Perhaps, when such an ultimate is found, we shall also find the One who is the first and the last, the beginning and the end- ing ; for it may be that, none other than He can be the true and final ultimate. J 6 THE NATURE OF GOD. Let us now turn our attention to Idealism. It, too, proposes a principle of unity. It finds its world-ground in " thought." It ought, perhaps, be said that Idealism includes all those systems of thought in which the separate and distinct existence of the material world is denied, in the interest of what it is pleased to call the "Idea." Rightly de- fined, Idealism includes all those systems in which the world is conceived in terms of thought, or in which thought is made the only true and eternal reality. It includes the illustrious names of Kant, of Berkley and of Hegel — names which stand as synonyms of speculative thought itself. Differ- ing from each other in many particulars, they all agree in this, that the unifying principle of the world is to be found in thought. Professor Mullins, in his thoughtful book, " Why is Christianity True?" thus states the essential tenets of Idealism as they bear upon our problem : " Everything which exists is thought. Thought and existence are identical. Matter, if we view it properly, is thought and nothing else. Cause and effect which we observe in the world of matter are really a mental ideal which we bring to matter our- selves. Space, which we see all about us, is also a REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. J J way of regarding matter which the mind creates. As you might gather fruit and drop it into a bag, so the mind gathers the facts of the external world and drops them into the conception of space. Space is the envelope which the mind slips over all objects around it. This is true, also, of all other forms of thought about material things. Thus, with all our strivings, we never get at anything except ideas or thought." " These ideas, however, are not merely our own ideas confined within the limits of our own minds. The world about us is not to be confounded with the world within us. The world about us is too evident and too actual for us to rest in this conclu- sion, says Idealism. The world actually exists out- side of us. If, then, there is nothing in the world but thought, and if the world is not merely our thought about it but something more, what is it ? The answer which Idealism gives is, that the ex- ternal world represents for us the thoughts of God. Indeed, Idealism asserts that the world is ' the great thinker ' in the act of thinking His thoughts, and we are thinkers who think His thoughts after Him. . . . Beginning thus with an idea, nothing is found in the world about us nor in the world above us, 78 THE NATURE OE GOD. but the one Being whose chief characteristic is ideas. All the development of the world, then, is but the development of God's thought. There is an evolution going on, but it is simply the evolution of thought." Thus you see how Idealism disposes of the prob- lem presented in the world's diversity, and by what method it arrives at unity. It disposes of the divers- ity in the world just as Pantheism does, by denying that it exists. It identifies matter and mind, exist- ence and thought, and leaves us but a single reality, of which all things are but the projection. But by what right does Idealism thus dispose of the material world, the reality of which is attested by every sense faculty? By what right does it close its eyes to the entire realm of reality, and persist in seeing but one hemisphere of the real ? Is such a method of dealing with facts in all con- science to be spoken of as honest ? It is little won- der that Idealism has never been more than the creed of a particular sect. Shutting its eyes to the real world of sense impressions, or what we call the facts of nature, its conclusions are at once vitiated. It is the whole world, and not a segment of it, that is to be reckoned with, and no principle of unity REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 79 can possibly be the true one which does not take into account the whole circle of facts just as they present themselves, and at the same time furnish a conception in the light of which they may be uni- fied. If, therefore, we really know what we know, we are compelled to reject the ultimate which Ideal- ism presents. If we really know anything, we know both the world of matter about us and the world of mind within. If our knowledge is real knowledge, we know that they are different and that they can- not be identified. Dualism, is a truth which no in- tellectual process has yet been able to overcome. To force a solution, by assuming some unifying principle regardless of consequences, is not a pro- ceeding which seems to be desirable and which is certain to lead to many evil results. But I must hasten to speak of yet another ulti- mate, presented by the now current philosophy as a solution of our problem. It is the one offered by Materialism. Materialism finds the unifying prin- ciple of the world in the " atom." By this atom the worlds were created and all that in them is. Here in the crystal or in the grass blade ; there in the animal or man. Here building mountains or continents, or there in the systems that shine in the 80 THE NATURE OF GOD. darkness, this something, which eye hath not seen nor ear heard has been at work fashioning the uni- verse of being. Toiling through ages, unguided and without purpose, it has at length produced a world the wisdom of which has been alike the won- der of the scientist and the philosopher. Just what this " atom " may be we are not told. Even its existence and nature belong to that great realm of existences the grounds of which, as Professor Hux- ley tells us, " rest upon the great act of faith." This alone we know, that the atom is matter, since in the world there is nothing besides. But how about that other world, the existence of which is just as certain, and even better known by us than this world of matter? How about this world of mind and thought and spiritual realities? The answer is, " This also is matter. Thought is but a secretion of the brain." In the words of a modern materialist, " All those capacities which are comprehended under the name of the ' soul's activi- ties,' are only functions of the brain substance." Or to express it more coarsely, " Thought stands in the same relation to the brain as the gall stands to the liver." Accordingly, there is no world of mind or thought or spirit. As separate realities they disap. REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 8 1 pear. But one thing is left, and that is matter. I shall not occupy your time in considering the enormous inconsistencies of Materialism or the havoc, which if practically applied, it would make of all that is most sacred to us in life. That must not now concern us. Our question is this ; does Mate- rialism furnish a true principle of unity ? Does it look the world in the face, reckon with its two great realities, and show us a way in which they may be reconciled ? If it does not, then the atom is not and cannot be a true ultimate. You will recall that long ago Spinoza laid down this axiom : " Things which have nothing in common cannot be under- stood by means of one another ; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other." In view of this allow me to ask — have matter and mind anything in common ? Are they not essen- tially distinct? Is not one of the distinguishing attributes of matter extension and that of mind in- extension? Is not mind free, and is not matter clearly within the realm of necessity ? Prima facie, the world is a dualism. We can make nothing else out of it. What God hath not joined together, it is not within the power of thought to unite. We have either to fly in the face of facts, or reject the 6 82 THE NATURE OF GOD. ultimate presented by Materialism. From our prob- lem we must not eliminate any of its essential fact- ors if we are to arrive at a true result. Mind is. Matter is. Both are real. Both are to be taken into account, and no ultimate can possibly be ac- cepted as true, which fails to recognize their sep- arate existence at the moment that it binds them together into a harmonious unity. Well, had we the time we might go on to exam- ine other and less pretentious systems ; but the re- sult would be the same. All alike deal unfairly with the facts. In the interest of some particular principle of unity they all deny the diversity, and accordingly all end in failure. We will never arrive at a correct solution of any problem by the short- cut method of eliminating its troublesome factors. Every factor must be taken into account and its help sought, if we are to arrive at truth. They all are but way-marks that need to be consulted if we are unwilling to wander forever in the mazes of uncertainty. " Every would-be universal formula," says Professor James, " every system of philosophy which rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one-half of mankind and falls to the rear to become at the very best the creed of a partial REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 83 sect. Either it has dropped out of its net some of our impressions of sense — what we call the facts of nature — or it has left the theoretic and denning department with a lot of inconsistencies and unme- diated transactions on its hands ; or else finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and emotional powers, with no object outside of themselves, to react on or to live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to success. Someone will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system and to seek another in its stead." But a second reason for the failure of philosophy is to be found in its rigid adherence to the logical method. It proceeds upon the assumption that if God exists, His existence must be capable of logical demonstration. It must be logically deduced, just as one would deduce a proposition in Euclid from self-evident axioms. Now, it might as well be admitted once and for all, that the existence of God cannot be demon- strated. Proofs there are in plenty, but they are not such as may rightly be called objectively valid. What is above logic and outside its legitimate realm cannot be demonstrated by logic. Every question must be determined by the sort of evidence corre- 84 THE NATURE OF GOD. sponding to its nature, and we have no right to de- mand some other sort. In the realm of the ab- stract, logic may help us ; but in that of the con- crete, it is of but little, if any, value. In all these matters logic is compelled to wait on experience for its premises, and experience stands in its own right. And God is not an abstraction. He exists, if He exists at all, in the realm of the concrete and the actual. But in this realm we can deduce nothing logically. We believe in our own existence and in that of the world, although neither can be logically demonstrated. Life abounds in practical certainties for which no logical reason can be given, but which are nevertheless the foundation of our daily life. Our practical trust in the uniformity of nature, in one another, in the affection of friends, in the senses, is not the result of a logical process of thought. Numberless logical objections might be raised which would reduce all these to probability ; still we are convinced of them. In fact, the beliefs which we hold with the deepest conviction are not the cer- tainties of logic, but the certainties of life. Dem- onstration, in the nature of the case, is confined to the realm of the subjective and logical relation of ideas, and can never attach to reality. It cannot be applied to either the facts of science or to those of religion. REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 85 And so, when philosophy attempts by logical deduction to establish the existence of God it un- dertakes an impossible task. It has back of it no self-evident axioms upon which it can rest, and accordingly builds its structure in the air. No, the existence of God cannot be deduced by logic. It is the necessary postulate of every argument rather than the logical conclusion of one. It is a truth, which like most of the truths of which we are convinced, depends not upon demonstration but exists in its own right. Moreover, the discovery of that principle of unity which, as we have already seen, is essential to any true world-ground, is absolutely beyond the power of logic. Logic does not banish contradictions. It does not reconcile differences. On the contrary, it but intensifies them where they exist. Permit me once more to quote from John Caird : " We speedily find that the unity of the spiritual world is a thing which lies beyond the scope of formal logic, and that instead of reconciling, our rational efforts only bring into harsher opposition and discordancy the differences we seek to solve. Nor from the nature of the thing can it be otherwise. If the sphere of spir- 86 THE NATURE OF GOD. itual reality be that in which nothing exists as a self -identical entity, how is it possible that formal logic, whose fundamental principle is the law of identity, should be other than baffled in the en- deavor to grasp them? Or how can an organ of thought which tests all things by the so-called law of contradictions, compass, or in the attempt to compass, do anything else than misrepresent the realities of a world where analysis is ever revealing oppositions which, if taken abstractly, are contradictions and whose absolute opposition can only vanish in the light of a higher synthe- sis ? The only source of the rationalizing intellect in order to attain self-consistency is to explain away or sacrifice one side or aspect of truth to an- other with which it seems to conflict, or to select some supposed fundamental principle or dogma as its starting point, and force everything else in the many-sided world of thought into external coher- ence with it. The only method, in other words, which logical ratiocination has for attaining unity is that of abstraction and generalization ; that which proceeds by the elimination or excision rather than by harmonizing differences." I shall offer no comment on the intellectual dis- REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 87 honesty of such a procedure as this. It but con- firms the statement made at the beginning, that philosophy does not deal fairly with the problem of the diverse, that it does not look the world squarely in the face and deal with it just as it is. Little wonder is it that it has failed to find God, for God is not the goal of the pathway along which philoso- phy chooses to travel. But is there, then, no ultimate capable of bind- ing together the diverse elements of the world and of satisfying all those requirements which thought demands in a true world-ground ? I think there is. I believe that when fairly considered just such an ultimate is presented in the Christian idea of a per- sonal God. At any rate, it will be worth our while to submit it to the various tests of a true ultimate, and if it proves itself capable of meeting them we are justified in affirming it as final. There are three requirements which the mind makes of any would-be ultimate. First. It must afford a rational explanation of the world as it is. Second. It must present a principle of unity in the light of which the diverse may be reconciled. Third. It must satisfy the needs of every de- 88 THE NATURE OF GOD. partment of our personality by presenting an object upon which each may react and for which it may live. Let us now apply these three tests to the Chris- tian idea of God in order that we may see whether it is able to meet them. First, then, does this idea afford a rational ex- planation of the world? Whether true or false, any view of the world which completely satisfies the mind must conform to the conditions which the mind itself imposes. The mind must be its own umpire to decide whether the world is fit to be called rational or not. That it so accepts it is proven by the fact that it believes itself able to in- terpret it and regards it as an object of knowledge. But a world that can be known is, ipso facto, rational. If it can be known it is for the reason than it is a " cosmos " and not a chaos. And as such man has universally regarded it. Face to face with its realities he has always believed himself in the presence of that which may be interpreted. Men universally believe that there is such a thing as real science, that the world is an honest world, and that our knowledge of it is not a delusion. It matters little whether this conviction be true or REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 89 false ; it is here, it is universal and verified by every test. Accordingly the mind refuses to accept anything as a world-ground that treats its convic- tion with disrespect. Believing the world to be rational, it demands a rational world-ground and refuses to accept any other. Well, then, does the idea of a personal God af- ford a rational explanation of the world ? Does it account for that intelligence which the scientist seeks to discover, and which at last is the essence of his science ? I think that to ask this question is also to answer it. For, confessedly, no ultimate other than the one presented in a personal and self- conscious Being is capable of meeting the test. Every other fails, and fails utterly. Mere Will alone, mere Mind alone, cannot meet the require- ment. Schopenhauer's " Pure Will " or Hartman's " Impersonal Will and Idea " do not meet the case. Pure will is nothing. Reason itself, is a pure ab- straction. Subtract from reason or will or idea the element of personality and nothing is left. Pure will, unconscious intelligence, impersonal reason, impersonal spirit, are all empty phrases. They need the self-conscious spirit to give them meaning and reality. They are at best but functions of the per- 90 THE NATURE OF GOD. sonal self that stands back of them. All are actualized in a personal being alone. It is the person who thinks, the person who wills, the person who reasons. So far, then, as the first test is con- cerned, the Christian idea of a personal God meets it. It affords the only rational explanation of a rational world, and among all the ultimates which have yet been presented it is the only one that does. But the second demand that thought makes of a true ultimate is that it present a conception in the light of which the world may be unified. Now, to our senses, the world presents itself as a dualism. Realities exist under two forms, and arrange them- selves into two distinct classes — those of matter and those of mind, those of spirit and those of sub- stance. And yet, if our knowledge of the world as a whole be real, and if the world be as we be- lieve it to be, a cosmos, then it cannot be many, it must be one. However it may present itself, a world which can be known must be at bottom a unit. But if it be in reality what thought affirms it as being, then the explanation of its unity is to be found in its ultimate. Plainly it can be found nowhere else, for in no other light than in that of its ground can the unity of the world be affirmed. REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 9 1 We have already seen that, as yet, philosophy has presented no ultimate equal to the task of unifying the world. In the interest of a particular principle of unity, one or the other of the diverse elements has been left out of consideration. Idealism elim- inates the real world outside of us, and materialism does the same for the inner world of ideas. But no one-sided interpretation of the facts is admissi- ble. No troublesome factor may be ignored. There must be no juggling with the facts. Matter is, mind is, and no ultimate is worthy of the name which is incapable of mediating between the two and of presenting a conception in the light of which the unity of the world may be confirmed. But how fares it with the Christian idea of a personal Being in the face of this severe and crit- ical test ? Does it present that bond of unity which thought requires in a true world-ground ? I think we have but to apply it in order to find that it stands alone in the field as a mediator. It has no rival. Indeed, we may affirm with L,otze that " it is the unity of the diverse in our own self-conscious personality that suggests the unity of the world." In fact, the only unity that is or that can be, is the unity effected in or by the self-conscious person. 92 THE NATURE OF GOD. Take, for instance, your own self-conscious per- sonality. You are aware that it is made up of many elements and manifestations. You are at least a trinity. There is your rational, your voli- tional and your emotional nature. You cannot fail to recognize these distinctions in yourself. At different moments, indeed, at the same moment, you live and have your being in each. And yet, in spite of these distinctions, you recognize that you are one single person. You speak of yourself in the exercise of these distinct functions and say, I think, I feel, I will. Will, intellect, feeling, are bound together in unity in the self-conscious per- son. You live in altogether different experiences ; experiences of joy and of sorrow, of childhood and manhood. But you are aware that you are the one single person who rejoices or suffers, who was young and now old. Sixty years ago, when you were yet a child, there was made, let us say, a photographic image of what you were then. Twenty years later, when manhood was reached, the same was repeated. Though many changes have taken place, you still recognize in the picture of the man some of the features of the child. Yesterday, after the lapse of thirty more years, you repeated the experience. REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 93 Again you are different. A stranger cannot now identify the man of sixty with the child of three score years ago. Yet those three pictures are the images of one and the same person. The first is that of the beautiful and careless child, the second that of the mature man, the third the man of gray hairs and ripened experience. Yet you speak of the child, of the man, and of the one now in his full maturity, and say, "They are myself." You identify the three, although in appearance they are diverse and say the}' are one. But what makes the identifica- tion possible ? Is it not the fact that in self-con- sciousness the unity is effected, and is it not the personality that spans the years and unites in itself the diverse ? It is the self that abides throughout the years, and it is in this same self that the one- ness of the three is established. And so, too, in the self-conscious person the two distinct realities of the world of matter and that of mind are unified. As self-conscious persons we are at home alike in the world of material things and in the world of thought. In us both worlds are united. We live in the body, suffer its pains, experience its hunger, feel the weight of its years. We speak of bodily suffering, and say, " I suffer " ; of bodily 94 THE NATURE OF GOD. hunger, and say, "I hunger," and of the years whose increase write their record alone on the physical structure, and say, "I am growing old." But we live also in the realm of thought and spirit lost to the material world and finding in the spir- itual world our native element. As personal beings we touch both worlds and unite them in the unity of our self-consciousness. And thus in the self-conscious personality we find an ultimate entirely capable of satisfying the second test, in that it presents the principle of unity required in a true world-ground. In fact, person- ality stands alone in the field. It alone is capable of binding together the outer and the inner, the world of matter and the world of spirit. Beside it there is no other mediating principle. But there is yet one other requirement which must be met in any ultimate which may be accepted and rested in as final. It must satisfy the demands of our volitional and emotional, as well as those of our rational nature. In other words, it must not leave any of our fundamental powers without an object outside of themselves on which to react and for which to live. It is not enough to warrant our acceptance of any proposed ultimate that it satisfies REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 95 the logical side of our nature alone. After all, the logical expresses but one side of our complex being. We are emotional and volitional as well as rational. All of these departments of our nature must have a vote in the matter, and no ultimate will pass muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity or which leaves them without a chance to work. From the emotional and active there come demands which must be taken into account and reckoned with. The integrity of our entire personality in each and all of its essential elements must be preserved at all hazards, and no one of our essential powers may be left to perish through atrophy. And this is the reason why every ulti- mate that has yet been offered by philosophy has been rejected. They have each and all appealed to the logical department of our nature and have forgotten that man is more than a reasoning being. One and all, they have presented a deaf ear to the cry that comes from the emotional and active side of our nature and forgotten that it is not to be hushed by the offer of a stone instead of bread. But does the Christian idea of a personal God as the ground of the world meet this requirement also? Does it present an object outside of our- 96 THE NATURE OF GOD. selves on which our whole being may react ? Does it make provision for every department of our nature and leave no one of our essential powers to sicken and die for want of exercise ? Replying to this question in the light of experience it may con- fidently be affirmed that no ultimate other than this has had vitality enough to awaken or to keep alive all of our essential powers. Every other has left the will without a motive to act and the heart without an object to love. But where has the need of the whole self been so completely answered as in the Christian idea of a personal God ? What has so stimulated thought or summoned it to such splendid achievements? What conception has so fired the emotions or given such an impulse to noble activity ? It alone satis- fies the demands of man's reason. It alone presents an object that he can love without being degraded and live for without being debased. And thus it appears that all the requirements which thought insists shall be met in a true world- ground are met and satisfied in the Christian idea of a personal God. It affords the only possible expla- nation of a rational world. It alone unifies its diverse realities and satisfies the needs of all the essential REASONS FOR THE FAILURE. 97 elements that enter into the constitution of our complex being. But if God be a person, we have in that fact a sufficient answer to our question — Why has philosophy not found Him ? For if He be a person, then it is not within the province of philosophy to find Him. Ratiocination is not a pathway that leads to a knowledge of a personal being. Into the realm of the personal, mutuality alone can open the door. The hunger of the soul rather than the craving of the intellect is the pri- mary requisite to the finding of the One who Him- self has declared : "Ye shall seek me and find me when ye shall search for me with all your heart." 7 LECTURE THIRD. RELIGION. We must now bid adieu to philosophy. Our brief review of its methods and results has sufficed to con- vince us of its inability to deal with our question — What is God? Yet, we must not suppose that philosophy is of no value to religion. Within its legitimate sphere it may be of the greatest service. It may help us to sift the wheat from the chaff and afford a valuable aid to the work of clarifying our conceptions of a Supernatural Being that have been otherwise derived. If religion has, as we shall presently see, its basis in experience, then the business of philosophy is that of sifting the facts, of verifying them, of separating them from the accidental, of developing their organic unity, of showing their connection with other elements of our knowledge ; in short, of giving them that form which systematic knowledge must at last assume. So long as it confines itself to the facts given in the religious consciousness, examines them in the light of necessary postulates of thought, it may be (98) REUGION. 99 of immense service. But the moment it goes be- yond this, its legitimate sphere, it becomes a usurper, and, though masquerading under the garb of friend- ship, is certain to prove itself the subtle and un- compromising foe of religion. Religion stands in its own right ; and the rela- tion that philosophy sustains to it is that of serv- ant. Whenever this relation is reversed, philosophy is sure to substitute its abstract conceptions of God for those of religion, and to debase the eternal thou into a metaphysical IT, which it offers for our worship and seeks to make respectable by vest- ing it with dictionary titles which have no meaning to the religious soul. 11 Philosophy baptized In the pure fountain of eternal love Has eyes indeed ; and viewing all she sees As meant to indicate a God to men, Gives Him the praise and forfeits not her own. ' ' Apart from such baptism, philosophy in the field of religion is a blind guide, which, if implicitly followed, is certain to land its votary in the ditch. Now, the vital distinction between philosophy and religion is this. In philosophy, the mind is yet intent on its search for the Infinite ; God is yet IOO THE NATURE OF GOD. in the remote distance, the Being yet to be discov- ered. In religion the search is ended, the goal has been reached and the soul finds itself in possession of God. Permit me here to quote a sentence from Caird : " Whether we view religion from the human side or from the divine ; as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the life of God in the soul ; in either aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has ceased to be a far-away vision, and has become a reality. The very first pulsations of the spiritual life, when rightly apprehended, is the indication that the division between the spirit and its object has vanished ; that the ideal has become the real, the finite reached its goal and become suffused in the life of the Infinite." Now, if this claim can be vindicated ; if it can be made out that religion has not only found God, but that it also holds actual and familiar fellowship with Him, then clearly it has something to tell us of the nature of the One with whom it holds such intimate relations. For the reason that religion is what it is, it is in the nature of the case the final authority on all ques- tions pertaining to the nature of the Being who is back of all. RELIGION. IOI But, what is religion ? What do we mean when we speak of a specific attitude of the spirit or of a particular class of experiences as religious ? What is that particular quality or characteristic that attaches to this particular class of facts, and which does not attach to others ? For, if we are able thus to isolate a certain kind of facts, it must be for the reason that something attaches to them that does not attach to others, by means of which we are able to classify and distinguish them as such. Just what this characteristic is, is of the most vital im- portance. If we are to make any headway in our study of religious facts, we must first be able to distinguish them from others, and determine what it is that gives them a right to be classified as such. In other words, we must have some criterion to which facts must be referred, and to which they must conform, before we accept them as distinct- ively religious. As in science a correct comparison and classification of facts depends on their reference to some principle, so also in religion. But what is this principle or criterion ? Clearly it must be something that carries us beyond the accidental ; beyond mere outward resemblances and differences. Apart from such a principle we are 102 THE NATURE OF GOD. certain to be misled and to fall into the mistake of identifying religion with that which only resem- bles it. Perhaps we may best determine what this criterion is by satisfying ourselves as to what it is not. For one thing, our principle is not to be found in mere forms of worship or in anything that is out- ward and accidental. And outward worship is a mere accident of religion. For when we come to look into its history we find that no particular form of worship is essential to its life. Worship is but one of the forms in which religion finds expression. But it is capable of existence apart from formal wor- ship. It has lived in dens and caves, where no out- ward suggestion of sanctity has served to lift the thoughts upward, as well as in gorgeous cathedrals in which the genius of man has given to wood and marble the power of speech. It has lived and flour- ished alike, in the silence of earth's waste places and in splendid temples resounding with the melody of organ and chanting choir. It is utterly indifferent to the outward. It needs no anthem or ritual or priest to give it vitality. On the contrary, when- ever the formal and the outward have been relied upon or unduly emphasized, religion in all that RELIGION. 103 makes it what it really is has sickened and died. But just as little is the principle that we are seek- ing to be found in knowledge. Yet that is by no means the same as saying that knowledge is not important. It is. For religion does not consist of the stuff of which dreams are made. It does not shut itself up to the realm of mere emotions or live its life in the privacy of our subjective experiences alone. On the contrary, religion is intelligent. It rests solidly on realities rationally apprehended. In fact, were not man a thinking being he could not be religious. It is his ability to think and to rightly interpret his experiences that makes him a religious being. The moment that religion parts company with knowledge it cuts itself loose from reality, degenerates into mere caprice and waywardness, and ceases to be religion. But the knowledge that is vital is not of necessity the kind that takes the form of pure thought, or ideas or doctrines scien- tifically apprehended and developed into reasoned systems. Were this the case the learned alone would be religious, and we would search in vain for piety among the lowly. And religion sways all alike, whether learned or ignorant. It lives its life alike in the soul of a Newton or a peasant. It enriches 104 THE NATURE OF GOD. and floods with supernatural light the fields of reasoned truth and imparts its comfort and strength to the ignorant and oppressed pauper who toils for his daily bread. Knowledge is, indeed, important, but it is the kind of knowledge of which all alike are capable ; the kind that enters into ordinary thinking and that expresses itself in the language of common life. Nor does the idea of religion reside in creed or dogma. It is independent of both. Both are acci- dental and secondary. Both are after products. As the plant precedes the science of botany, and the facts of history antedate their record on the printed page, so does religion precede both dogma and creed. Both are but attempts to put into form the facts of which religion knows itself to be pos- sessed. Religion is the reality of which creed and doctrine are but the verbal expression. But while relegating these to a secondary place, we must not lose sight of their importance and real service. In fact, both are necessary to the propa- gation as well as the purifying of religion itself. Except as religion takes form in doctrine it ceases to be rational. What cannot be expressed in speech is vet in the realm of fane v. It is the formal ex- RELIGION. IO5 pression of its content in creed and dogma that re- deems religion from the vagaries of privacy and individual idiosyncrasies. Were it to live its life shut up to our inner experiences it could never know itself and would be certain to degenerate into the unrealities of mysticism. In order that it may become knowledge, its subjective experi- ences must needs be translated into doctrine, for the reason that it is in doctrine that what is in the inner life is represented to the intellect, examined, clarified, and put into rational form. Yet neither creed nor dogma are to be identified with religion. Religion is the reality ; doctrine its more or less correct expression. But just as religion needs thus to be repre- sented in doctrine in order that it may become intelligent, so also does it need to be framed into creed, in order that it may become a living power in the world. A creedless religion can never become more than the private possession of the individual. It can never conquer the world or per- suade men of its reality. For, after all, as Sohm has indicated, " a creed is not as some think, a series of dry formulas in which is summed up the results of abstract thinking on divine things. It is 106 THE NATURE OF GOD. rather a record of divine realities which have hith- erto sustained the life of the religious community, which through past centuries and even now repre- sent the source of power and ruling strength of re- ligion against all hostile influences and contain the principles of continual regeneration of the world. In fact, it is in the creed that the religious com- munity is made to recognize its oneness and power. It is the truths of religion, thrown into the form of a creed and lifted up as a standard, that has made it an objective power well nigh as mighty in the outer world as are the truths thus witnessed and confessed over the individual life." But while all this is true, it must not be forgotten that the creed is one thing and religion quite another. The creed is the ex- pression ; religion the reality. And so we shall look in vain for the principle after which we are seeking in either creed or dogma. Neither are of the essence of religion, for the reason that it has its existence apart from both. Its ultimate source and secret is to be found neither in philo- sophic intelligence nor in anything belonging to the outward, but in the feeling of self-abnegation, of conscious dependence, of reverence, aspiration, in that disposition or attitude towards God, call it REUGION. 107 what you will, that gives moral elevation to the humblest intelligence and sheds spiritual grandeur around the homeliest and obscurest life. But it may be asked, By what right is the field containing the principle that we are seeking thus circumscribed, and by what authority are we thus shut up to the realm of the inner life ? I answer, by virtue of the right that belongs to the expert in any field of knowledge to determine its proper limits and to give a definition of his own particular science. Manifestly the right to define must, in all justice, be accorded to the specialist in any partic- ular department of knowledge. If we are in ear- nest and really desire a right apprehension of any- thing, we will insist that the one who assumes to define it shall himself be acquainted with the facts of which he undertakes to speak. Of what possi- ble value would a definition, say of biology, coined by one whose knowledge is confined to mathemat- ics, of architecture, be to anyone ? Or what has anyone whose mind is occupied solely with the task of hewing wood or carrying mortar to tell us of the principles of art or music ? What we require in a definition is that it be a description of some- thing given by one who knows. Least of all is the 108 THE NATURE OF GOD. one who has a particular thesis to defend to be con- sidered. What right has a Spencer, or a Mill, or any of their ilk, who cannot even find God in His universe and to whom the Eternal is but a shadowy specter of which, at best, but uncertain glimpses may be had — what right have such to speak of those relations which exist between the soul and the Being with whom it has, and knows that it has, fellowship ? Let the shoemaker stick to his last. What we want is expert testimony. I claim no right that is not gladly accorded to the votary of any particular branch of knowledge when I insist that those who know, those whose knowledge and ex- perience fits them to testify, shall be heard in an- swer to our question, What is religion ? And no one knows enough of any branch of knowledge to entitle his definition to respect until he himself has stood within its sanctuary and opened his own mind to every possible avenue through which such specific knowledge may come. It is not true that your outsider, your cold critic, knows the most of things. Clear, impartial insight requires, not that we have no preferences, but that we have right preferences. To say, as some do, that religious people cannot judge about religion is like saying RELIGION. IO9 that the humane cannot understand suffering or that genius cannot understand painting, that for true art you must avoid consulting with Raphael, and in music you must keep clear of Beethoven. The same applies to religion. We must insist on hearing the testimony of the expert alone. No de- partment of knowledge has suffered half as much as the religious through false definitions volun- teered by the vulgar and the uninitiated. And what is, if possible, still worse, her so-called de- fenders have too often brought it into contempt by a hasty adoption of these definitions, which as little define religion as a description of a beetle would accord with that of a human being. Religion knows itself and is known by all who open them- selves to it. It is under no obligations whatever to house and make respectable every waif which those who seek only to bring it into contempt may choose to lay at its door. Accordingly, in answer to our question, What is religion ? we shall hear the reply of such alone who know. Nor should we confine ourselves to the votaries of any particular school, even of religious thought. We should hear representatives from each and accept as essential that particular element upon which all are agreed. IIO THE NATURE OF GOD. You will grant, I am sure, that it would be diffi- cult to find a better representative of what may be called a modified intellectualism in religion than Principal Caird, of the University of Glasgow. In the introduction to his " Philosophy of Religion," this great preacher and philosopher thus defines it : " Religion is the surrender of the finite will to the Infinite. Oneness of mind and will with the Di- vine mind and will is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle between my false self and that higher self which is at once mine and infinitely more than mine ; it is to realize the latter as that with which my whole spiritual being is identified, so that it is no longer ' I ' that lives, nor any * I ' that I can claim as my own — but ' God liveth in me.' " Over and over again does Caird remind us that religion is that elevation of the human spirit into union with the Divine. That it is " oneness with God " ; that it is " the life of God in the soul " or the life of the soul in God ; that its very essence is the living consciousness of personal com- munion with God. Differing in many of his theological conceptions, RELIGION. Ill yet one with Caird in his definition of religion, stands Wilhelm Herrman, of the University of Mar- burg. I shall quote a few sentences from his book entitled, " Faith and Morals." Speaking of the ex- periences of the religious soul when living faith first begins, he says, u Whatever he may have heard before about God in other ways, he will now know for the first time that he has found God himself. For now he not only cherishes thoughts about God which others have handed down to him, or which he himself has excogitated ; he lives in the midst of experiences in which he traces God working upon him. A man can only say that he has found God when it has become clear from some event in his life that God has therein sought him out and touched him. This is the regular order of all liv- ing piety in all religion." But it is in that greatest of all his productions entitled " Communion with God," that Herrman sets forth most clearly his idea of religion. It was of this remarkable book that a distinguished Amer- ican teacher of theology, upon being asked by a theological student what books he should provide for the study of doctrinal theology, replied, " I would recommend, first of all, Herrman's c Com- 112 THE NATURE OF GOD. munion with God.' " When asked what else, the professor thought for a moment, and finally said, " I do not know as you will need anything else." Well, if you have read this book you have found that his idea of religion is expressed in its signifi- cant title, " Communion with God." For, with Herrman as with Caird, religion is nothing else than the personal and conscious communion of the soul with God, which is mediated through Jesus. Otto Pfleiderer is, as you know, Professor of The- ology in the University of Berlin. Among thinkers of the liberal school, he is regarded as, perhaps, the leading theologian of the present. I shall quote but a single, yet quite remarkable, passage in which he states what he regards as the " heart of religion." It is evident, says he, " that Jesus, according to the first three Gospels, called God His Father in no sense other than the one in which He taught us to pray ' Our Father in heaven ' ; and in which He said of the merciful and the peacemakers that they should be called ' children of the Father in heaven,' who makes His sun to shine on the evil and the good." In exactly the same sense Paul says, " Ye are the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." And he therefore calls Christ the "first born among RELIGION. 113 many brethren." Hence, it is evident that we must consider the divine Sonship which formed the funda- mental character of the religious self-consciousness of Jesus, not a unique metaphysical relation be- tween Him and God, but as the first actual and typical realization of that religious relation in gen- eral in which men should stand to God because of their divine origin and destination, and which be- comes a real experience in all who believe in Christ, that is, make their own his filial spirit." We may, therefore, consider the consciousness of divine Son- ship ; this salient feature in the personality of Jesus, at the same time the characteristic essence of the Christian religion ; its distinguishing mark from all that is pre-Christian and extra-Christian and the nucleus of all specifically Christian utterances con- cerning God, man and the world." You see, then, that with Pfleiderer the consciousness of sonship with God is the vital thing in religion. You will, I am sure, pardon me for introducing yet another authority. For I am anxious that we shall hear the testimony of representatives of every school of religious thought at all worthy of the name. For, in our search for the essential in re- ligion, we must not confine ourselves to the repre- 114 TH E NATURE OK GOD. sentatives of either conservatism or liberalism in theology. Romanticism has also a right to be heard. In- deed, no testimony bearing on the question would be complete without that of the great mystic, Fredrick Schleiermacher. According to Schleier- macher, religion is the " immediate consciousness of all that is finite as existing in and through the infinite ; of all that is temporal, as existing through the Eternal. It is to feel, amid all becoming and change, all action and suffering, that life is life only as it is lived in and through God. The sum total of all religion is to feel that in its highest unity all that moves us in feeling is one ; to feel that aught single and particular is only possible by means of this unity ; to feel, that is to say, that our being and living is being and living in God. The true nature of religion is immediate consciousness of the Deity as He is found in ourselves and in the world." It is true that Schleiermacher placed undue em- phasis on feeling. But if you bear in mind the audience to which he spoke, and remember that it was made up of the Rationalists of the eighteenth century, you will see how natural it was that he should put special emphasis on the factor that was RELIGION. 115 most neglected and which in his judgment could best bring men into that immediate relation to the Highest in which religion lives and has its being. Well, nothing would be easier than the task of multiplying this testimony from the literature of religion. From Augustine, with soul athirst for God, to Austin Phelps, who refused to revise the " Still Hour " for the reason that he recognized in it the work of " another mind dwelling in him," the whole line of experts who have penetrated into the depths of that soul experience in which religion lives, confirms the testimony already given. Though differing as they often do, as to the extent and defi- niteness of the knowledge that is necessary, they all agree as to what constitutes its real essence and unite in their testimony, that its very heart is the LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS OF ONENESS WITH GOD, and that in such intimate and mutual fellowship it finds its life and being. But it is in the literature of the Hebrews that religion finds its best and noblest expression. Con- templative in his constitution, tending as he did to the mystical, the Hebrew found in religion his na- tive element. It cannot be doubted that the pleas- ures of the world, the lust of wealth, the absorption Il6 THE NATURE OF GOD. in material things which goes with a commercial age, such as that in which we are now living, leave a barren soil to all that is religious. The seers of the Infinite have usually been the quiet and con- templative souls. For the most part they have been those whose chief delight has been to feel themselves alone with God. They have been those who have felt themselves to be strangers and pil- grims in the world and who have regarded its gains as unworthy of serious effort. And then, too, the simple habits, the fervid tem- perament, the peculiar sensitiveness of the affec- tions and imagination engendered by a rural life, the perpetual sight of the everlasting hills that by day, and of the sky that by night, spoke their mes- sages to a soul unoccupied with other things ; all contributed to the ability of the Hebrew to produce the highest and the best in the realm of religious literature. Turn, if you please, to that book in which the religious emotions of the Hebrew find their best expression — I mean the Psalms. Hear the longing of David's heart for God, whom he loved and with whom he delights to commune, as it is voiced in the forty-second Psalm, "As the hart panteth for RELIGION. 117 the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for the living God." Hear it again in the sixty-third : " O God, thou art my God ; early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is ; to see Thy power and Thy glory so as I have not seen Thee in the sanctuary. Because Thy loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise Thee." Or mark his devotion even to the house inhabited by Jehovah : " How lovely are Thy dwellings, O Jeho- vah of Hosts : my soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of Jehovah. My heart and my flesh cry aloud for the living God. Yea, the sparrow hath found for herself a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Jehovah of Hosts, my King and my God." Or that in the one hundred and thirtieth Psalm, " My soul looketh for the Lord more than the watchmen look for the morning ; yea, more than the watchmen look for the morning." It is unnecessary to cite other and just as specific passages. For when rightly regarded the Psalter emphasizes but a single thought. Taken as a whole, it but expresses the intimate yet varying Il8 THE NATURE OF GOD. relations that exist between trie soul and the Being whom it trusts ; to whom it looks for guidance ; whose hand it sees in history, whose absence it mourns and in whose confidence and fellowship it finds its chief joy. And the fact that communion with God is the essence of religion, is proved by the fact that in these very Psalms the religious ex- perience, whether that of the Hebrew or that of the devout soul of to-day, finds its best and noblest expression. It is a far-away cry from David and Asaph, to Paul and John the beloved. Yet the same thought characterizes the religious conceptions of all. What words could better express the relation that the devout soul sustains to God than the Apostle's prayer for the saints at Ephesus, to whom he dedi- cates one of his epistles ? Here is the prayer : " That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ; that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge ; that ye may be filled with all the fullness of God." Or, what more truly expresses the substance of this experience than the utterance of John, when he RELIGION. 119 tells us that "every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God " ? Or, that " God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him"? And thus it matters not whether it expresses it- self in the Song of Songs, whether in the devotional hymns of David, or whether in the more studied and unimaginative utterances of an Augustine, a Herrman or a Caird ; religion is ever the same — the abiding consciousness of oneness with God ; the inti- mate and immediate fellowship of the soul with the Highest. To the religious soul God is not a stran- ger. On the contrary, He is the best known of all realities, for the reason that He affects more pro- foundly than anything else the spiritual conscious- ness. Of His existence and nature the religious soul is persuaded as it is of nothing else. Indeed, it is the certainty and the immediate nature of its knowledge that keeps religion alive, for a God un- known, who produces no effect in the consciousness or whose presence makes no part of our experience, cannot be an object of love or call into being those confidential relations in which religion finds its exercise. Now, it would be strange if religion had not its 120 THE NATURE OF GOD. counterfeits. It has them in plenty. Varieties of phe- nomena, on account of some outward resemblance, have often been mistaken for and as often classified as religious. Nevertheless there is and can be but one religion. Outward appearances, however simi- lar, do not prove the identity of things. The manufactured flower, for instance, may readily be mistaken for the real if attention is confined to the appearance alone. But the likeness is only in the outward. The aroma, the delicate color of leaf and flower, the life that inhabits the true are en- tirely wanting in the copy. In a word, the one is alive, the other is dead. It is in the innermost of things that we must find their real likeness or difference. Yet, deceived by outward resemblances, a variety of phenomena, ranging from the coarse fetichism of the savage to the intellectual abstrac- tions of philosophers, have been classified as re- ligious. Is it any wonder, when identity is found in mere appearances rather than in the innermost nature of things, that we have what its votaries are pleased to call " the Science of Comparative Religions " ? Or? is it a matter of surprise, when the accidental is thus mistaken for the essential, that laborious at- RELIGION. 121 tempts are made to trace a gradual progress from what are assumed to be its primitive forms, on up to the highest, including even the Christian, which alone is able to vindicate its right to the name ? It is a mistake. Even Buddhism, in spite of all that has been said for it, is not a religion but a philoso- phy. You cannot have a religion without a God, and Buddhism is godless. It is not even a moral system. Binding men, as it does, with the iron chain of metempsychosis, it cuts the very nerve of morality even. In fact, these various forms of re- ligion, of which we hear so much, have no exist- ence outside of the mind that has a thesis to defend. Accordingly a comparison of one religion with another is out of the question. You might as well speak of comparative truth or comparative reality. And truth is not evolved out of falsehood, or reality out of that which has no existence. In the nature of the case there can be but one religion. It may be simulated, but in all that makes it real it stands alone and above all possible comparison. It is not the summit to which the devout have come along the tedious pathway of gradual ascent. Religion is a spiritual birth. It descends upon man and over- powers him. It has no earthly antecedents. No 122 THE NATURE OF GOD. trail lies behind it by means of which it may be traced downward and backward to an earthly and temporal origin. Of course, it is not disputed that there is progress in religion. There is and must be, for the reason that it is a living thing. Nor is it denied that it approaches nearer to the ideal in some than in others ; or that even in the same individual it de- velops into greater and greater perfection. This must needs be for the reason that it is alive. But the progress is always within the sphere of religion itself. It is never from without or from below up- ward. It is not the vain attempt by endless addi- tions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor by the constant exer- cise of spiritual activity to appropriate the infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but it is given implicitly, as a principle which has yet to unfold its hidden riches and its all- subduing power. If we accept the definition already given that in its essence religion is oneness with God, that its very fiber is the consciousness of immediate fellowship with Him, then it is evident that there can be but one religion. A conscious- RELIGION. 123 ness of spiritual oneness with a fetich, or an object that one's own hands have fashioned, is not possible in the case of an intelligent being. Fellowship between a self-conscious person and an unconscious object of nature is out of the question. Such fellow- ship demands another self. It demands a personal being apart from us to bring it into being. Even those abstract conceptions in which philosophy finds its God will not suffice. They all lack the very element that makes religion possible — I mean the OTHER SELF. From all such ideas there has been evaporated the essential element of religion, and nothing is left but a soulless abstraction that can- not be loved and with which communion cannot be had. For religion, a self-conscious Being, a Being capable of making response and with whom mutual commerce may be had is absolutely essen- tial. Look at it as we will, a Being able to make answer to the soul's upper quest is the sine qua non of religion. Another self, yet a mightier than self, is as essential to its life as is the light to the flower or self-consciouness to the person. But there is yet another characteristic mark of religion. It is that of prayer. It is through this exercise that religion utters itself into reality and 124 TH E NATURE OF GOD. becomes an active power in the world. As through the medium of speech actual commerce is carried on between human beings, so also between man and God. And this mutual intercourse is prayer. With- out prayer religion does not exist. August Sabatier, the brilliant and liberal French theologian, thus speaks of prayer : " Religion is an intercourse ; a conscious and voluntary relation entered into by a soul in distress, with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act ; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that dis- tinguishes the religious phenomenon from such other neighboring phenomena as purely moral or aesthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which term we mean no vain ex- ercise of words ; no mere repetition of certain sacred formulae, but the very movement of the soul itself, putting itself in personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence — it may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion ; wherever, on the other hand, this RELIGION. 125 prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrine, we have living religion. One sees from this why natural religion, so called, is not properly religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remote- ness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dia- logue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigation, it never was anything but an abstraction ; an artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characteristics proper to religion. But that is not all. While it is true, that prayer is one of the marks by which religion is to be differentiated from all that simulates it, and that in its essence it is actual and mutual commerce between the soul and God, yet this is not all that is to be said of this act of devotion. It is in prayer that religion translates itself into reality, and proves its right to be classed among the factors of our objective experience. For prayer does not exhaust itself when it breathes its sweet calm over the inner life. It has not spent itself when it has inspired hope in the despondent or dis- 126 THE NATURE OF GOD. persed the clouds that brood over the spirit. It is through prayer that religion affects the outer world, accomplishes actual work in it and classifies itself with those actual forces of which account must be taken. And how shall I speak of what prayer has wrought in this real, objective world of ours ? How shall I tell of how it has joined hands with those agencies that have made for the world's betterment and proven itself to be not simply a weak adjunct, but the mightiest of them all ? For who can tell of all that prayer has wrought ? It has changed the course of empires. It made Cromwell's Iron- sides invincible in the day of battle. Single-handed it has built orphanages, hospitals and institutions without number. It has launched ships on the high seas, and made them bearers of light and hope to the benighted. It has opened the stubborn purse-strings of the miser, and compelled him to yield up his gold at the call of humanity. It has subdued king- doms, wrought righteousness, stopped the mouth of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword ; out of weakness it has made men strong, and caused them to wax valiant in fight. It is not dealing fairly with the facts to say that RELIGION. 127 religion is entirely subjective, shut up to the inner life of the soul. True, it does live in the inner- most, and is primarily a matter of private experi- ence. But it does not exhaust itself there. Just because prayer is a necessary accompaniment of re- ligion, or in the words of Sabatier, " is religion itself in action " it affects the world of outward realities and accomplishes things that are real. It is just this certainty that furnishes the motive of all prayer, and it is the firm conviction of its effi- cacy confirmed by multiplied proofs that keeps it alive. Break down the conviction of its efficacy and you cut the very nerve of prayer. But what is it that makes prayer a power in the world as distinct, as real and as rational as the power of gravity, or of light, or of electricity? And why is it that pious souls have used it as trust- ingly, and with as positive results, as men have used either of these ? Is it not for the reason that God is personal ; a Being who can be influenced ? Is it not for the reason that He not only hears, but that, as free He is able also to answer the prayer of all who ask in confidence and in filial resignation to His will ? At bottom, it is the certainty of the divine personality that gives life to prayer, and it 128 THE NATURE OF GOD. is the fact of its efficacy that proves the personality of the One to whom all prayer is addressed. Intel- ligent beings know that help cometh not out of the ground ; but, on the contrary, from an all-powerful Being who knows our necessities before we ask, for the reason that He himself is both self-conscious and personal. But here we are confronted by the question, Is prayer, then, real prayer, confined to the limits of Theism? And are w T e to infer that those alone who think of God as personal, actually pray? If that be the case, what is the meaning of those tem- ples ; those shrines at which a blind devotion offers its incense to impersonal gods of wood and stone ? Do not these addresses, these genuflections that make up the ritual of heathenism, vitiate the posi- tion that a personal being, one who is able to hear and to enter into sympathy, is essential to the exer- cise of true prayer ? I think the question is en- tirely pertinent and calls for a candid answer. For if it can be made out that this communion that we call prayer may actually be had with an unconscious object, or even with an impersonal force of nature, then is our position that the idea of a personal God is essential vitiated, and prayer itself becomes either RELIGION. 129 a meaningless monologue or an utter absurdity. And yet the difficulty suggested by the question is by no means as great as would at first appear. In fact, the question itself is based upon a mere assump- tion. It assumes that, apart from a belief in a per- sonal God, men do actually pray, a position utterly incapable of proof. For we must not be misled by outward appearances or superficial likenesses. In our classification we must hold fast to the prin- ciple that identity is to be found only in essentials, and not in that that is accidental, and which, with- out destroying the thing itself, may readily be dis- pensed with. And will anyone, not altogether a stranger to the real nature of prayer, hold for a moment, that posture or mere attitude of the body, or, indeed, anything that is merely outward, is at all vital ? Is not all this accidental ; and is it not true that given the soul conscious of its needs, and the other self able to hear and to answer, you have all that is essential. Prayer needs not even to be audibly uttered. Many a prayer, like that of Hannah's in the temple, has been spoken in silence and heard by Him who heareth in secret. Every- thing that is external may be subtracted, and all that is vital to prayer yet left. 9 130 THE NATURE OF GOD. Well, then, if actual communion alone is essen- tial ; if all else is secondary, then it is certain that heathenism as such affords no instance of true prayer. I say heathenism as such. For I do not lose sight of the fact that even among pagans, men who have been really in earnest to know the truth, have shaken themselves loose from false be- liefs and worship, in the midst of which they have found themselves, and caught visions of the true and only God who has not left Himself without witness to any of His creatures. Such an one was Abraham, whom God called out of Ur of the Chaldeans. Such, probably, were the Magi who came from the East to worship at the manger at Bethlehem. Such, doubtless, was Socrates, con- demned and murdered by the men of his age, for the reason that he ridiculed the gods of pagan Athens. Such was Job, the Arabian emir, who wrestled with God, as did Jacob, and strove to know the shrouded name, and hoped to find that it was Love. Naaman, the Syrian ; Rahab, the harlot, the Syrophenician woman by her sick daughter's bedside — all these followed the light that "light- eth every man that cometh into the world," and were doubtless among the company of which Jesus RELIGION. 131 spoke when He said, " Many shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven." Yet it must not be forgotten that these are exceptions. Not one among all these was the legitimate product of heathenism. One and all, they were the " heretics " of their age ; the repudiators of the thought and life among which they lived. And we are speaking of heathenism as such ; of heathenism with its lords many and its Gods many ; of heathenism with its impersonal deities. You will recall that so good an authority as Max Muller describes Fetichism as " a superstitious ven- eration of rubbish." And that he also affirms that "it is not even a primitive form of religion." Ac- cordingly, it is prayerless. For how could a fetich, a thing cherished only as a means of gratifying de- sires or averting dangers and calamities, and on which, when disappointed men vent their irritation by blows and expressions of impotent anger, or by ex- changing it for some other equally arbitrary object, in any sense of the word be an object of religious reverence ? And why ? Is it not for the reason that it lacks the personal element ; that it fails to present the Other Self, without whom communion is impossible ? 132 THE NATURE OF GOD. And what is true of Fetichism is true of all heathen religions. Personality is the pivot around which religion revolves. Religious thought is car- ried on in terms of personality, this being in the world of religion the one fundamental fact as much to-day as in any previous age. Well, then, if you agree that personality is the pivot around which religion revolves, you will ex- perience no surprise at the statement, that heathen- ism as such is prayerless. It could not possibly be otherwise. For, what soil does the Pantheism of the pagan, or the philosophical conceptions of the Hindu, in which personality is an illusion, and man's true destiny his extinction or reabsorption into the in- finite impersonal, afford for that communion which, apart from a conception of God as personal, is, prima facie, impossible? Moreover, one has but to turn to the so-called sacred literature of heathenism to find convincing proof of this fact. You will search in vain for any expression of that personal intercourse with the Deity which is of the essence of real prayer. Egypt- ologists tell us that in the Book of the Dead we have the oldest poem in the world. It is a hymn addressed to the rising and setting sun, and has RELIGION. 133 often been cited as an expression of true piety. But is it, in reality, such ? Read it through, and you will be convinced that it is but an address to nature. In the Vedas, the sacred poems of our Indo-European kindred, you have also a number of hymns, which we are told approach the high plane of true prayer. I shall quote what seems to me the most devout of these passages. Addressing himself to Indra, the poet thus cries out : " He has settled the ancient mountains by his might ; he has directed downward the action of the waters. He has supported the earth, the universal nurse. By his skill he has propt up the earth from falling. " Dawn on us with thy prosperity, O Usha, daugh- ter of the sky ! O, luminous and bountiful god- dess ! Ushas advances, arousing footed creatures and making the birds to fly aloft. The flying birds no longer rest after thy dawning. In thee, when thou dawnest, O lively goddess, is the life and breath of all creatures." Now, would anyone hold for a moment that in either of these passages there is even the faintest ap- proach to real prayer ? Gems are they of the poetic imagination ; but you will search in vain for that 134 TH 3 NATURE OF GOD. element which we have found to be of the essence of true communion. They are all one with Byron's " Apostrophe to the Ocean," and with Shelley's " Alastor." Compare these apostrophes, these glow- ing addresses to impersonal nature, with the fami- liar address of Elijah to God, and see the difference. Observe how confidently the great prophet speaks to the One with whom he stands upon terms of familiar intimacy. Observe how he lays before God the situation, confident that all will be under- stood. How he talks with Him, as a friend talks with a friend, of the mutual interests that hinge on the tests that are about to be made. How he re- minds God of His past faithfulness to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. " Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel ! let it be known this day, that Thou art God in Israel, and that I am Thy servant, and that I have done all these things at Thy word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me ; that this people may know that Thou art the Lord God, and that Thou hast turned their heart back again." Or what shall we say of that prayer in which, more than any other, religion has found appropriate utterance — I mean the prayer in which the rela- RELIGION. 135 tions between the suppliant and God are conceived in terms of earthly fatherhood and sonship. Will anyone at all alive to those spiritual relations to which this prayer gives expression, hold for a moment that there is not a difference wide as the poles between these utterances of the truly religious soul and those glowing addresses to natural objects that make up the sacred literature of the Kast? The one never rises above the level of apostrophe ; the other is real prayer. And between the two there is no likeness whatever. But wherein do they differ ? Is it not in the fact that in the one we have but the expression of those mystic emotions which natural objects are certain to awaken in all sensitive souls ; while, in the other, we have the expression of a consciousness of spiritual affinity and of mutual understanding ? And that is to say, that in the one, God is conceived as personal ; a Being with whom fellowship may be had and in whom confidence may be reposed. While, in the other, the object addressed is but a mysterious yet awful something, hidden behind phenomena, and to which no other name can be given than that of the Unknown It. And never did true prayer ascend to the unknow- 136 THE NATURE OF GOD. able. The cry of the soul in the moment of true devotion is, 1 ' Let me gaze, not on some far-reaching Nor star-sprent sky ; But on a. face, in which mine own beseeching May read reply." Apart from the vision of a Divine face, ever smiling upon the kneeling spirit, there is no prayer ; for its source is not reverence, but a longing of the heart for personal and mutual fellowship with God. And thus, as a result of our study of prayer, we are forced back upon our former position, that the essence of religion is just this relation of the per- sonal spirit to a personal God. Nothing else can be made out of it. Every duty, every exercise, all that nearly or remotely enters into it involves and demands this personal relation. Forgiveness in- volves personal relations. Conscience has no mean- ing except as a personal God gives it authority. The sense of responsibility is a sense of obligation to a person. Prayer is made possible because there is a personal Being who understands and who makes answer. The sense of Sonship that lies at the heart of the religious consciousness grows out of personal relations. In a word, the fact of the Divine RELIGION. 137 personality made known in the consciousness, and confirmed by daily communion, this is the pillar upon which religion rests. Well, now, before we turn away, let us see at what conclusions we have come. For one thing, we have learned that our knowledge of God rests upon precisely the same basis as does our other knowledge. It is derived through actual contact with its object, and has as its basis facts actually given in consciousness. Nor does the fact of its privacy detract from its validity. All knowledge, for that matter, is pri- vate. It is either your knowledge or mine or some other person's. The validity of any particular kind of knowledge is not to be determined in the light of its privacy, but rather in the light of the answer that may be given to the question as to whether it may be the possession of all who conform to its conditions. And the door of any particular form of knowledge has its own key. Its bolts cannot be rudely forced, nor will any key that we may choose turn them backward in their bearings. And this is particularly true in respect of our knowledge of persons. Logic here will not help us. The boasted scientific method may open 138 THE NATURE OF GOD. the chambers of nature, but not those of the human soul. Approach a personal being along any avenue, save that of mutual sympathy, and he will resist the intrusion, shut himself up, and guard his inner- most secrets as jealously as does the Sphinx the secrets of the Nile. To rightly know a person, it is imperative that we be in attune with him. Well, then, if God is a person, as religion affirms, our knowledge of Him will come through fellow- ship with Him. Not through schools, but through life ; not through information, but acquaintance. And then, too, our characters must be in attune with His. Long ago, standing on the mount of the Beatitudes, that One who, among all the sons of men knew most of God, said : " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And experience has borne witness to the truth- fulness of that utterance. From the wise and prudent He has ever hidden Himself. To the in- different, to the intellectual boaster and self-suffi- cient, whether of wisdom or material achievement, He will always remain the " Unknown." Let phi- losophy boast of its achievements in the fields of logic and mere intellection. Let science boast of what it has wrought in the realm of material RELIGION. 139 things. The boast of religion is in God, and in that knowledge of Him which is its alone. But, just because it is what it is, religion will live. Its history, through twenty centuries, has con- firmed the prophecy of its founder, that " The gates of hell should not prevail against it." Arraying itself against every carnal power, it has awakened the enmity of the world. Against it there have been launched those weapons of imperial power, of carnal hate and intellectual ridicule against which no earthly thing has ever stood. Yet religion has lived. No weapon that has been formed against it has prospered. And why ? Is it not for the reason that it is not carnal, and that it is what it professes itself to be, the life of God in the soul ? No other account can possibly be given of its persistent vital- ity. Having its roots in the unseen, it is also eter- nal, " for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal." Not until the soul of man is quenched, not until God ceases to be God, will religion cease on the earth, or lose its power among men. LECTURE FOURTH. THE ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. Religion, then, is a reality. It has its existence in the world, and is accordingly to be classified with those facts of our experience of which a rational account must be given. It is not a phenomenon of any particular age or mental condition. Wher- ever man has lived, it has lived. Indeed, so coin- cident is its existence with that of the race as to justify the statement that man is by nature a reli- gious being. But how came religion to be, and to what are we to trace its origin in the world ? You will, I think, concede that, before we are prepared to give a true account of the origin of anything, we must first have a correct notion of the thing itself. We are not living in a world of chance. Things have their logical antecedents. There is always a thread, dif- ficult though it may be to trace, which connects things with their origin, and the end of anything is implicitly given in its beginning. Accordingly, in our search for the origin of any particular thing (140) ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 141 we must first have a right conception of the thing itself. Without this to begin with, we are like the traveler in an unknown country, journeying he knows not whither, and seeking he knows not what. For this reason we might dismiss the vari- ous accounts which philosophy gives of the origin of religion. One and all, they are wide of the mark, in that religion itself is misconceived. Nev- ertheless it will be necessary for us to consider two of these accounts, for the reason that at present, they are widely accepted. The first is the one presented by Rationalism. You are aware that Rationalism seeks to eliminate the supernatural from human history and experi- ence. It finds no place for the miraculous, and denies the possibility of a personal revelation of God to men. But since religion presupposes the thought of God, and since the thought came not through personal revelation, whence, then, came it? The answer of the rationalist is, It is inborn. We come into the world with certain definite and fundamen- tal conceptions. Our best ideas and ideals are innate, or the mind is so constituted as that it must work them out conformably to nature. It is true that these ideas have been sadly defaced ; they 142 THE NATURE OF GOD. are not what they once were. Yet for all that, down at the bottom of the simple and unperverted heart, they yet slumber in all their primitive beauty. Among these innate ideas is the idea of God. To be a human being is to be possessed of the idea. It is inborn ; it has not been suggested by anything without, but is, on the contrary, natu- ral to man. Now, if this were true, we might easily dispense with a supernatural revelation. To come to a knowledge of God, man needs but to give himself to reflection, and to put into scientific form the idea already present in the mind. But, unfortunately for the theory, we do not come into the world with any such innate ideas. In fact, the doctrine of innate ideas has been abandoned by most, if not by all, unprejudiced thinkers. It is as much a scien- tific figment as is the notion of innate rights. Be- sides, religion needs more than an idea of God to bring it into being. It demands a living and per- sonal God ; a being possessed of actual existence outside of us, and who, for that reason, is able to affect the spiritual consciousness. A simple idea of God is not God. But when the doctrine of innate ideas was ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 43 yielded, and along with it the figment of an inborn notion of God, another attempt was made to answer the question. It was now held that the idea of God follows of necessity from the nature of the mind. The mind carries with it the idea of infin- ity. And since it is not itself infinite, it must necessarily assume an infinite outside of itself. Looking outward on the universe of suns and moons and stars slumbering in the infinite depths, the mind finds in them the symbol of the infinite, and comes of necessity to the conclusion of an infinite being whom it names God. Thus the idea of God follows from the constitution of the mind itself. Reflecting on itself and the universe about us, it arrives of necessity at the notion of God. Well, as a theory this, too, is beautiful enough, but it also fails to give a rational account of the origin of that particular conception of God which is essen- tial to religion. Let us own that somehow man has come into possession of a conception of the infinite : we need yet to be shown how he comes into pos- session of the idea of God. The infinite and God are not the same. They are not opposite terms of the same equation. The infinite is a logical con- ception, but God is a personal Being. It is easy 144 TH E NATURE OF GOD. enough to understand how that those who thought of God should apply to Him the idea of infinity ; but the opposite — how the abstract idea of infinity could be construed into the living God — is unintel- ligible. The infinite in itself is not a living, per- sonal being, and out of an abstract conception of the infinite religion could not have come. Its origin is not to be traced to any merely intellectual notion, however perfect. What religion needs to bring it into being is not an idea of the infinite, but, on the contrary, the experience of God as a living power and actual content of the soul. The moment it is made to depend solely on the objective, whether it takes the form of creeds or institutions or ideas, and this subjective element is eliminated, religion dies. It requires a real content on which to live ; and such a content is not presented in mere ideas or notions, however exalted. But in the times in which we are now living another theory of the origin of religion has found favor. I mean the theory of Development. The triumphal march of Evolution has recently been transferred from the sphere of natural sciences into that of history and religion. Indeed, it is no longer regarded as a theory. To such an extent has it ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 45 become the governing principle of thought, as that into its mold everything which is to pass current must now be cast. To be intellectually respectable we must now see development everywhere. Accord- ing to this theory, religion as we know it is the outcome of a long process of development. Begin- ning with the Fetish, the idea of God in the course of many generations past into the Elohistic stage, then into that represented by Jehovah of the He- brews, and finally into the refined form in which it is to-day presented in Christianity. Now, whatever we may think of the theory of evo- lution as applied to the material world, it is certain that it cannot be applied to things spiritual. And religion is in its very essence spiritual. It lives in a realm apart from the operation of physical laws that hold in the realm of material things. It belongs to the kingdom which " cometh not with observation," and of which Jesus declared, it is "within you." Moreover, it ought not to be forgotten that evolu- tion, even as a modal theory, is now and has always been discredited by many who have undisputed right to pass judgment on its merits. It rests upon an assumption which the actual history of the world does not seem to warrant. It assumes that 146 THE NATURE OF GOD. the march of humanity has been steadily upward, and that progress has been the law holding in human history. Now, it may be that progress has been the law of the world ; but it is just as likely that it has not. At any rate, we have no right, in view of the facts as we know them, to take it for granted or to draw important conclusions from it. It does not minister to our confidence in the law of universal progress to know that every race looks backward rather than forward to its "golden age." Yet precisely this is the case. Greece looks back- ward to her Solon, her Thales, her Pericles, her Socrates, and her Plato. Egypt looks backward to her Pharaohs, and, pointing to her splendid ruins, says, " Behold what we once were ! " Rome looks backward to her Virgil, her Horace, and her Cicero. The Hebrew points to David and a Solomon, re- calls the splendid civilization w T hich then was, and mourns a glory which has long since departed. And to-day the wandering son of the old Hittite pauses in astonishment before the records of his own past, unable to read the writings of his fathers, and surprised at the fact that in the palmy days of his ancestors, Kirjathsepher was a library city of his own people. Until the evolutionist is able to fur- ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 47 nish 11s an example of a race which has lifted itself out of barbarism, and continued its march upward, apart from the power which a revealed knowledge of God gives, we may be excused from accepting his hypothesis as final. But be that as it may, it will hardly be denied that evolution gives a very poor account of the origin of religion. To be sure, if we identify it with that which is merely accidental, or with that which bears to it some outward resemblance, it will be easy enough to see progress. Nothing is easier than to arrange religious phenomena in a series from the lowest to the highest, and to assume that this series represents a historical development. But nothing is more misleading. If Paul is right, then degeneration is the outstanding fact in religious history, and the fault of the modern theory is that it mistakes the last product of degeneracy for the facts of a primitive religion. Allow me to state a few of the reasons why the theory of development as applied to religion must be rejected. For one thing, it requires that faith be generated out of its negation, and devotion, to arise in a state where the ideas which create it do not exist. But 148 THE NATURE OF GOD. you cannot evolve religion out of its negation, and that superstitious atheism out of which evolution seeks to evolve it is its negation. And then, too, it is just as impossible to generate religion out of terror or man's highest ideas out of his most dismal fears. The terrible only terrifies, and nothing is so fatal to religion as terror. And religion has never been a terrible thing to man. On the contrary, it has always been his comfort in sorrow, his strength in weakness, the light that has cheered him in darkness, and the power which has given him the victory over all his fears. If fear had created religion, then that per- fect love which is its very life, and which, as we are told, " casteth out fear " would have been its destruction. Clearly, then, we have not traced re- ligion to its source when we have traced it to some mere notion of God, however derived. First and last, religion is the mutual and sympathetic relation between self-conscious and personal beings, or as we have already seen, the communion of the soul with a personal God. Accordingly, the knowledge which is essential is the knowledge of a person, the kind of knowledge which is made possible alone through a self-revelation. ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 49 And this being the case, two things are necessary : the one a movement of God to man, the other a movement of man to God. Without this religion cannot exist, for the reason that it is out of such mutual and voluntary relations that it is born. Now, there is an old but very significant story which explains how this happened. It tells us of how that in the still evening hour, when the wind rustled mysteriously in the tree tops, God walked in the garden where the first created dwelt. Of how God there met man, made Himself known, and im- pressed upon his spirit a divine vision that could not be effaced. It matters little as to what criti- cism may make of this story, whether it be regarded as actual history in the modern sense, or simply a pious legend. Nevertheless, it states a fact, and affords the only possible account of how mankind received the thought of God, and with it religion. For, as we have just seen, the thought came not through introspection or by a gradual process of de- velopment out of atheistic superstitions. But if it came through neither of these it must have come from the outside. Its source must be traced to a self-revelation of God to man, a manifestation at once external and sensuous. 150 THE NATURE OF GOD. And then, too, it must have been in the nature of man to make response to the divine movement from without. Apart from such predisposition no out- ward manifestation even could have been effective. But, created as he had been for God, with soul rest- less and unsatisfied without Him, man beheld in the self-revealed the One for whom his soul yearned, yielded himself, and experienced God as a living and personal power. And that was the birth-hour of religion in the world. Its existence is as old as man's. It began with him ; his birth was its. And what took place when religion first entered the world has in all that is essential taken place wherever it has since lived. Wherever it* has been experienced as a power within, it has been for the reason that somehow God has approached man from without and made himself known in the conscious- ness as a personal being in whom the soul could im- plicitly trust and with whom it might enter into communion. But this brings us to another very important question ; the one which concerns itself with the seat of religion in the soul. For, let it be granted that the religious thought of God rests on data given in consciousness, are we even then quite sure that ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF REUGION. 151 the thought corresponds with the reality ? Are we certain that God is really such as we think Him to be, and is our religious as trustworthy as is our other knowledge ? Now, it is obvious that in de- termining this question no single one of our facul- ties is to be considered to the exclusion of the rest. All are to be consulted, for the reason that all have a vote on the matter. If the religious thought of God comes as the result of God's revelation of Him- self within all the complex activities of the human soul ; if it is adapted to man in the totality of his be- ing, then is the thought of God true because in con- formity with reality. But before it can be so accepted the whole being of man must be co-operative in the reception of this self-revelation, as well as met and filled in the form which the revelation itself takes. And that is to say, that if religious knowledge is real, it must rest on precisely the same basis as our other knowledge. And real knowledge, as Dr. Car- penter has indicated, does not rest " on any one set of experiences, but upon our unconscious co-ordi- nation of the whole aggregate of our experience ; not on the conclusions of any one train of reasoning, but on the convergence of all lines of thought towards one center." 152 THE NATURE OF GOD. But does religious knowledge conform to this test ? Does it rest upon the whole aggregate of our experiences, and is it the product of the convergence of all lines of thought to one center ? Before we can intelligently answer that question we must in- quire as to the seat of religion in the soul. You must be aware that its seat has often been located in one or another of our faculties. Schleier- macher found it in feeling. You will recall his definition of religion to which reference was made in the preceding lecture, in which he defines it as " the immediate consciousness of the Deity as He is found in ourselves and in the world." L,et us own that few have possessed a better understanding of its real essence than this great philosopher and repre- sentative of mystico-romanticism. He understood it for the reason that he himself had entered into its experiences and made it his own possession. Never- theless he made too much of the emotional side, and fell into the error of locating the seat of religion in feeling. But for this there was reason. For what great reformer has not at some point overstepped the precise limits of fact in his zeal to bring to the minds of others the great truth of which he felt him- self to be possessed ? It was the revolt of Schleier- ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 53 macher's soul against the falsehoods embodied in the arid Deism of the eighteenth century, which reduced religion to a collection of rational doctrines about God that forced him to the opposite extreme. The age needed to be recalled to the fact that re- ligion is an experience to be enjoyed rather than to be explained ; to be lived rather than to be dogma- tized about. This was the mission of Schleier- macher. And if we bear this fact in mind we will readily excuse the error into which he fell in his efforts to stem the tide of dogmatism which then and often since has threatened the very life of re- ligion. Yet for all this he had his disciples, and there are even yet many who find the seat of religion where he found it. With Schleiermacher religion begins in feeling. It is to be traced to the feeling of " absolute dependence." Given this sense of de- pendence, this consciousness of profound need, and out of it there will come religion. Feeling is the germ, religion is the product. Now, if we consider the subject but casually, it will indeed seem that he was justified in his opinion. For is it not the consciousness of our needs that always drives us to God? Is it not true that when Jeshurun waxed fat, " he forsook 154 TH E NATURE OF GOD. God which made him, and lightly esteemed the rock of his salvation? " And was not Mr. L,owell right when he spoke of persons who "had the idea of God fattened out of them " ? And did not Jesus Himself say, " Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest?" It would seem that in the measure that we are op- pressed by a sense of our needs prayer arises, and that, contrariwise, a sense of self-sufficiency is de- structive of that devotion which, as we have seen, is a vital element in religion. And surely the world in which we live presents enough to remind us of our littleness and to force home upon the soul a sense of its depend- ence upon a power over us and above us. Forces titanic, and against which our little strength af- fords no defence, terrify us and seem bent on our destruction. We feel ourselves helpless against a thousand evils which seem to mock our weak- ness. Behind every object some evil lurks. Suf- fering is the common lot of all. A little brief struggle and it is all over — death wins his victory at last. Well, is it any wonder that man, thus con- stantly reminded of his weakness, feels his need of help ? On its face it does certainly seem that feel- ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 55 ing is the seat of religion, and that Schleiermacher was right when he traced it to a sense of depend- ence. And yet if we look a little deeper, we will discover our mistake. For how would it be if we were entirely ignorant of the existence of a sym- pathetic and all-powerful God above us ? Would we then give ourselves to prayer? Suppose that we possessed no knowledge whatever of a spiritual Being above us ; that, so far as we knew, the heavens were tenantless ; or that back of the storm and earth- quake and pestilence we found no one powerful enough to hold them in leash — would our sense of weakness then drive us to prayer ? Take away the intellectual conviction that a personal God exists, and you have silenced every prayer, for the reason that you have taken away a knowledge of the other Self to whom all prayer is addressed. It is, after all, a knowledge more or less positive that there is One able to help, and that our complaints enter into His ears that gives inspiration to prayer. Men do not tell their woes to the storm or seek help from the waves when they clap their hands or open their jaws to engulf. Postulate the existence of God, and then a sense of need may drive us to Him. But back of the 156 THE NATURE OF GOD. prayer and underlying the consciousness of need, there must exist the conviction that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, before religion can come into being. Apart from such a knowledge and belief, men do not pray. Feeling is, indeed, essential. Without it religion would never be born in the soul. But more than feeling is necessary to make religion real. It is your Jobs and your Davids, possessed of a knowl- edge of God and His nature, from whose lips there comes the confession, " In my distress I cried unto the L,ord, and He heard me." No, a sense of need is not sufficient. It may and does afford a motive to religion when once a knowledge of God is pos- sessed ; but apart from such knowledge it but leads to despair. But are we then to find the seat of religion in knowledge? There have been many who have held this opinion, and there are many who hold it still. They tell us that, "what we need above all things is knowledge." I quote from one of the foremost educators of the present this statement : " If one is concerned about religion, and believes re- ligion to be a most potent force for good in human affairs, it is his business to teach the world the ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 57 reason why it should believe in God. This is the most tremendous question of both philosophy and religion." Now, I think that no one will deny that knowledge, and by this term we, of course, mean a knowledge of God, is essential. In the nature of the case, communion with a Being who has for the mind no existence, is impossible. But we have not traced religion to its source when we have made the discovery that its roots take firm hold 011 knowledge. It is true, that the one solid intel- lectual conviction upon which it rests, is that of the actual existence of a personal God — a God who, for the reason that He is personal, is able to respond to prayer. It may be admitted that, without such knowledge there can be no prayer, and, as a conse- quence, no religion. Subtract this knowledge and there would remain the sense of awe of natural forces, of sublimity as one looks at the ocean and landscape and sky ; of wonder and delight in the steady march of nature's laws ; but no religion, be- cause there would be no response to the soul in its upper quest. And then, too, if we turn backward, we find that the days in the history of the ancient and modern world, when religion faded out of public life, have 158 THE NATURE OF GOD. been days in which men somehow have ceased to believe in God. If France is still more than half irreligious it is because the philosophy of the day fails to discover God. If it be true that a large part of the scientific world is irreligious to-day, it is because its philosophy has been in a large measure materialistic and has found no place for God. Side by side, a knowledge of God and religion have always existed. So intimately are they related as to suggest the thought that the latter is dependent on the former and springs out of it. Nevertheless, such a conclusion is not warranted by the facts. Men may know all that can be intellectually known about God and remain utterly irreligious. Indeed, in the soil of mere intellectualism religion has always sickened and died. Wherever religion is regarded merely as a matter of knowledge, there the tyranny of intellectualism is soon felt. It is sure to overrate the value of correct conceptions of faith to the detriment of the spiritual life and to con- found a subjective conception of truth with the truth itself. Open, if you please, the history of Scholasticism. Read the record of the times in which men of gigantic intellect strove and wrestled with dis- ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 59 tinctions aud deductions and ramifications touch- ing the nature of God until nothing was left but a metaphysical Deity, for whom men could feel neither reverence nor affection. Would any- one say that, so far as intellectual conception at least was concerned, a knowledge of God was then wanting? It was an age of dogma, of close and well reasoned deductions as touching the Divine substance. It was an age prolific in dictionary titles and fine spun deductions, which sought to put in speech and verify to the reason the being and nature of the One whose best manifestations are always to the humble. It was an age which boasted of its reasoned knowledge of God, and from the icy grasp of which theology has hardly yet escaped. But did all this knowledge about God make men religious ? Does the history of Ration- alism, headed by Wolf, who sought with mathemat- ical clearness and precision to define God and to give to the world a Deity stripped of mystery, prove the conclusion that knowledge about God is the source of religion ? Read the story of the long and weary years that followed in the wake of Scholasticism ; when Jesus was silenced that audience might be given to the pagan Aristotle. Or turn to the l6o THE NATURE OF GOD. record of trie times which followed its revival in Germany, and you will agree with Hurst that " Rationalism in Germany, without Pietism as its forerunner, would have been fatal for centuries." No doubt a knowledge of God precedes that com- munion which is the essence of religion. But it is not that kind of knowledge which men usually have in mind when they speak of a " well defined knowl- edge of God." The truth is, that this pedantic and reasoned knowledge is subversive of true piety. It is sure to mistake the faith by which we believe for the faith which is believed, and to substitute a doc- trine of faith for faith itself. To the religious soul God is indeed the " high and lofty One who inhab- iteth eternity, whose name is holy, who dwelleth in the high and holy place." But to all such He is also a Father and friend at the very moment that He is the inscrutable. No, the power which makes religion, the power which satisfies the soul and frees it from earthly things, the power which in religion perfects both the individual and the national life, belongs to it by virtue, not of the comprehen- sible, but of the incomprehensible, which transcends human thought and understanding. The power of religion lies in the mystery through which it ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. l6l leads to God, the incomprehensible Being, whom the understanding alone cannot reach. The moment God is denned, or His nature arrived at by a logical process, He ceases to be God and degenerates into a metaphysical abstraction with which communion cannot be held and from which help cannot be derived. And that is to say, that the knowledge and the feeling which prepare the way for religion, is a par- ticular kind of knowledge and a particular kind of feeling. A mere indefinite feeling of need is not sufficient to compel the eyes to look upward or the soul to pray. It is that particular kind of feeling which prompts to the seeking of a person, and which as unerringly impels the soul to seek the Living and personal God as its deliverer from dis- tress, as the particular kind of feeling which we call thirst, impels to the water which satisfies it. It is this definiteness, this self-consciousness, if you please, of the feeling that makes it distinctively religious, and differentiates it from a variety of feelings induced by our multiplied necessities. It is not the feeling that something is needed, but that God is needed, that gives it its character and value. Other needs may lead the soul somewhere ; 1 62 THE NATURE OF GOD. but it is this particular need which finds its answer in a person, and which invariably turns to a per- sonal being that makes for religion. The same is true of knowledge. At last the only knowledge that opens and prepares the way for religion is the knowledge that the God who is sought is a person. No other knowledge can be taken into account. A knowledge of a deity, other than personal, were such knowledge possible, would not tend to religion but away from it. All through, it is the personal element, entering into the feeling as well as into the knowledge, that gives importance to each, and which makes it possible for us to classify them as distinctly religious. But if the beginning of religion is to be found neither in feeling nor knowledge, is it not then to be traced to that realm of our nature which we call the volitional? It will be admitted, that in that supreme moment when the soul yields itself in glad self-surrender to God, religion is born. Being the life of God in the soul, it must needs wait until the soul opens itself to God. And this plainly is an act of the will. Beside the door of the heart stands this keeper, without whose consent no one can enter. It is this ability of the will to close the ORIGIN, SKAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 63 door, even in the face of God, which Jesus recog- nizes when He says, " Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and sup with him and he with me." And this fellowship which Christ prom- ises to all who open the door is religion. It begins when man yields himself to God to control and to dwell in. Apparently, then, the seat of religion is to be found in the will, since its rise in the soul is conditioned upon its act. And yet, if we look a little further, we will again discover our mistake. For, after all, no act of the will is purely arbitrary. The will itself is determined in its activity by both desire and knowledge. We will what our desires crave, and this craving is again dependent on knowl- edge. Indeed, the deeper we look into the matter the more thoroughly will we be convinced that neither of our functions act alone, but rather in harmony with all the rest. That our personality acts as a unit, and that whether we think or feel or will, our entire self, and not a part of us, is brought into activity. And that is to say, that the seat of religion is the entire self-conscious person. Its home is no one part or province of our nature, no one disposition or faculty of the soul. It embraces 164 THE NATURE OF GOD. the whole mind, the entire man. Its seat is the center of human nature and its circumference is the uttermost limit of all its energies. The cry of the whole self is for God, and it is to this cry that religion makes response. And this fact imparts to religious knowledge its certainty. It is the kind of knowledge which rests on the co-ordination of the whole aggregate of our experiences, and in the reception of which the whole being of man co-oper- ates. I wish now to call your attention to the peculiar content of that experience which comes as a result of the soul's surrender to God. It would not be stating the case correctly to say, that as a result of such surrender God's attitude to us is in anywise changed. He abides ever the same ; the One with whom is "no variableness, neither shadow of turn- ing." It is the change in our attitude to Him that makes it possible for Him to draw nigh unto us and to fill us with all the riches of His infinite full- ness. The little plant, hidden away in the dark crevice of the rocks where the winter's snow lingers, makes no change in the sun when it is transplanted to the sunny side of the mountain. But its change of attitude to the sun alters the relation of the sun ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 65 to it. So, likewise, from the moment of self-sur- render, God is brought into new and different rela- tions to the soul. He stands no longer without, but within, and on account of His indwelling, quickens the soul with new life and fills it with new experiences. Later on, I shall call your atten- tion to the proof afforded in the peculiar nature of these experiences in confirmation of the fact that God is a personal Being. Meanwhile, let us see just what these experiences are. Now, when we speak of religion as a new life, a life of God in the soul, it is important that we should know just what kind of experiences we have in mind. Of course, in some of its features this experience will be variable. We are not alike, nor do objective realities affect us in precisely the same way. Allowance must, of course, be made for those differences in disposition and constitution which characterize us as distinct individuals, and which give a peculiar tone to everything that af- fects us. But when all allowance is made for the accidental, and that alone is left which is essential and invariable, it will be found that three distinct experiences characterize the religious life. The first is that of a consciousness of recon- 1 66 THE NATURE OF GOD. ciliation — a sense of being at peace with God. The consciousness that that estrangement which once existed between the soul and God has given place to mutual friendship, and that the relations which now exist are those which grow out of love. In a word, it is the experience to which the Script- ures give the characteristic epithet, " Peace with God." A SECOND experience is the consciousness that a new life has taken possession of the soul. That the old life of the flesh with its carnal lusts and selfish aims has given place to a life of the Spirit, in which the individual acknowledges himself as being in the possession of new affections, new motives, in short, recognizes himself as being a " new creature." And this new life is not simply a change in one's mental attitude to things. It is a change in the innermost self, and is always accompanied by the overpowering consciousness that the individual is not what he once was. It is the sense that the life which now lives within, is in no sense his own, but that of another, who has now taken up His dwell- ing within, and who, by such indwelling, has trans- formed his very personality into the moral sub- stance of God. In the expressive phraseology of the ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 167 Scripture, the experience is that of being in pos- session of a" new heart." A Third experience of the religious life is that of being controlled by a power which is not alone from within, but also from without. Prior to the act of self-surrender, in which religion begins, the dominant motive of aim and act is primarily selfish, " My will ; my advancement ; my well being," in a word, self, is the umpire to which everything is referred. But after the act of self-surrender, self is lost in the will and service of another, whose rights are now recognized as superior to those of self, and whose service has become the supremest delight. And this recognition of a will other than our own, to which every act is referred, is, perhaps, the most pronounced of all religious experiences. In obedi- ence to this will the religious soul finds its highest delight, experiences a sense of perfect security, and is made partaker of that joy which is the sure re- ward of all who truly yield themselves to it. These three experiences, then, the experience of reconciliation with a person above and other than self ; the consciousness of a new life dwelling within, and the sense of being controlled by a supreme will from without, are the invariable char- 1 68 THE NATURE OF GOD. acteristics of religious experience. Not that they are distinct and separate in time, but that when the total of all that is given in the religious conscious- ness is analyzed, these three elements are found to constitute and impart to it its distinctive char- acter. Well, now, when these experiences are rightly considered, when we take them just as they are given in the consciousness, what, I ask, is the con- clusion to which they point ? If we are to trust the facts of our consciousness, and if experience counts for anything, are we not to conclude that these par- ticular experiences to which religion testifies are produced by personal contact with a Being other than self ? For the thing which enters into each of these separate experiences and which imparts to them a distinct significance, is just this personal ele- ment which constitutes the very nerve of religion. They are all experiences such as could not possibly arise out of any relation which we sustain to an un- conscious power or influence outside of us. No power other than that which goes forth from a person could possibly produce the result. Nor are these experiences given in the religious consciousness, such as an idea or mere abstraction, ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 69 however exalted, would be capable of effecting. One and all, they require a personal being to give them reality. One and all, they are identical with those which in a proportionate degree grow out of our re- lations with our fellows. Nothing short of a self- conscious person above and apart from us will meet the case or afford a rational explanation of the ex- periences just as they are given. We have either to deny the experiences altogether, or accept the con- clusion, to which on account of their distinctive character, they infallibly point. In order that this statement may be vindicated, let us for a moment revert to these experiences and consider them one by one. Take the first. The consciousness of reconcili- ation, the sense of being at peace with a being out- side of us, which follows on the act of self-surrender. Is this experience, in the shape in which it is given in the consciousness, capable of being produced by a power other than personal ? Do men desire to be reconciled with a blind power, no matter how great or how threatening? In the presence of such a power we may feel dread ; we may fear its effects and endeavor to escape from it. But there is no desire whatever to be reconciled with it, or a sense 170 THE NATURE OF GOD. that we are out of moral harmony with it. Men die, cursing without compunction the power that slays them, and without even a thought of possible moral harmony existing between themselves and it. They know that as between themselves and imper- sonal power, moral harmony is not to be thought of. Between the human soul and the powers resident in earthquake or storm or pestilence, such harmony is out of the question. Reconciliation is a term appli- cable alone to self-conscious beings between whom, for any reason, there has grown an estrangement. The emotions which prompt to the seeking of it are by no trick of speech, to be identified with those feelings which are awakened in us by either fear or dread. We do seek to escape a power. We do seek to interpose some barrier between it and ourselves behind which we may hide and feel ourselves safe. But with persons, we seek to be reconciled. And this, not on account of fear of injury which they may possibly do us. Fear is incapable of awakening those desires which prompt us to seek reconciliation. They always spring out of a sense of self-reproach, the consciousness that we have wronged another. A true conception of reconcili- ation always involves the fact of moral estrange- ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. I/I ment and a sense of personal guilt, deepened by the moral worth of the one from whom by our own acts we have estranged ourselves. And it is this that prompts to the seeking of rec- onciliation with God. Paul located it rightly when he said, "It is the goodness of God " that prompts to repentance. The same fact is brought out in the story of the prodigal. Sitting there among the swine, hungry and in rags, he thinks of his home and the father whom he had wronged in the day that he turned his back upon both and chose the life of the wanton. But when he turns his steps homeward, it is reconciliation that he seeks. Yet it is not fear that prompts his return. On the con- trary, it is the remembrance of the goodness of his father and his own baseness that brought about the estrangement. It was so also with the Psalmist : " I remembered God," says he, " and was troubled." What was it that troubled him? Not that he feared the vengeance of a blind and unconscious power. Such trouble as that which came to him is not the child of fear, but of self-reproach. It was when he " considered the days of old," the years of ancient times and the goodness of the One whom he had sinned against and forgotten, that the baseness 172 THE NATURE OF GOD. of his estrangement appeared in its true light and gave birth to a longing for reconciliation. No, this desire is not the desire to be in harmony with an im- sonal power. No unconscious force or agency, no creation of the mind possesses vitality enough to call it into being. It comes out of a sense of moral estrangement between persons. Personal relations, moral considerations alone, can account for it. Ac- cordingly, if this experience of moral disharmony be a fact given in consciousness ; if the sense of being reconciled with a Being above us, which fol- lows on the act of self-surrender, be a real experi- ence, then God is a person al Being. Apart from His personality, neither could be real, for the reason that personality is required to give them reality. But take now the second experience : I mean that of a new life within. The consciousness of a life so distinct from the old life of the flesh and so truly of the Spirit as to be explicable alone in the light of the indwelling of a person- other than self. If not fully at the moment of self-surrender, yet clearly traceable to that act, the religious soul is certain to recognize himself as being a " new creature " ; dom- inated by new affections, new thoughts and new purposes. In all that makes him the person that he ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 73 now recognizes himself as being, he knows himself to be different from the being he once was. It will be granted that at any particular moment we know ourselves as we know nothing else. We may hide ourselves from others ; we may close every avenue through which a knowledge of our- selves may come to others ; but no one can hide a knowledge of himself from himself. We know what we are in our very inmost. Everyone knows the precise character of the thoughts which are his, the affections which have their home in his heart and the motives which govern his life. Self-knowledge is inseparable from self-consciousness. But we not only know ourselves. We are able also to distin- guish between our own thoughts, affections and purposes and the thoughts, affections and purposes of another. We are able to say of this particular thought or of this particular affection, " This is mine " ; and of another particular thought or affec- tion, " This is not mine, this is foreign to me." It is this ability to distinguish between what belongs to us as individuals and what belongs to another that makes it possible for one to affirm of the life which, after the moment of self-surrender, inhabits him, that it is not the life of self, but that of another. 174 TH E NATURE OF GOD. When, for instance, the miser, with heart set on gold, and to whom no greater sacrifice could come than the loss of his treasures, finds himself suddenly released and dominated by new affections to such a degree as that he finds delight in enriching others with the treasures wmich he once worshiped, he knows that the new affection is not rightly his own, that it does not belong to the old self, but to the new by which he is now inhabited. Or when the one who finds his chief gratification in the in- dulgence of those base passions to which innocence and virtue alike appeal in vain, suddenly finds within a new self, looking with shame and con- tempt on the former self, he knows the new to be different from the old, for the reason that by it the old is condemned and cast out as an intruder. Nor does anyone to whom these experiences of a new life have been a reality, for a moment refer the change to a different intellectual conception of things. He knows that it is to be referred to noth- ing else than the control of a new spirit dwelling within. In short, he recognizes himself as being a new person, different in moral substance from the person he once was. So complete has been the transformation as that he now regards his former ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 75 self as " dead," and in the light of the new con- sciousness, declares himself as being in the very fiber of his moral personality, different from the per- son he once was. But how, I ask, is this experi- ence to which the religious soul testifies, in which the old life gives place to the new and which is sure to follow on the act of self-surrender — how is this experience to be explained except on the ad- mission that a new self has actually taken the place of the old ? For, let it be remembered, that the experience of a new life is not to be referred to a change in one's intellectual or emotional attitude to things. It is not a toning up of moral conduct or even the determination to live a life well-pleasing to God. It is not a determination of the will mani- festing itself in the output of good deeds, the fixing of some moral program of life, or, indeed, anything that pertains to the outward. The experience is that of a new life within, the consciousness of being con- trolled in the very inmost by new thoughts, new af- fections and a new will. In a word, it is the con- sciousness of the indwelling of a new self. It is an experience utterly incapable of being expressed in terms other than those which we are obliged to use when we speak of persons. It has to do with the 176 THE NATURE OF GOD. very foundation substance which lies back of all our activities. It is the experience of being occupied in the field of the very inmost by new moral forces. And it is just because the change effected is in the very inmost that it affects the whole field of our per- sonality that it is incapable of being referred to physical or intellectual causes. It is easy enough to account for transformations in the realm of the physical. Experience teaches us that, back of all such changes there lies a physical cause. Standing on the slopes of the Wengern Alp, I have seen the dark mist rise out of the gorges, and as it slowly emerged into the light, take on itself a lighter hue, until at last, kissed by the sunlight that fell aslant the peaks, it was transfigured into the gorgeous sheen of the rainbow. But the change in the mist cloud was not referred to a spiritual cause. Significant as it was, it was but a change in the physical and wrought by physical agencies. It belonged to the appearance only ; for the mist, in spite of the glory imparted to it by the sunlight, remained what it was. And so, too, in the realm of the intellectual, revolutions may take place. Change in intellectual attitude is the usual accompaniment of enlarged ex- perience and deeper insight into truth. "When I ORIGIN, SEAT AND CONTENT OF RELIGION. 1 77 was a child I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child ; but when I became a man I put away childish things," is the utterance of one into whose intellectual experience there had come many conceptual revolutions. And yet, in the roots of his nature he remained the same that he was. His change in intellectual attitude did not effect a change in the man. It never brought from his lips the confession that it had made him a " new creature." It is quite a different thing from a change in mental attitude to which this same one refers when he speaks of "putting off the old man with his deeds and putting on the new, which, after God, is created in righteousness and true holi- ness." And it is just this latter, this change in the innermost life, this experience of being occupied by a new self to which religious experience univers- ally testifies. A little further on we shall inquire into the trust- worthiness of this along with other experiences characteristic of the religious life. Meanwhile, assuming that this particular experience is to be trusted, and that it is correctly described when it is spoken of as the sense of being possessed by a new will and new affections, permit me to ask, what can 1J& THE NATURE OF GOD. it mean but that a new self has taken possession ? Apart from another self, in whom this new will, these new affections and this new mind reside, they are but abstractions, utterly incapable of affecting the consciousness. It is their unity in a self-con- scious being that makes them real and imparts to them their power to control. And this person, whose indwelling is confirmed in the experience of being possessed by a new will and new affections and new purposes, religion affirms to be none other than the One of whom it is said, " He dwelleth in you and shall be in you." But the third experience to which religion testi- fies is that of an external and personal control. It recognizes the existence of a will other than its own or that of the community to which it yields itself gladly, seeking ever to know what this will is, in order that it may be obedient to it. And this sense of being controlled by a Supreme will is, as already intimated, among the most pronounced and signifi- cant facts given in the religious consciousness. It is the inner certainty of such control to which is to be traced those experiences of joy, of confidence and of abiding security which enter so largely into the saintly life. i 7 9 And thus, while recognizing the indwelling of a new self, religion also bears witness to the constant presence and overrule of a Being outside of self, yet one with the new self who dwells within. The Being with whom the religious soul has to do is accordingly both immanent and transcendent. Im- manent in the new personality resident in the soul ; transcendent, in the One outside of self and to whom it yields itself in willing and glad surrender. But this control of which religion speaks, is not that of an arbitrary power, or even an almighty will apart from a person. The content of the experience is not exhausted in the mere conception of a govern- ing will, however mighty. It is the experience of the control of a will, behind which is a being altogether worthy ; a being whose very worthiness gives to this will the only authority which it can rightfully hold over a free and rational being. For mere will, backed even by absolute power, were such a thing possible, would be wanting in that authority by which a true man will allow himself to be controlled. Mere will, did such a thing exist, may be capricious and arbitrary. It may be bent on our moral ruin — may be selfish, vindictive and even cruel. It is the kind of will that settles for 180 THE NATURE OF GOD. the worthy man the question of the authority which it shall have over him. In other words, it is the moral character of the person whose will it is, that gives it its authority. It is because it is his will, or her will ; the will of one whose worthiness we acknowledge that gives to will its control over free and rational men. When Thomas Carlyle wrote on the tombstone of his wife, " In all that I have done or attempted that was worthy, she was my companion spirit," he owned himself as having been controlled by a will other than his own. But it was because this will was the will of one whom he loved and whose un- selfish devotion to him vested it with the right of control, that it became the governing influence of his life. And so, when the religious soul speaks of a will other than his own to which he acknowledges him- self to be subject ; or when he seeks to know this will in order that he may render obedience to it, he has in mind a person, a self-conscious being, in whom this will resides and whose it is. When he speaks of the experience of being cared for and defended, of being beset behind and before, he has in mind a person whose watchful eyes are upon him i8i and whose almighty arm is his defence. It is to his conscious relations to such an One that he refers all those experiences that make for his joy, his sense of safety in the present, and that confidence for the future which comes out of a sense that he is under the convoy of a personal yet almighty friend who will permit no evil to befall him. And thus, when religious experience is traced to its source and its content analyzed, we are forced back to a self-conscious person as its only possible explanation. All its relations are personal. They all require a personal being to make them valid. Its experiences of joy, of superiority to trials, its sense of unconquerable power, and the fact of its persistent life in the world, all must be traced to a personal being with whom communion is held and from whom all that gives it meaning is derived. From first to last, religion requires a self-conscious and personal God to give it reality and to afford a rational interpretation of the experiences to which it universally and unqualifiedly testifies. LECTURE FIFTH. THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. The testimony, then, of religion to the Divine personality is complete and unequivocal. Your re- ligious soul will tell you that God is his daily com- panion, a being with whom he holds fellowship and from whom he derives help. It is the certainty of this conviction that keeps religion going. Now, at this point we might be justified in resting our case. For the question as to the nature of God is one upon which religion alone is qualified to tes- tify. Clearly, it is a matter of our experimental and not of our formal knowledge. For, if God actually exists, He exists in the world of realities outside of us, a knowledge of which is derived through ex- perience alone. Logic in the realm of concrete realities is of but little service. It can neither affirm or deny facts which are real, for the reason that it has to do with ideas and concepts alone. There is but one door through which our knowledge of real things can come, and that is the door of ex- perience. Accordingly, having heard the testimony (182) THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 83 of religion to the fact of the Divine personality, the point at issue might rightly be regarded as proven. And yet, were we to stop at this point, the force of the argument would be seriously impaired. Cer- tainty in respect of facts attested depends largely on the character and qualifications of the witness. His ability to judge correctly of the facts, the actual knowledge which he may have of them, are to be taken into account. The knowledge of a compe- tent witness must also be first hand, and not that kind which is derived from the testimony of others. It must rest on that experience which comes from actual and personal contact with the facts. And then, too, what often passes for experience may not be trustworthy. It may be imaginary, and not real. We want to know who has had the experience ; we want to know something about his mental and physical constitution in order that we may deter- mine as to whether the experience to which he tes- tifies is such as realities, as we know them, are capa- ble of producing in the normal consciousness. It is for this reason that we must go back of the testi- mony which religion offers in favor of the Divine personality, and inquire into the trustworthiness of 184 THE NATURE OF GOD. religious knowledge itself. What estimate, then, are we to place upon religious knowledge, and what degree of certainty attaches to it ? In the preceding lecture I called your attention to the fact that the certainty of our knowledge of things is determined largely by the answer which is given to the question as to whether or not all of our faculties have been co-operative in its reception. Since all truth comes from the outside, it is of the utmost importance to correct knowledge that it be rightly reported. And this is the task of no single one, but, on the contrary, of all of our receptive faculties. Each must be given its proper work to do, and every channel through which truth is con- veyed to the soul must be kept open. The same law applies to our religious knowledge. If it is to be accepted as trustworthy all of our functions must co-operate in its reception. When the breath of the Lord blows upon the harp of the soul, if harmony and not disharmony is to result, all of its chords must be responsive. The fact, therefore, that the religious concept of God is, as we have seen, the product of the co-ordinate activity of all of our re- ceptive functions, adds immensely to its trustworthi- ness. And yet, before we can rightly determine the THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 185 degree of certainty which attaches to our religious, it will be necessary for us to inquire as to the rela- tive certainty of other kinds of knowledge. Now, when we come to look into the matter, we make the discovery that the same degree of cer- tainty does not attach to all kinds of knowledge. We are more soundly convinced of some things than we are of others. The distinction between moral certainty and that certainty which rests on deductions from necessary principles is a real dis- tinction, and one which we cannot fail practically to recognize. And so we classify our knowledge with reference to the degree of certainty which attaches to it ; and when we do this we find that it arranges itself into three distinct classes : formal knowledge, probable knowledge, and that kind of knowledge which we have of real existences out- side of us to which we give the name experimental. Let us now look at the various kinds separately in order that we may determine the relative certainty which attaches to each. L,et us begin with our formal knowledge. Now, by formal knowledge we mean the kind which has its basis in necessary principles. " It includes," says Professor Stearns, " the forms of 1 86 THE NATURE OF GOD. reasoning based on necessary principles in the formal sciences, such as logic and mathematics. We have here to do with ideas, laws, relations and processes, but not with real existences. The intuitions are not things, and do not stand for things ; they are forms of thought which, doubtless, correspond to the objective forms of things, but are to be distin- guished from the things themselves. Logic and mathematics are formal sciences. But, for the pur- pose of these sciences the question of the corre- spondence of the notion with the reality is not essential. The notions are mere counters of thought. Their relation to reality is only hypothetical. Tak- ing it for granted, as a supposition, that these notions represent so and so, we ask what results will follow from their combination and manipulation according to the mathematical and logical processes." Now, the certainty of this kind of knowledge is absolute. For instance, it is absolutely certain that the same thing cannot be and not be at the same time. It is absolutely certain that the whole is equal to all of its parts, and so on. The term must applies to each and all of these propositions of our formal knowledge. If we think of them at all, we can think of them in no other wav. THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 87 But, it may be asked, of what practical value is this certainty ? The answer is, but very little. In all those relations which most concern us it makes but little difference whether these propositions are true or false. For the peculiarity of this form of knowledge is that it has little or nothing to do with real existences. Except in a remote way, it does not contribute anything to our knowledge of things about us. Of course, if these things comprehended in our formal knowledge are anywhere to be found, the eternal verities will obtain in them. If a tri- angle, for illustration, exists, its three angles will be equal to two right ones. Or, if two parallel lines exist, it is certain that they will never meet. But none of these verities have anything to say about facts, or about what is or what is not in the actual world. All that these sciences make sure of is, that if these things are anywhere to be found the eternal verities will obtain in them. But they are primarily interesting only as subjective facts. They stand waiting in the mind, forming a beautiful net-work, and the most that we can say is, that we hope to discover outer realities over which the network may be flung, so that the real and the ideal may co- incide. 1 88 THE NATURE OF GOD. And so, in any attempt that we may make to dis- cover the nature of God, formal knowledge cannot help us, for the reason that it is utterly incapable of throwing light on the world of the actual, in which God exists. So far, then, as our present inquiry is concerned, formal knowledge has nothing to impart. For what good does it do me, asks Schopenhauer, " to know ever so certainly w T hat I have no interest in? In mathematics, the mind busies itself with its own forms of knowledge, time and space, like a cat that plays with its own tail." It is only when the formal sciences are used in the interests of reality that they become of any real value. If not so used they are good for mental discipline, but otherwise they are worthless. And this is the place to say that the insinuating sneer of the skeptic at the failure of all attempts to demonstrate with mathematical certainty the being of God, is at last but a confession of his own ignorance. A better understanding of the nature of formal knowledge, and the limits by which it is beset would make him humble rather than con- temptuous. True, if God were a mere notion, or even a necessary principle, this method of demon- stration would be applicable. But just because He THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 89 is neither, just because He is a person, possessed of actual existence, His being and nature are to be de- termined by considerations other than those which enter into our formal knowledge. But a second kind of knowledge is that to which we give the designation, probable. It is the kind which we get from books, from our teachers, from conversation with others, and in kindred ways. It is neither reasoned knowledge, based on necessary principles, nor yet the kind which we have gotten for ourselves through personal experience. It is all second-hand knowledge, the trustworthiness of which depends on the veracity of our informants, and their ability to sift the wheat from the chaff of error. The most that can be said of this form of knowledge is, that it is probably true ; personally, we are not quite certain that it conforms with facts. And yet, when one comes to analyze the sum total of what he calls his knowledge, and begins to classify it with reference to the degree of certainty which belongs to it, he will be surprised at the vast amount which he is compelled to put over into this class of the probable. It is true that we act on it and shape our conduct by it But we do so for the 190 THE NATURE OF GOD. reason that it is frequently the only kind available. We cannot at all times put ourselves into personal contact with the facts, and, as a consequence, we are compelled to accept the testimony of those who have. Yet we are never quite certain of our prob- able knowledge, however great our confidence in those who have imparted it. We want to see for ourselves, and to bring ourselves into actual contact with the facts. Of course, in matters which do not seriously concern us we ordinarily give ourselves but little trouble in the way of experimental verifi- cation. We accept the statement for what it is worth. But when it becomes a matter of vital im- portance to know the real truth, or when conse- quences far-reaching are involved, we cannot be satisfied with knowledge which is merely probable. Then a man will say, " I cannot depend on the tes- timony of others, however truthful they may be. They may be honest enough, but honesty itself does not insure against mistakes. I will investigate for myself. I will get the facts at first hand, for what I know I really know." And he does so, for the reason that experience is the umpire to which all questions as to the certainty or uncertainty of our probable knowledge must at last be referred. What THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 191 the plummet and the square do for the builder in the way of verifying his judgment, that experience does for our probable knowledge. It tests it by the test of actual contact with reality, and proves its cer- tainty by the readiness with which it conforms with the actual. Now, it is to the kind of knowledge thus derived to which we give the name experimental. It is the kind which concerns itself with those facts out of which our knowledge of actual existences is built. It takes into account all those realities which mani- fest themselves to, or in the consciousness through, our outer or our inner sense. It should go with the saying, that the term real existences does not include that inner world of ideas and notions which has its existence apart from actual objects. By it we mean those objects alone which are capable of producing effects in the consciousness, and which attest their reality by the effects which they are capable of producing. It will be seen at once, that this includes the whole world of actual existences outside of us, the sum total of those facts which form the frame-work, or rather the founda- tion, of all knowledge of self, of the world, of our fellow-men, and of God. Whatever is seen by the 192 THE NATURE OF GOD. eye, heard by the ear, or is made known through the feeling ; in a word, whatever is capable of pro- ducing effects in the consciousness, belongs to the world of real existences. Now, the avenue of this particular kind of knowl- edge is experience. It is through experience that we come into possession of the facts out of which our knowledge of actual existence is constructed. So far as our knowledge of these outward realities goes, it is entirely experimental. We do not come into its possession by abstract thinking ; we are entirely dependent on the material given in consciousness for what we may know of the object itself. Well, when we come to see the kind of knowl- edge which experience gives, we at once perceive the vastness of its range and its actual importance. In fact, it includes all, or practically all, the knowl- edge which we value most in life. It is the kind which underlies all progress and which furnishes the material of every science. It is the kind upon which, in all the relations and activities of life, we place the greatest dependence. But by what right, it may be asked, do we thus depend on the knowledge gained through experi- ence, and in what does its certaintv consist ? It will THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 93 not be denied that we do trust it. When we are in doubt about the supposed facts of our probable knowledge we always refer them to experience in order that we may verify them. The confidence which we may have in any science is based on the fact that its theories are not accepted on the grounds of their mere reasonableness, but on those of experi- mental tests. We feel ourselves compelled either to accept the testimony of experience on the one hand, or to deny the reality of knowledge on the other. But what is it that imparts to experimental knowledge its certainty ? I think the answer will be found in three things. First, in the fact that it is knowledge of the ob- ject itself derived from actual contact with it. Ideas, conceptions, apart from real objects, lack this cer- tainty. They may or may not be correct mental representations of the actual. But we are certain that the world about us is real. It does not deceive us. It produces actual impressions on the con- sciousness, and it is just these real impressions re- sulting from actual contact with objects which im- part to experimental knowledge its certainty. In fact, the very term experience implies real knowl- edge so derived. It involves the existence of objects 13 194 TH E NATURE OF GOD. outside of us with which we are brought into con- tact. We do not experience the first principles of thought or the processes of logic or mathematics. Nor do we experience the facts of our probable knowledge. In every case experience implies the presence of real existences affecting the conscious- ness. Accordingly, the certainty which attaches to this kind of knowledge is true certainty. It rests on the testimony of our consciousness, a testimony which, as rational beings, we are bound to accept. There is absolutely no other tribunal to which we can refer our questions as to the reality or nature of existences outside of ourselves. It is first-hand knowledge, vouched for and verified by actual con- tact with reality. Now, when we speak of actual contact with real- ity as furnishing a true basis for knowledge, we have in mind the kind of contact which is complete and which leaves out nothing which is essential to the object itself. For it is obvious that contact with realities may be imperfect. It may touch the ob- ject but remotely ; or it may be had through but one or another of our receptive faculties. If, for any reason, contact has been imperfect, or if it has been of such a nature as to present to the conscious- THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 95 ness an indefinite or distorted impression, then the trustworthiness of the knowledge based upon it will be impaired. I need but remind you that most of those strange beliefs in apparitions, and kindred phenomena, which have their existence among rude and savage people, are to be referred to imperfect contact with objects. For the most part, they are to be traced to faulty impressions made, or supposed to be made, upon one or another of the senses. For when the mind builds its fabric out of imperfect or distorted material, the structure which it builds is sure to be fantastic and out of harmony with reality. And in the working out of knowledge the mind must needs confine itself to the raw material mediated through the sense. It has no other out of which it can con- struct it. It cannot furnish the material of real knowledge out of itself. It must be furnished by the susceptibilities, for the reason that it is through these that the world of reality is touched and the material of knowledge furnished. Just as the car- penter is dependent on the material out of which he is to construct a building, so the mind is de- pendent on impressions given in the sense in the construction of knowledge. If, for any reason, these 196 THE NATURE OF GOD. are faulty, the knowledge will be faulty. Let us make the matter a little clearer, if possible, by use of an illustration. We are alone, let us say, in the forest. It is that witching hour of the night in which, on account of the darkness and our own subjective moods, we are particularly open to faulty impressions. We hear, let us say, a sound, but fail to see the object from which it proceeded. Now, so far as the sound itself is concerned, we may think of it as having been distinct and definite enough to have impressed itself correctly on the consciousness. Well, out of these impressions the mind is warranted to go on to the construction of knowledge. Yet it cannot go beyond the content present in the consciousness. It must import noth- ing out of the fancy of the imagination. If the knowledge is to be real, it must be constructed out of the material actually given in consciousness. But while knowledge so derived will be true so far as it goes, it would be very far from true were the mind to go on from this partial contact to affirm anything as to the form of the object itself. To be sure, the sound may be associated with an object the form of which is already well known. In that case we would be warranted in going beyond the THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 97 inere content and affirming that it proceeded from a bird or an insect, as the case may be. But if the object at the particular time, or at no time prior, has left an impression through the eye, as well as through the ear, then the mind in its work is com- pelled to stop with the material furnished by the sense of hearing alone, and cannot go on to construct out of itself a real knowledge of the form. And that is to say, that when for any reason the contact with the object has been imperfect or has been had through but one of the receptive faculties, the material furnished is not sufficient to construct a true knowledge of any particular object. But suppose, on the contrary, that this contact of which we are speaking has been perfect at all points ; that it has been through the eye, the ear, in .short, through all the sense faculties ; then, out of such contact the mind may construct knowledge. Perfection of contact, the response of all our facul- ties to the object, is essential to the trustworthiness of all knowledge which rests on experience as a basis. It is such contact, actual and complete, which we have in mind when we speak of real, rather than imaginary, experiences. It is the syn- thesis of all possible impressions made upon all our 198 THE NATURE OF GOD. faculties, and the testing and the investigation of these impressions by the process of reflection, that gives to experimental knowledge its certainty. But there is yet another feature of this kind of knowledge which adds immensely to its certainty. I mean the possibility which it affords of verifica- tion by repeated experiment. Whenever this is possible the certainty of the knowledge is intensi- fied, for the reason that by repeated experiment its possible errors may be corrected and its facts con- firmed. Now, it may be admitted, that if, in the first instance, the contact with the object has been complete, the certainty of the knowledge will not be increased by any number of repetitions. Never- theless, we cannot but attach to knowledge so veri- fied a degree of certainty which we are unwilling to grant to any other. Except in extraordinary cases, we are not quite sure that we have been put into possession of all the facts by a single experi- ence. There is always the possibility that some- thing important has been omitted, or that our sub- jective states may have influenced in such a way as to have distorted the facts. In either case, the knowledge derived through a single experience will be unsatisfactory. But, if it is possible to repeat THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 1 99 the experiment, to repeat it under all possible cir- cumstances and conditions, and if the results yet remain the same, the knowledge so gained will pos- sess additional certainty. It is, then, in the strict- est sense, scientific knowledge, for the reason that it is just through repeated experiment that science comes into possession of its facts. Take, for instance, the fact that plants of differ- ent variety are capable of cross-fertilization. How came this to be an established fact of science ? The answer is, that repeated experiment has confirmed the fact, and that the experiment is capable of being repeated over and over with precisely the same re- sult. Or, here is the chemist experimenting with a new explosive. He finds that under certain con- ditions of light and heat the normal relations be- tween the atoms are broken up and an explosion follows. Now, a single experiment may carry with it a certain conviction that a new fact has been dis- covered, and something added to the world's knowl- edge. But, if he repeats the experiment again and again, and always with the same result, would any- one say that the knowledge so obtained carries with it no additional certainty? And, if precisely the same results follow every experiment, does not the 200 THE NATURE OF GOD. knowledge based upon these experiments approach that kind of certainty which we call absolute? We know that fire burns. Experiment, without a single exception, gives certainty to the knowledge. We know that abstinence from food produces hun- ger. We know that laceration of the nerves pro- duces pain. We know that the harvest follows seed time. We know that labor brings its reward, and that, contrariwise, idleness tendeth to poverty. Of all of these facts we are entirely convinced. The knowledge of them is certain knowledge. But we are certain of it, because experiment, oft re- peated, has taught us that the facts cannot be other- wise than our knowledge declares them to be. Re- peated experiment, with identical results, gives certainty to knowledge which is based upon them. If we are honest we are compelled to accept all such knowledge as real, whether we wish to do so or not. But there is yet a third quality belonging to a particular class of experiences which imparts, by common consent, to the knowledge based upon them a degree of certainty hardly less than absolute. I mean the quality which renders them capable of being had by all men. Confessedly there are ex- THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 201 periences which are not, and which, on account of their peculiar nature, cannot be had by all alike. They are such as can be had by those few alone who, to use the phrase of Dr. Moreau, belong to u one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." They are such as come alone to those geniuses which Mr. Nisbet evidently has in mind when he says, " Whenever a man's life is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he in- variably falls into the morbid category." Of course, the experiences had by such are unique, and of necessity, private. They are of a nature such as to make them possible to those alone who possess a temperament out of the ordinary. And, while to us such experiences may not impart to the knowl- edge based upon them the same certainty as that which is based on experiences more universal, yet to those who have had them, the certainty of the knowledge cannot be greater. Yet, for the most part we suspect it. Before we are willing to accept facts so certified as true, we want to know who has had the experience. With most of us their normal character and universality carry immense weight. And yet, in saying this, I do not mean to throw 202 THE NATURE OF GOD. suspicion on all knowledge based on experiences which are even abnormal. Abnormality itself does not, of necessity, vitiate knowledge. We are to esti- mate, and do estimate, its value in the light of con- siderations other than those of the mere way in which such knowledge is brought to us. As a matter of fact, much of such knowledge has stood the fiery test. Much of the knowledge of which we are possessed could not have come to us in a way other than that in which it has actually come. Oft the persons who testify to the reality of these experiences are those whose veracity cannot be questioned. Fre- quently they have been the wisest, the holiest and the sanest of their generation. For it has been the lot of many of the great to differ radically in tem- perament from ordinary men. The prophets, the seers, the reformers, the geniuses, the leaders of every generation, have often possessed the neurotic temperament. Paul, who was caught up into the third heaven, and who heard things which "it is not lawful for man to utter," probably belonged to this class. To it belonged a Luther who testifies to having seen the arch enemy of man. To it be- longed Savonarola, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and John Mazzini. And to it also belonged the lone exile THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 203 of Patmos, who "beheld the new Jerusalem de- scending out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband." But time would fail me to speak of the great and the good, who, just because of their peculiar tem- perament, have stood on the mountain peaks be- holding the first rays of the morning and hearing the voices which, out of the to-morrows, ever speak to the responsive soul. Prophets, seers they have often been — the men and the women of whom the world was not worthy. What if the experiences which came to them were out of the normal? What if the more phlegmatic among us have never had them ? Their trustworthiness is not on that account to be impeached or their value depre- ciated. The knowledge based on these experiences has often been the newest and the best. Oft it has re- quired the lapse of centuries for men of ordinary mold to climb into the bright light in the radi- ance of which it was the privilege of these to stand and to rightly appreciate the knowledge which they have given to the world. "What right have we to believe," asks Dr. Maudsley, " that nature is under any obligations to 204 THE NATURE OF GOD. do her work by means of complete minds only ? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work done and the quality of the worker by which it was done that is alone of moment. . . . The last resort of certitude is the common assent of mankind or of the competent by instruction among man- kind." In much the same strain writes Professor James : " Few of us are not infirm or even diseased, and our infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of the moral perception ; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor ; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism, which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament opens to regions of re- ligious truth, to corners of the universe which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast and thanking heaven that it has not a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from the self-satisfied possessor? If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 205 realm, it might well be that the neurotic tempera- ment would furnish the chief condition of the re- quisite receptivity." But we are not all geniuses. Most of us are so keyed as to be able to respond to the more ordinary experiences alone. I have called attention to these abnormal cases and the way in which we should regard them only for the reason that in emphasiz- ing the characteristics belonging to those which, by mutual consent, are regarded as furnishing a true basis of knowledge, the impression might be left that they are of no value whatever. This is not the case. Clearly, however, they must be regarded as standing in a class by themselves and must be judged in the light of what they are worth. Ac- cordingly, I do not include them among those ex- periences had by all men and which are universally regarded as trustworthy sources of knowledge. It is with the latter alone that we are concerned, for it is upon these that our actual knowledge of exist- ences must at last depend. Surely we have no other pathway to the attainment of such knowledge than the one offered through actual contact with objects themselves, for it is, as we have seen, upon such contact that all experimental knowledge rests. 206 THE NATURE OF GOD. But when, as a result of such contact, the same ex- periences invariably follow, and these not in the private consciousness of a favored few, but in that of all, then the knowledge based upon experience rises to the height of absolute certainty. It was one of the axioms of Spinoza that an " idea was true when it corresponds with its object." And it is just the accuracy of this correspondence which experience, oft repeated in the history of the race, is able to confirm that puts the seal of verity on our experimental knowledge. Now that God actually impresses Himself on the consciousness is the testimony of religious souls everywhere. Just as through impressions of sense we perceive the realities which make up our physical environment, so through the inner sense the religious soul is made conscious of God. He knows that his consciousness is effected as really by God as it is by existences in the out- side world. For as man, being as to his body, included in nature is surrounded by a physical environment which is constantly acting on him and presenting itself to his consciousness, so man, as spirit, is surrounded by a spiritual environ- ment which is constantly acting on him and pre- THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. ZOJ senting itself in his consciousness. And this en- vironment the devout soul feels to be God. You will hardly expect me to enter into a dis- cussion of the problem as to how God affects the consciousness in religious experience. That is a psychological problem of its own, and does not properly belong to the present discussion. It is not the question as to how God can come into the con- sciousness of the religious soul. It is with the fact that He is actually present that we have to do. As to the way in which the sensibility is affected ex- perience has nothing to say. It confines its testi- mony to the much more important fact that the consciousness is so affected, and that it is affected in a way precisely analogous to that in which a person affects it. Wherever you find the religious soul he will bear testimony to this fact. He is ab- solutely certain about it ; he is as thoroughly con- vinced of it as he is of the existence of the sun, of the sky which bends over his head, or of the actual existence of a friend with whom he holds daily intercourse. He knows that he experiences God ; that his consciousness is as really affected by God as it is by those outward objects which impress themselves upon him through the medium of the :oS E NATUR1 D senses. So convinced is he of the fact, as that gladly yields to it the governance of his life, dies, if need be, in witness . % : its reality. ■ ; -.:: is this experience trustworthy? Is ; .; of such a nature as to afford a reliable basis foi knowledge? Let as see how it fares with it when submitted to the three tests to which all those experiences upon which real knowledge is built must be submitted. Let as apply to it the first test : that of actual and complete contact with the object Le: me ren again that the specific content of the religions consciousness is that of a person and not a thing. Experience proves that we are affected by pers in a way entirely different From the way in which we are affected b; things We ic distinguish be- en the effect produced in our consciousness by ing like ourselves and that produced by material objects. Were this not the case, no one could dis- tinguish between material and spiritual realities : indee;.. we could never hope to know tilings as they are. It is just because one thing affects us in one . and another in another, that we are able to distinguish between things, and affirm of a particu- lar sensation that this, and not that, has produced it. If all objects affected us alike the world would be THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 200, robbed of its diversity, and a knowledge of partic- ular things would be impossible. Jevons, speaking of scientific certainty, says : " Whatever feeling is actually present to the mind is certainly known by the mind. If the sky is blue, I may be quite sure that I experience a sensation of blueness. What I do feel, I feel beyond a doubt." We have either to trust our consciousness and acknowledge that in it things are represented as they are, or abandon forever the hope of knowing the world about us. Accordingly, when in consciousness an effect is produced by a person, we distinguish it from all other effects, and affirm that a person alone could have produced it. Now, it is to just this consciousness that the re- ligious person testifies. He knows himself to be affected not as an object, but as a person alone could affect him, and affirms of the effect that it is pro- duced by contact with a personal God. He knows that the effect could not have produced itself. That it is not to be traced to his own thinking, but that it has been produced by a person through the medium of spiritual contact. But is this contact out of which religious ex- perience comes a real and complete contact with 14 2IO THE NATURE OF GOD. the object ? Does it so touch the reality as that nothing essential is left out ? I think we have but to suggest this question to find the answer. For no one will deny that we do know persons as we do not know things. We do know our fellows as we do not know even the most familiar objects about us. Nor is this knowledge which we have of per- sons a knowledge simply about them. It takes in the very inmost. It comprehends the elements which make up their very selves. Take, for instance, the knowledge which you have of a tree or a stone, or of a material object. You have but to sift it to find out that, at best, it is but a knowledge of attributes, of those qualities which belong to it. The thing itself, the ultimate reality, escapes you, for the reason that no faculty of the sense is sufficiently delicate to put you in touch with the thing in which these qualities inhere. What, at last, do we know of matter, in spite of all these centuries of study and investigation? We know some of its belongings ; we know its more common modes of manifestation, and in some degree the laws which govern it. But, like the will-o'-the- wisp, matter itself has eluded our quest and van- ished into the darkness whenever we have attempted THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 211 a near approach. It escapes contact, and escaping this, has not yet become an object of complete knowledge. It is the same with force. We know its push or pull, its modes of manifestation, but the thing itself has stood aloof for the reason that no avenue has yet been discovered through which the thing itself might be made to affect the conscious- ness. And thus, in cases without number, our in- ability to put ourselves into that actual contact with the object which experience requires, shuts the door of knowledge in our faces and leaves us in darkness as to what these things are in themselves. But it is not so in respect of our knowledge of persons. We do know ourselves, and knowing our- selves we are able to know others like us, for it is given to the spirit to know best that which is most like itself. The contact of spirit with spirit in its intimacy is such as can never be approached in the case of material objects through the sense. In all our personal relations the contact is from both sides ; a contact in which each fits, as it were, into the other. In all our personal relations we not only seek to touch others, but others seek also to touch us. It is not so with material objects. The stone, the tree, the flower, the sky, the hills, make no re- 212 THE NATURE OF GOD. sponse. We may seek to commune with them, but they remain silent. Our joys, our sorrows, evoke no response, and in spite of our imagination, in all that pertains to their innermost, we are miles and miles apart even at the points where contact seems to be the most intimate. But we do touch persons. Through speech, through sympathy, through love, through that mysterious something in us which communes with what is kindred to it, and in turn unlocks the innermost of another, we do know even as we are known. It cannot be denied that we do know more of persons than we do of things. And we do so for the reason that our contact with per- sons is vastly more complete than it can possibly be with soulless and irresponsive objects. So far, then, it appears that the knowledge based on religious experience is absolutely trustworthy. It rests on experience produced by actual contact with a person. It has its basis in facts given in the consciousness through real and intimate contact with its object — a contact vastly more intimate and real than any which can be had with material objects through the medium of the sense. Let us now apply the second test of trustworthi- ness to religious knowledge. We agreed, a moment THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 21 3 ago, that certainty in respect of any particular item of knowledge gained through experiment increased with each repetition of the experiment in which a like result was produced. We are never quite sure of the truth of any proposition which has for its basis a single experience. At best, we hold such propositions only tentatively. We say they may be true, or they may not be true. But if any such proposition is confirmed by repeated experiments, and if these always result in precisely the same way, then what was before a mere hypothesis becomes an established fact in science. We are absolutely cer- tain of any proposition which has its confirmation in multiplied and unvarying experiment. The facts of science ; the laws which govern in the realm of nature, in short, all facts universally accepted are of this sort, and we accept them for the sole reason that they are. But do the great facts to which religious experi- ence testifies rest upon this same basis ? And does this experience, however often repeated, confirm the claim that in his daily communion the religious soul has actually to do with a person ? Let us deal honestly with the question. A fact witnessed and confirmed by multiplied experiences is no less a fact 214 THE NATURE OF GOD. because it happens to be religious. The conscious- ness to which God is present is the same conscious- ness as that in which realities of the outward world present themselves. The individual to whom both experiences come and in whose consciousness both impressions are made is the same. If, then, a fact confirmed by numerous experiments is absolutely certain in the one case, is it not also in the other ? For let it not be forgotten that the experience of the pious soul, no matter how often repeated, is precisely the same. It always testifies to the fact that it is a person, and not a thing, by which the consciousness is affected, and that this person is no other than God. Nor are these experiences isolated or even occa- sional. Enoch daily walks with God ; and the Psalmist prevents the dawn in the sweet fellowship of prayer. In fact, the moments when God is not experienced and when He is not felt to be in the consciousness are exceptional, and are sure to be mourned. Let us own that if the experiences of which we are speaking were variable, or even occasional, then the conclusion that they are pro- duced by a person would be less certain. It is their constancy, along with the fact that they invariably THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 215 witness to the same thing, which gives them their weight and imparts certainty to the knowledge which rests upon them as a basis. But we must hasten to the application of the third test, that of universality. Are these experi- ences upon which religious knowledge rests such as may be had by all men ? Now, in answering this question, let it be under- stood that we have in mind only experiences of per- sonal fellowship, the consciousness of communion with a personal being, which, as we have seen, is the essential thing in all religious experience. Aside from this particular element there will be others peculiar to each individual. For in this, as in all other experiences resulting from contact with real- ities, there will be minor effects determined by individual temperament and differences in mental constitution. I speak of what comes to all. Of that which is so distinctly of the essence of religious experience as that when it is not present, something vital is left out. Do all saintly souls testify to the consciousness that God is personal and that He sustains to them relations identical with those which exist between themselves and an earthly friend ? Is this experience universal ? 2l6 THE NATURE OF GOD. Let us except those spiritual geniuses who by common consent are lifted above the laws which hold in respect of ordinary men and women. They stand in a class by themselves, possessed as they are of that peculiar physical and mental constitution which makes them responsive to experiences which in the nature of the case can be had by them alone. Yet no one will dispute that the knowledge with which even these abnormal souls have enriched the world has for the most part been trustworthy in spite of the fact that it rests on experiences which were theirs alone. We do accept the knowledge so derived, for the reason that it has proven itself to be trustworthy. Yet we do not accept it for the reason that it is private, but in spite of its privacy. We accept it on the ground of the moral trust- worthiness of those who testify to the experiences, and also on account of its real value to the world. But, barring these exceptions, what we require as a guarantee of certainty of all knowledge of ex- istences external to us is, that the experience grow- ing out of contact with them shall be such as may be had by all alike. We distrust privacy. We have every reason to trust the universal. Well, then, does religious experience universally THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 217 witness to the fact, that in religion communion is had with a personal being ? We have but to open history to find the answer. Indeed, the reality of such communion is the one distinguishing feature of the religious consciousness. It is the mutuality of this very experience that unites the hearts of every race and of every temperament into a spirit- ual community. It is just this which is common to the experience of all alike, whether learned or unlearned, black or white, peasant or philosopher. For, where has religion not lived ? What earthly condition or environment has shut it out ? What race or people is there among which it has not found a home? What surroundings from those under which men have been compelled to toil for their daily bread, to those which make the envir- onment of the favored whose privilege it is to live in ivory palaces, have kept men aloof from that companionship with God which is the essence of religion ? At last, the hunger of the soul and its willingness to yield itself in full surrender to the One for whom it feels itself to have been created, are all that is needed to produce the experiences upon which religious knowledge rests. And, thus, when fairly regarded, religious knowl- 2l8 THE NATURE OE GOD. edge is verified by every possible test of certainty. It claims no exception. It seeks not to avoid the rigid processes to which we submit our other knowl- edge. Its facts, like those of science, rest on actual contact with the object and are verified by experi- ments without number and by individuals every- where. From this it follows, that it is not a guess which religion makes when it affirms of God that He is a personal being. It is knowledge, tested and scientifically verified. But we must not turn away until we have made •reply to a question which is certain to be asked by the confirmed skeptic. It is the one which grows out of the so-called privacy of religious experience. For, since it is actually had by some alone, and not by all indiscriminately, it will be asked, does not this fact throw suspicion on that knowledge which rests on religious experience as its basis? In reply to this question let me ask another. Is religious knowledge, then, an exception, or is it not, on the contrary, true that all knowledge based on experi- ence is in a certain degree private ? The truth is, that all experimental knowledge is essentially such, and is the possession of those alone who have had the experience. The knowledge of the astronomer THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 2 1 9 is private. To him alone the heavens speak their secrets and make known the laws of their being. To him alone, they are peopled with worlds, pro- jecting themselves along the track of their orbits, and to the music of the spheres his ears alone are open. But this knowledge need not be private. It is open to all who are willing to tread the path- way which leads through the portals of astronomic knowledge. The knowledge of the chemist is his alone. No eye but his has witnessed the strange behavior of the substances with which he deals, and with which he has made himself familiar. But it need not be private. To all who are willing to submit to her requirements, nature opens her sanc- tuary and unfolds the secrets of her mysterious processes. But a man may shut himself out from any kind of knowledge. He may wait and demand that it come to him in his own way. But he will remain the fool that he was, for knowledge comes alone to those who open themselves to her, and who are willing to enter through the door of experience, which she throws open to all. Her promise to all who really want to know is, " They that seek me shall find me, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." I know of no branch of knowledge from 220 THE NATURE OF GOD. which, if a man chooses, he may not shut himself out. But that fact does not invalidate the knowl- edge, or make it a whit less certain. The question is not whether the experience upon which any kind of knowledge rests has been had by all, but whether it may be had by all. I have been told that in the great tunnels which pierce the coal deposits of Durham, in England, down in the darkness, into which no ray of sun- light has ever penetrated, there live men and women who have never seen the sunlight. Men to whom the experiences which fill the soul at early dawn or at the falling of the evening shadows have never come. Men whose only conception of the glory of the light is molded by the flickering lamps which open for them a pathway through the gloomy passageways. And such may, indeed, dispute, upon the grounds of privacy, the experiences had by those to whom the light is no stranger. Such may suspect the knowledge of terrestrial things which comes to men who live and walk in the day. But what sane one would accept the plea ? The experience of the sunlight may, indeed, be private, it may not have been shared by all men. But it is had by all who have not themselves shut out the light. THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 221 And so, likewise, is it with the experiences which come to the religious soul. They are such as may be had by all. They are such as do come to all who conform with the conditions, viz., the com- plete surrender of self to the loving and all-wise control of the One who has said, " If any man open the door, I will come in and sup with him, and he with me," — the One whose challenge to the unbeliever is contained in the words, " If any man wills to do the will of my Father in heaven, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself." LECTURE SIXTH. ANTHROPOMORPHISM. A religious conception of God is of necessity an- thropomorphic. Since the essence of religion is actual communion with the Deity, its idea of God must needs be that of a personal being. Between the human spirit and that which is not like itself, there can be no fellowship. That mutual under- standing which is the outcome of kinship is indis- pensable to real fellowship. And so it has come that by the religious soul God has always been conceived as personal ; a being more like ourselves than anything of which we can think. To all such He is a person ; lifted, indeed, above all human imperfections, possessed of perfect self-con- sciousness and self-control, yet a Being capable of being touched with a "feeling of our infirmi- ties " for the reason that in nature He is one with us. It is alone in the soil of such a conception of God that religion lives and finds all that is essen- tial to its life. Apart from it, it withers and dies. Whatever prejudices we may have against anthropo- (222) ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 223 morphic thoughts of the Deity, it is, nevertheless, certain that they are inseparable from religion. Pan- theism, in which the Deity is conceived as impersonal substance, is no religion. At best Pantheism is but a philosophy. It may be acknowledged that in the beginning its founder, Spinoza, was influenced by religious motives. Yet it cannot be denied that in the end he sacrificed the religious to the speculative interest. He gave to the world a system of philoso- phy which imprisons the Deity in a universe from which he cannot escape, and robs him of self-con- sciousness, except as he arrives at it in man. Accordingly Pantheism has always been inimical to religion. It affords no ground for fellowship be- tween man and God, and borrows from Theism the moment it admits its possibility. Nor has Deism, with its far-away God, a God too great to concern Himself with our affairs, or even with us, a place for communion. Across infinite wastes the soul must cry in vain, for out of the limitless distance no voice can answer or help come. Materialism, with its impersonal and unconscious Deity, is also barren of all that can give life to re- ligion. It demands a personal God, a God conceived in terms of the human spirit to bring it into being. 224 TH E NATURE OF GOD. But we must not fall into the error of supposing that religion stands alone in this particular. Sci- ence, history and philosophy are under the same necessity. It would seem that the mind, whether seeking to discover the secrets of nature or to solve the mysteries of existence, must of necessity move along anthropomorphic channels. Except as re- garded in the light of one or another of our human attributes the world about us has no meaning. The charm of the knowledge of nature is the discovery therein of reason and order corresponding to our own ideas of reason and order. Remove from phi- losophy its anthropomorphisms in speech and con- ception and you take from it the only element that makes it intelligible. From the " Ideas " of Plato to the " cosmical processes " of Hegel, and then on to the " Unconscious Will " of Schopenhauer, psychological anthropomorphisms characterize every system of philosophy. It cannot escape them. In fact, every definition or conception of an Ultimate must, so far as it is not a pure negation, suggest either a being human in respect of the high- est attributes of humanity, or borrow its terms from that class of expressions which express human attri- butes and functions. ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 225 There are but three forms, says Martineau, " under which it is possible to think of the ulti- mate or immanent principle of the universe. Mind, life, matter. Given the first, it is intellectually thought out ; the second, it blindly grows ; the third, it mechanically shuffles into equilibrium. From what school do we draw these types of con- ception ? Is it not from our home experience ? If it is because we are rational that we see reason around us, no less is it because we are alive that we believe in the living ; and it is because we have to deal with our own weight and extension that we make acquaintance with material things. Take away the properties of the " ego " and we should never find what they are in the "non ego." Man is equally your point of departure, whether you discern in the cosmos an intellectual, a physiolog- ical or a mechanical system ; and the only question is, whether you construe it by its highest character- istics, or by the middle attributes which it shares with other organisms, or by the lowest that are absent from no physical thing. In every doctrine, therefore, it is from our microcosm that we have to interpret the macrocosm ; and from* the type of our humanity as presented in self-knowledge there is 15 226 THE NATURE OF GOD. • no more escape for the Pantheist or the Materialist than for the Theist. Modify them as you will, all causal conceptions are born from within as reflec- tions or reductions of our personal, animal or phys- ical activity ; and the severest science is in this sense just as anthropomorphic as the most ideal theology." The same may be said of histoiy. Except as its events are united in the anthropomorphic idea of purpose, they remain but a tangled mass of facts, without relation and without meaning. Nor are these anthropomorphisms so characteristic of our sober literature, the result, as some would have us believe, of poverty of speech. Verbal expression always keeps pace with changing conceptions, and vocabularies have always been enriched when the occasion has demanded it. It is because anthropo- morphism lies at the core of things ; because mind and will and purpose are actually in the world, that a correct expression of the facts just as they are be- comes, of necessity, anthropomorphic. Until sci- ence and philosophy are able to construe the world as it is without the use of terms borrowed from our spiritual natures, religion needs no apologist and may retort to the objector, " Physician, heal thyself." ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 227 Nevertheless, it will be worth our while to look into a few of the more pretentious of these objec- tions to religious anthropomorphisms in order that we may be able to see just what they are worth. It will not be denied that a religious conception of God is essentially anthropomorphic. To the de- vout soul, God is conceived, not in terms of matter or in those of substance, but in terms of the human spirit. To all such He is a thinking, feeling, will- ing God ; possessed of human qualities and attri- butes, a being moved by love, by compassion and anger, ordering and superintending the means for the accomplishment of some prearranged purpose. In a word, a Deity, human at the very moment that He is divine, and for this reason able to sympathize as well as to help. And as such He is represented in that book which, more than any other, has given shape to the religious conceptions of men and given to thought its only vital conceptions of the Deity ; I mean the Bible. It will not be disputed that the presentations which the Scripture gives us of God are decidedly anthropomorphic. It represents Him as a being possessed of eyes to behold the righteous, of ears to listen to their prayers, to whom the smell of incense and the savor of sacrifice is sweet. One 228 THE NATURE OF GOD. who, on account of His nature, is capable of shar- ing all the struggles and travails of humanity, of feeling the extremity of human anguish and moved by human emotions. A being who, because of His human likeness, is able to commune with man face to face ; in the fullness of time to become incarnate, to live, suffer, die and arise from the dead, and ascend into heaven bearing our human nature with Him. There is no denying the fact that it is the humanity of the Deity to which the Bible gives prominence, or that it is a quasi-human God for whom it makes the claim that He was " the bright- ness of the Father's glory and the express image of His person." Yet it is against all such thoughts of the Deity that we are cautioned by a few who have assumed to themselves the task of protecting His dignity against profane encroachment. By these it is objected : First, that to affirm that God is a person is to vest Him with limitations. They remind us of the fact that whatever the Deity may or may not be, He is at least the absolutely unlimited and unconditioned. But personality, or what is the same, self-consciousness, is, in the nature of the case, conditioned. It requires the aid of some sub- ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 229 stantial reality apart from itself to bring it into being, since without the help of such reality no one can possibly know himself as personal. Accord- ingly, God cannot be a person, for the reason that to be such is of necessity to be dependent. You will at once perceive that this objection is purely psychological. It is one that would never occur to the every-day thinker, for the reason that it requires an acquaintance with metaphysical terms and methods to give it meaning. Neverthe- less, let us do what we can to divest it of its meta- physical harshness in order that we may the better estimate its real force. It starts with the assumption that we are personal, self-conscious beings ; that we know ourselves as hav- ing an existence distinct and apart from external ob- jects. But how came we to know ourselves as sepa- rate and through this discovery to arrive at self-con- sciousness ? From the standpoint of the objector we are not so at the beginning. Nor is the fact of our personality intuitively perceived. It is something that needs to be developed, something that requires the existence of something apart from itself to make it real. To arrive at self-consciousness, we require something with which we may contrast ourselves 230 THE NATURK OF GOD. and from which we may distinguish ourselves. Be- fore it is possible for the thinking subject to affirm of anything " that is not me " and " I am not that," some reality must needs exist apart from it. We look out for illustration on a world made up of objective realities ; of rocks and trees and mount- ains, and in so doing make the discovery that they are not ourselves. We contrast ourselves with them, perceive that they are to be distinguished from ourselves and we from them. Now, it is held that out of such contrast self-consciousness is awak- ened. That this ability whereby we are able to distinguish between self and not self and which is the vital thing in self-consciousness could not be realized in the absence of these external realities which make such contrast possible. Take away all outward reality and no one could possibly know himself as personal or be conscious of his existence apart from them. Personality is contingent and dependent, arising, as it does, out of the contrast which the mind makes between the outward object and the thinking subject ; it demands external objects to make it real. Well, now, if this be true, then the objector is right in his contention that God cannot be personal, ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 23 1 for the reason that if He is, He is of necessity de- pendent. But a dependent God is unthinkable. In all that pertains to His being or attributes He is, in the nature of the case, self-existent and uncon- ditioned. Such, then, as briefly as I can state it, is the sub- stance of the first objection to the Divine personal- ity as held by religion. And if we admit that self- consciousness is thus conditioned and that the proc- ess by which we arrive at it is such as has been described, then we are certainly face to face with a most formidable objection. If personality actually involves dependence, then whatever our notions of God may be, we must, at least, eliminate from them all that savors of the personal. But is it a fact that we do arrive at self-conscious- ness in the way described, and is it true that, apart from objective existences with which we may con- trast ourselves, we are unable to know ourselves as persons ? It may be seriously doubted whether any- one has ever arrived at self-consciousness in that way. It is true, that after we once recognize our- selves as personal, we look upon outward realities and contrast ourselves with them. But we do not arrive at the fact of our separate existence in that 232 THE NATURE OF GOD. way. The process is vastly more simple than this of endless comparison and separation of self from the not self. For how, let us ask, is it possible for that which at the beginning of the process does not already recognize itself as distinct to distinguish itself from that which is not itself? In every process we must begin somewhere. We must separate this from that. We must begin the process with dis- tinctions already in mind. Were it not for the fact that we already know ourselves as distinct we could not even begin the task of comparison. It is just because we already know ourselves as persons, and are conscious that we are looking on outward things, that we are able to distinguish ourselves from them. When Descartes uttered his great saying, " I think, therefore I am," he indicated the real origin of self- consciousness, and dispelled the delusion that it is in any sense dependent on the existence of realities outside of us. To think is to be conscious that we are thinking. To think of things is to know our- selves as distinct from them. In fact, the moment that thought is born self-consciousness is also born. You may shut man off entirely from the outward world, close every avenue of sense-perception, leave him nothing but the power to think, and he will ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 233 know himself as personal. Lotze, long ago pointed ont the unsoundness of the position that the " I " can only be real in opposition to the " not I " when he said, " It is a common error to suppose that two things, because their conceptions are correlative, and form the terms of an opposition or relation, have arisen in and through this relation itself." It is so, with the distinction between the " I " and the " not I." These terms do not arise merely in their con- trast, but each of them was whatever it is before ever the contrast was made, and was so in spite of the circumstance that in this case the one of these con- ceptions is only indicated by the verbal negation of the other. Indeed, that which constitutes the es- sence of the " I " previous to the contrast, is itself the ground on account of which in the contrast it presents itself only as the "I," and not as the "not I." But let it even be owned that we need the help of something from which to distinguish ourselves in order that self-consciousness may be awak- ened, it by no means follows that this something must be a reality apart from ourselves. That im- portant something is found in thought itself ; for to think is to discover that our thoughts are dis- 234 TH E NATURE OF GOD. tinct from the being who thinks them. For is it not true that the very first result of our thinking is that of distinguishing between ourselves and our own thoughts and states ? Or does anyone at the moment that he gives himself to reflection fail to distinguish between himself and the thoughts which he thinks ? Surely, if something other than the thinking self is necessary to the awakening of self-consciousness, that something is presented in the thoughts we think, and which we at once rec- ognize as being distinct from ourselves. A spirit has personality, or rather is a person, the moment it knows itself as unitary subject in opposition to its own states and to its own ideas ; these states and ideas it recognizes itself as uniting in itself as the subject of them, while they are only dependent states in it. And so, the attempt to make out that to know one's self as a person is in any way de- pendent on the existence of a substantial not self, ends in failure. It requires nothing more than the ability of the subject to grasp its own states and thoughts as its own. We may even grant that our consciousness begins and is conditioned by the ac- tivity of something not ourselves ; still it does not lie in the notion of consciousness that it must be ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 235 aroused from without, or that it is dependent on the existence of an external world. And so to the objector's question, What is the object of the Deity's consciousness, we reply, His own thoughts and states. If it be asked, When did this self-consciousness begin, we answer, Never. To the further question, On what does it depend ? we reply, On His own power to know. An eternal unbegun self is as possible as an eternal unbegun not self ; an eternal consciousness is no more diffi- cult than eternal unconsciousness. And so it ap- pears that we have but to examine candidly this objection to the Divine personality to discover its weakness. In common with all philosophical ob- jections to the theistic conception of the Deity, it rests on a defective and very superficial psychology. Indeed, it is hard to persuade one's self that it was ever meant to be taken seriously. But its weakness is further manifest, in the fact that it rests wholly and entirely upon an unwar- ranted assumption. I mean the assumption that the limitations that beset our human consciousness are essential to consciousness itself. L,et us own that personality, as we know it in ourselves, is limited. It is. But is this fact a sufficient warrant 236 THE NATURE OF GOD. for the conclusion that limitations belong essen- tially to personality, or that they are inherent in consciousness itself? Is it not, on the contrary, true that these very limitations are foreign rather than native to it ? Take them one by one ; ex- amine each separately, and they will all be found to attach to the impersonal in us rather than to the personal. They are each and all foreign to the spirit rather than essential belongings of it. And as such the spirit regards them. It looks upon them as hindrances from which it must escape, in order that it may enter on that life of freedom which is its by right. It regards them as intruders, and as alien to its true nature. It knows that its outreaching for God and for perfect freedom are but attempts! to realize a more perfect personality. It is just this consciousness of the impersonal in us, from which the soul is ever seeking to escape, along with the ever-recurring foregleams of that perfect freedom which is to be its own when complete per- sonality is attained, that keeps alive the struggle for moral character and life. In other words, it is the struggle of the spirit to attain a perfect person- ality and to realize that freedom which is its by right, that lies at the bottom of every moral struggle ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 237 in which we are engaged. We are neither perfectly- self-conscious nor self-controlled. We know but in part, and we prophesy but in part. But we also know that when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away. Did these limitations belong essentially to our person- alities, we would not be conscious of them. It is the recognition of their alien character, and the cer- tainty that they do not belong to personality in its perfection that accounts for the fact that we not only perceive them but also struggle to throw them off. And this is the profound meaning of the words of Jesus, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." " Whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it." Just in the measure that the spirit disengages itself from the earthly and the impersonal does it take on its true life, for the outcome of such elimination is always the perfect- ing of the personality. It is because Jesus is free, and on that account the perfect person, that man- kind looks to Him as its ideal, and is smitten with the consciousness that until it becomes like Him its true selfhood must remain unrealized. It is this 238 THE NATURE OF GOD. foreign element in us, this something which does not belong to us ideally, that makes our personality in- complete, and keeps alive the longing and the struggle to be like God. If these limitations of which we are conscious entered into the essence of personality, and if they did not disappear just in the measure that perfect personality is realized, then we would be warranted in the conclusion that God cannot be a person. But since such is not the case, and since, on the contrary, these limitations disappear as we pass from the impersonal into the personal, the objection is left without foundation. To the perfect person, they are entirely foreign ; they are not a part of his consciousness for the reason that such a one is in the nature of the case entirely free. But we must not think that we have disposed of all objections to an anthropomorphic conception of the Deity when we have made reply to those which philosophy offers to it. Objections come also from the religious side and in the supposed in- terests of religion itself. The highway that leads from Sinai to Bethlehem is long, but it is one upon which the light of revelation shines brighter and brighter unto the perfect day. Beginning with a ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 239 Deity hidden behind clouds, from the midst of which a voice spake, saying, " Take heed to your- selves that ye go not up into the mount or touch the border of it," it ends in His full disclosure in the person of the One who said, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Nevertheless, there are some even among re- ligious people who prefer to linger at the mount. Their notions of God are satisfied rather by its light- nings and clouds and thunder, its voice of warning against nearness of approach, than by the sim- ple and unostentatious events of the incarnation or His life lived before the eyes of men. To such those metaphysical attributes which suggest His almightiness and aloofness will be preferable to those more human ones which He shares with us and the possession of which makes it possible for Him to be our daily companion and friend. Well, when such notions of God are thought to be essen- tial to religion, it is little wonder that those who hold them should take alarm at all anthropomorph- isms in thought or speech. For how is a being, whose nature is in any sense like our own, to be thought of as Deity? Or how is a God, whose dignity is thus compromised, to inspire within the 240 THE NATURE OF GOD. soul of man those emotions of awe and fear upon which it is supposed that religion is dependent? Now, if it be a fact that such notions of God are vital to religion, then this objection to anthropo- morphism is, in all conscience, serious enough. But is religion thus dependent ? Does it require a Deity, whose garments are darkness and thick clouds of the skies, One who speaks in thunders and whose presence inspires terror to keep it alive ? Is mere physical almightiness more to be had in reverence than that spiritual excellence which goes out in loving companionship with the weak? Was Judaism at last right when it spurned the claims of Jesus and taught that God was too great to become incarnate in human flesh ? I think that just the contrary is the case. In fact, it is not until aloofness gives place to nearness and fear yields its place to love that religion takes its rise in the soul. Its essence is communion and fellowship with the Deity, relations that are utterly impossible so long as fear is in possession of the heart. " He that lov- eth me," said Jesus, "shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself to him." And it is the greatest of the apostles who reminds us that " perfect love casteth out fear." It ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 24.I was that He might be known, and by being known also loved, that He became incarnate. It was that He might be loved, that by His incarnation He proved His kinship with us. To be sure, if God is for us, to be the supreme One, our notions of Him must be exalted. By no thought or figure of speech may the exalted nature of God be compro- mised. We must make of Him no graven image or any likeness inconsistent with His worthiness. To think unworthily of God is to evaporate His deity, and even to take His name in vain is to degrade Him to the level of the commonplace. Neverthe- less, if we think of Him at all, we must think of Him in some particular way. If the mind in the moment that it turns itself Godward is not to re- main in utter vacuity, it must occupy itself with some particular content, the material of which has been given in experience. The thought of the in- determinate is the thought of nothing. Accord- ingly, it is not a question as to whether or not we shall liken God to anything, but rather as to what we shall liken Him without compromising His su- preme spiritual excellence. It is in the fact that at last all knowledge must rest on experience, and that experience makes us acquainted with nothing 16 242 THE NATURE OF GOD. higher than a spirit made in the divine image, that anthropomorphism finds its vindication. But is it true that to think of God as personal, or, what is the same, in terms of our human nature, tends to the lessening of that sense of His majesty and holiness which, in the interest of religion, must needs be fostered in the soul ? L,et it be remem- bered that this is not a question that is to be de- cided by the advocates of any particular theory or in the light of foregone conclusions as to what we must or must not expect. It is one to which ex- perience alone can make answer. But when we turn to experience, we find that whenever God has been thought of as impersonal, or even as quasi- personal, reverence and veneration have vanished, and that, on the contrary, both of these emotions have been intensified just in the measure that the fact of His personality and likeness to ourselves has taken possession of the thoughts of men. For where has a sense of His exalted majesty been so pronounced as just among those who have looked upon Him as profoundly personal ? To whose soul has there come so overwhelming a sense of His un- speakable holiness as that which came to Jacob, to Job, to David, to Paul, to Augustine, to Luther, and ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 243 to the innumerable company of men and women whose saintliness has glorified the history of man- kind ? Did any of these lack in a sense of reverence, or did any of these think lightly of the Deity ? It was Jacob, to whom God had made Himself known as a person, who was " afraid," and who, speaking even of the place where God had met Him, said, " How holy is this place ; this is none other than the house of God." It is David to whom God is profoundly personal, who, addressing the Almighty, says, u O Lord my God, Thou art very great ; Thou art clothed with honor and majesty? Who cover- est Thyself with light as with a garment ; who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain. Who layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters, who maketh the clouds His chariot, who walketh upon the wings of the wind. Who maketh His angels spirits, His ministers a flaming fire." Or was Job wanting in reverence for the One with whom he communed and whose presence con- strained him to say, " Behold, I am vile. What shall I answer Thee ? I will lay my hand upon my mouth." But why should I dwell ? One has but to read the literature of religion to dispel all doubt that he 244 THE NATURE OF GOD. may have as to the effect that a conception of God as personal may have in lessening a sense of His majesty or of the immeasurable distance by which, in character He is separated from us. Indeed, it is in the presence of such conceptions of God that reverence reaches its height and worship is made possible. You will look in vain for either in the literature or life of heathenism with its impersonal gods. You will find neither reverence nor godly fear among the devotees of any of those systems of philosophy in which the personality of God is denied, or even called in question. In fact, these very attributes which tell of the holiness and moral excellence of God and which inspire worship attach alone to a personal being. They belong alone to the One of whom it may be declared that He is both self-conscious and self-controlled. Nor does the thought of God as personal, or even as one whose nature is like our own, open the way to undue familiarity with Him. It is true that it brings God nearer to us. It is true that it makes it possible for Him to be our friend and companion, for only as He is personal can He be known or loved. But it is His transcendent excellence that always stands in the way of undue familiarity and ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 245 that keeps alive the sense of the immense moral distance existing between Him and us. A Being supremely worthy does not need to be protected by artificial decorations or metaphysical attributes. He needs not to be kept aloof that He may be pre- served against irreverent intrusion. On the con- trary, the better such a One is known, the nearer His approach, the more perfect will be the rever- ence evoked. Experience proves that those who have known the most of God, those to whom He has been a daily companion, have also possessed the pro- foundest sense of their own littleness as compared with His majesty. It is not by the segregation of the Deity, not by relegating Him to a position of utter remoteness that reverence and Godly fear are to be kept alive. Reverence for the truly worthy is always the product of intimate knowledge. It is not familiarity with the Highest that breeds con- tempt. Irreverence, on the contrary, is always the progeny of false conceptions, perversions, obscura- tions — in a word, ignorance of God. You have only to remove Him beyond the range of our knowledge, to push Him into the dark background 246 THE NATURE OF GOD. of the unknowable to destroy reverence and en- gender contempt. And this has invariably been the effect of those lofty epithets which philosophy has applied to the Deity. They have served but to remove Him from the realm of the concrete into that of the abstract. They do not belong to the living God. They are certain to have the effect of separating Him from us and of negativing all definition. Practically, they all amount to a denial of knowledge, and serve but to render a conception of God vague and unreal to the mind. Such a Deity is at best but a name- less specter, hovering in mists and shadows ; a some- thing the nature of which it is impossible to dis- cover, and devoid of vitality sufficient to awaken our respect. Tell men that God is the personal spirit and the term carries with it a definite con- ception. And to affirm, not that He is a spirit, but the personal spirit, is to tell all that we know or can know of Him. I do not say that it tells all that He is ; but it tells who He is, and gives us the assur- ance that He feels and thinks and wills as do we. In the interest of religion we must by all means hold to the term personal in our definition of the Deity. Every other term but obscures His real ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 247 nature, confuses our conception, and leaves us with- out a God real enough to awaken our concern. And it is just this conception of a personal Deity, or, if you please, of a quasi-human God, to which warrant is given in the words and life of the One in whom from the day of His death until now the thought of the world has found its highest expres- sion of the Deity. I think it is the deepest and the truest thing that we can say of Jesus, that He fills out in full the anthropomorphic measure of our human way of thinking about God. It is precisely this conception that constitutes the loftiest tenet of the religion which He founded ; a religion which for thousands of years has withstood the keenest criti- cism of the ages and commanded the whole-hearted assent of the brightest intellects the world has ever known. But what, let us now ask, is a person? What idea of the divine being is present to the religious soul when he applies the term personal to God? I think that any doubt as to the appropriateness of the term will be dispelled when this question is correctly answered. What, then, is a person ? Con- fessedly we have here a most difficult question. Not that we do not know of what we are speaking 248 THE NATURE OF GOD. when we use the term person. We do. It is the one thing that we know best in the world, and it is also the most mysterious thing that we know. We know others, and we also know ourselves. That little pronoun "I" is a term most familiar to our daily speech, and we know very well what we mean when we use it. We know that we have in mind our self-conscious persons as distinct from objects about us. But when we come to analyze this "I," this self of which we speak ; when we attempt to tell, or even to form a definite conception of what it really is, the difficulty of the task at once appears. It is always something more than we can put into words ; something vaster than any definition that we can frame. It has in it the vastness of the in- finite. When we have told all and thought all, there are yet undiscovered depths beyond into which it recedes and from which we are entirely unable to extricate it. There are abyssmal depths of person- ality which startle us at times by their vastness and the vistas which they but half disclose. We are dimly aware of undeveloped powers within us ; capabilities of energy and intelligence and love, which, on minds which have pondered them, have forced the conviction of a life beyond as the sole ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 249 condition in which a personal being can find scope. So akin is the self to the infinite, as that Lotze goes so far as to say, "In point of fact, we have little ground for speaking of the personality of finite beings ; it is an ideal, and like all that is ideal belongs unconditionally to the infinite. Perfect personality is found alone in God, and to all finite minds there is allotted but a pale copy thereof." " A very little word," says Charles Kingsley, " is this ' I.' For in our language there is but one letter in it. A very common word ; for we are using it all day long when we are awake, and even at night in our dreams. And yet a wonderful word, for though we know well whom it means, yet what it means we do not know and cannot understand ; no, nor can the wisest philosopher who has lived. And a most important word, too, for we cannot get rid of it, cannot help saying it all our life long from childhood to the grave." Reflecting on the mysteries of the life of the flower, Tennyson pens these familiar lines : " Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of your crannies, And hold you here in my hand, little Flower, roots and all, and all in all, 250 THE NATURE OF GOD. And if I could tell what you are Roots and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." Nearer the truth would it have been, had he written those words of the Ego, the person ; for to know the Ego would, indeed, be to know what God is. Itself the image of God, it is also His most accurate expression ; for it is just this mystery of personality, its profound depths, into which it is impossible to penetrate, that constitutes not alone the mysterious and hidden in man, but also the un- knowable in God. " There is," says Victor Hugo, " an infinite out- side of us. Is there not an infinite within us? These two infinities, do they not rest superposed on one another ? Does not the second infinite underlie the first, so to speak ? Is not the mirror, the reflection, the echo of the first, an abyss concen- tric with another abyss ? The ' me ' below is the soul ; the ' me ' above is God." And yet, myste- rious as it is, we do know the person. We know it because we know others and because we know ourselves. In history we see persons, thinking, acting, loving, and these become objects of reflec- tion. In literature, in language, and in human ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 25 1 life personality gives itself expression and we are able to determine what it is which so expresses itself. But above all, we know ourselves. And in reflect- ing on ourselves we are made acquainted with the person. But when we thus reflect, we discover that the constituent elements of personality, as such, are self-consciousness, desire and self-control. And that is to say, that personality is made up by the combination of the three powers, intellect, suscepti- bility and volition, united in self-conscious unity. The " I," possessed of the power to think, to feel and to will, and at the same time conscious that it exercises these powers, is the person. Wherever these are present there is the person ; wherever they are absent there is ,the impersonal. Personality is the ultimate reality in us. The spirit possessed of the three functions of knowing, feeling, willing, is the person. Well, this being the case, two conclu- sions follow. First, that corporiety is no part of the person. " It is the soul," said Heraclitus, " that is you ; the body that is yours" So far as the body is concerned, it is only the servant, the medium through which impressions from the outward world come and the organ for the expression of its life and action. The spirit, with its essential powers, is cap- 252 THE NATURE OF GOD. able of living a separate life, in which it would come to a knowledge of external things otherwise than through sensations, and express itself otherwise than through the body. The body may be eliminated and the person yet remain. But just because there can be no substitute for intellect, susceptibility, or will, it follows that these are of the essence of personality. These are essential, and they are all that is essential to the person, for the spirit is the person. But just as the body is not essential to the person, so neither is it necessary to our knowledge of what the person is. It is not even vital to our fellowship with persons. In our thoughts of others we can and do eliminate the body entirely. They influence us, make themselves known, and we in turn influence them in ways other than that of physical mediation. In our truest fellowship we touch others on the spiritual side alone. We feel the influence of some- thing in them that cannot be defined, and which, for want of a better name, we call their personality. Think, if you please, of some particular person, of whom you possess intimate knowledge. Is it the bodily form that is present in your mind when you think of such a one's real self, or is your knowledge of such a one dependent on your ability to recall ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 253 his physical appearance, his height, or bulk, or anything that is merely physical ? Are not these outward things merely accidental, and do we not know persons apart from them ? I think we must admit that the spiritual personality is not one with the organs and means through which it ex- hibits itself and that we are able to dispense with them entirely, and yet leave the person in all that is essential. Indeed, it is frequently quite impossible to recall the outward appearance, or in reflection to associate it with the person of whom we may be thinking. We are perfectly familiar with persons whom we have never seen and of whom we have been unable to form even a mental picture. Oft among those who have influ- enced us the most, and of whom we know the most, are those who have impressed us only on the side of the spirit. We regard them as our kindred and are certain that we know them. Yet they lived their lives, uttered their thoughts, inspired the souls of their own generation, and passed away, leaving no painter to put the tenement which they inhabited on canvas, or sculptor to invisage it in marble. Still we think of them as persons and have spiritual fellow- ship with them. They are real to us, although no 254 TH E NATURE OF GOD. form arises before the mind when we think of them. Who, for instance, is able to call before his mind with any definiteness the form of Him who, more than any other, has and even yet most influences the world — I mean the one of Nazareth ? Who so real to the multitudes who daily feel the power of His thought and soul ? Or of whom do the spiritually- minded know more ; or with whom have they so real and constant fellowship ? Yet to all such He is the formless, the incorporeal. The best known, the most loved, the most constantly present of all who have lived or are now living, yet He is seen alone by the eye of the soul. In all that made Him what He was ; in the transcendent power of His personality, He yet lives and moves and has His being among us, although His body passed from the sight of men into the yielding clouds which received Him out of the sight of the disciples. No, the body is not essential to our knowledge of the per- son, nor does it make fellowship any the more real. It belongs entirely to the accidental. The self- conscious, self-controlled spirit, this alone is essen- tial. In fact, it is just to the body that we refer most of those hindrances which shut us out from the realization of a true personality. Itself imper- ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 255 sonal, it is a hindrance, rather than a help. Until it is shuffled off and the spirit liberated, we can be but in part what we are destined to be. In our present state we are never fully self-conscious, nor are we at any time self-controlled. We are limited within and without, and it is only in our best moods that there comes to us even a vision of what perfect personality may be. Yet the one thing of which we are certain is that the limitations by which we are now beset are not essential to the spirit. " We are conditioned," says Prof. Bowne, "by something not ourselves. The outer world is an important factor in our mental life. It controls us more than we do it. But this is a limitation of our personality, rather than its source. Our personality would be heightened, rather than diminished, if we were self- determinant in this respect. Again, in our inner life, we find the same limitations. We cannot always control our ideas. They often seem to be occurrences in us rather than our own doing. The past vanishes beyond recall, and often in the present we are more passive than active. But these, also, are limitations of our personality. We should be more truly persons if we were absolutely determi- nant of all our states." 256 THE NATURE OF GOD. And so when we speak of God as personal we do not think of Him as being such in the limited sense in which we are. He is the perfect person. He is in its completeness what we are but in part. In Him the absolute self-knowledge and self-pos- session which are necessary to perfect personality alone are found. In His complete self-determina- tion and consciousness do we find the conditions of perfect personality, and of this our finite is but a feeble and imperfect image. But though imperfect and obscured as personality is in us, it is, neverthe- less, a true reflection of the divine. The limitations which beset the human spirit have not destroyed in it the image and likeness of the One in whose like- ness it was fashioned. The fact that it knows its imperfections, feels its limitations, longs to throw them off that it may enter on a life of perfect free- dom, proves that it is conscious of its true nature and that in essence it is one with God. Were the spirit unconscious of its limitations, did it not look upon them as foreign to itself and hindrances to its true life, this would not be the case. It is just this consciousness of the spirit that it is limited that proves it in nature to be one with the Eternal. Well, now, when we divest personality of that ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 257 which does not really belong to it, when we think of it as something apart from the body and freed from its limitations, is it speaking lightly of God to affirm that He is a person ? Clearly, if we are to think of Him at all, if He is for our thought to be redeemed from the dark realm of the unknowable, we must have some conception of what He is. If we know Him at all He must be something specific and particular. We must have some definite idea or the mind cannot lay hold of Him and He inev- itably recedes into the realm of the unknowable. But what higher conception is possible than this in which He is conceived as a person ? Does Hart- man's " Unconscious," or Schopenhaur's " Will and Idea," or Leibnitz's " Absolute Monad," or Arnold's " Eternal Not Ourselves That Makes for Righteous- ness," or Spencer's " Unknowable Power Behind Phenomena " — do either of these, in all conscience, present a more lofty conception of the Eternal God than this term person which the devout soul has always applied to Him ? What loftier conception can the mind possibly have of God than this in which He is divested of all corporiety, all human limitations, and in which He is construed in terms the loftiest that our experience affords ? For at last 17 258 THK NATURE OF GOD. our most exalted ideas are those which take shape and embody themselves in personality ; personality infinitely overtops the impersonal. It is just in this that the pre-eminence of' man over the rest of the creation resides. It is the supremest excellence of which we can think. And surely it is not by appealing to the lowest conceptions that nature supplies, but the very highest that we are to ap- proach the One who is transcendent in every excel- lence. It is not by expressing the Supreme Being in terms of physical force or of matter and motion, but, on the contrary, in terms of spiritual action, of will and intelligence ; in a word, by thinking of Him as personal. To refuse to form any concep- tion of the Supreme Being is to rest in vacuity. But in the forming of our conception let us by all means start from the highest level of experience and not from the lower. Such, then, is the idea of the Deity to which re- ligion seeks to give expression through means of its anthropomorphisms. Its thought is not that of a titanic physical being beneath whose weight the heavens bend and whose ponderous tread causes the earth to tremble. The kinship with the Deity to which it lays claim is entirely personal and spir- ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 259 itual. Corporiety does not enter into it ; and while its representations of God are borrowed from our human nature, the religious soul seldom, if ever, fails to pass beyond the anthropomorphic figure into the hidden spiritual meaning. And thus, from whatever standpoint we regard it, the anthropomorphic conception of God holds its place. It alone attaches no leashes to the Infinite. On the contrary, it leaves Him in the full possession of that power, the absence of which is the negation of Deity, the power of self-control. And is it not this power of self-control, without which Deity itself is impossible, that is wanting in all those abstract and metaphysical deities which are offered by phi- losophy as substitutes for the personal God of re- ligion ? They are each and all the victims of a limitless power with which their own deity vests them, but over which they have as little control as the storm or the earthquake over the forces that impel them on. But it is this power of self-control, this freedom from all limitations, whether from without or from within, and which is the possession of the perfect person, that vests the God of religion with all the attributes essential to real Deity. Whether in the armies of heaven, among the chil- 26o THE NATURE OF GOD. dren of men or in the realm of His own nature, such a Being is able to do whatsoever is pleasing to Himself. Whatever we may think of the legiti- macy of human terms as applied to the Deity, they nevertheless find abundant warrant in the nature of the One who is perfectly self-conscious and self- controlled, and who, on this account, is not only supreme, but, in the innermost of His nature, also profoundly spiritual. But I must now call attention to a fact, which of itself is sufficient to silence every possible objection to the anthropomorphic conception of God. I speak of the fact of the Incarnation ; that event accom- plished in history, in which the Eternal God took upon Himself our nature, united Himself with it, and lived on the earth in the person of the man Jesus. It was in this act that the kinship of God and man was confirmed, and the right of every soul to look up into the face of God and to call Him Father conclusively established. It was this act that proved that to be a human being is also to be a child of God and in the possession of the divine image. And it proved this kinship, for the reason that likeness in nature between the human and the Divine is antecedently essential to the incarnation. ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 26 1 The child is in nature like the father, the father like the child. And then, too, with God there can be no change, for the reason that He is perfect. At no moment is He less or more. Least of all, by any act will He violate the self-imposed laws that hold in the realm of His own being. Accordingly, if His union with humanity is to be actual and not one in appearance only, its realization is made pos- sible by reason of the fact that the divine already involves the human and comprehends it in its essence. But a Deity who, without violence to His nature, can identify Himself with man so com- pletely as in very soul to be one with Him, is not only infinite in power but also anthropomorphic as to His innermost life. To such a being, the title God-man will not be a misnomer. To be sure, when we reason thus from the incar- nation back to the nature of God, the fact of His incarnation is taken for granted. And to all who through experience have found that in finding Jesus they have also found God, that fact is abundantly confirmed. To all such, Jesus stands utterly alone, the solitary among men. Not as a prophet, but more than a prophet. Not as one pointing to the Deity, but Himself " the brightness of the Father's glory 262 THE NATURE OF GOD. and the express image of His person." For were not God in Jesus, and were not the words that He spake concerning Himself true when He declared, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," then no one in finding the man Jesus would, in finding Him, also find God. But we are not shut up to private experience for our proof of the reality of the incarnation. Aside from such witness, there are proofs valid to all. Indeed, when we have admitted the spiritual nature of the Deity, there is no possible escape from the conclusion that He will become incarnate — for to a spiritual being the incarnation is a necessity. We have already seen, that to a perfect person no leashes are attached and no limitations affixed. Possessed of all power, such a one will do whatever is pleasing to himself. To such a one no power can oppose itself or say, " Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." But, as self-controlled, such a one will also be capable of self-limitation. He will be able to take upon Himself a human form, to live a life in the flesh and under its conditions ; share with man his lot, descend into the grave, that by His rising its bands may be broken, and ascend into the heavens, bearing our redeemed nature with Him. ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 263 To a perfect person nothing that pleases Him can be impossible, for the reason that such a one is perfectly self-controlled. But, just because He is the perfect person, God is also spiritual in the inmost of His nature, and possessed of that which is one of the essential elements of a spiritual being — the ele- ment of love. Well, if all this be admitted, as it must be when it is owned that God is a person, how are we to escape the conclusion that sooner or later the incarnation must be an accomplished fact in history ? I hold that a perfect personal Deity, pos- sessed as He must needs be of limitless power along with infinite love, makes His incarnation a moral necessity. For, what at last is this love that con- stitutes the essence of a spiritual nature ? Is it not a life in others ? Is it not a going forth out of self ? To have all the hidden wealth of thought and feel- ing of which it is possessed called forth in relation to other and kindred beings, and to receive back again that wealth redoubled in reciprocated knowl- edge and affection? Surely, nothing short of this is to live the spiritual life. Not to do this is to take out of life all that makes it spiritual. How- ever we may seek to avoid it, the conclusion cannot be escaped, that the incarnation is the necessary 264 THE NATURE OF GOD. goal of that infinite power and love which are the possession of the perfect person. But that which in the spiritual nature of God was made antecedently possible and morally certain, in the fulness of time, became actual in history in the person of the man Jesus. In Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. In Him, as John tells us, the men of His generation beheld the " genuine God." And, as such, He was believed on and accepted by all who knew Him best. As such He declared Himself to be. With a calmness that must have been a stranger to the boldest of mere men, He laid claim to that august title. He ever pointed to Himself as the concrete embodiment of all that He said and taught concerning God. Not so did the wisest and best of those who have lived and taught among men. The dying Buddha puts his confidence in the truth of his teaching. He leaves his disciples the admonition that they may forget him ; but they are to keep his teaching and the way that he has shown them. Plato says the same of Socrates. Let us own that in the whole range of history there are no other figures apart from Jesus which so surprise us with the originality of their moral strength as do these two, yet each ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 265 hides himself behind the teaching for which he lived and died ; while Jesus knows no more sacred task than that of pointing men to Himself as the incarnation of all that He came to reveal. And by word and life, by all that He was and by all that He did, He successfully defended that claim against all unbiased criticism. I have not the time to tell you how that, in every particular, Jesus vindicated His claim to Deity. It is quite sufficient to say that He did reveal God. That in Him, the Deity, " who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets," was made manifest in concrete form to the eyes of men. That from the day of His ascension until now, the wisest and the best, goaded by that hunger with which we have been created, have turned to Him as did the wise men of the East to His cradle at Bethlehem. That all the knowledge that we have or can have of God was made possible through His life and person. He did reveal God. And when He finished His work here below, He left impressed on the minds of men an image of the Deity that can never be effaced. But if He revealed God, then He was Himself 266 THE NATURE OF GOD. God. That which is less is incapable of revealing the greater. The revealer of Deity can be none other than Deity Himself. When He said, "No man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him," He spoke a truth, confirmed in the experience of the multiplied millions who have found that in finding Jesus the soul has always confessed to itself and said, " Thou art with God." I am aware that there are those who imagine a God other and greater than Jesus ; who look upon Jesus as having indeed been possessed of a divine consciousness such as no other has ever possessed, yet for all that, as one whose work is accomplished when he has once brought the soul into communion with God. But who is this other God, if it be not Jesus Himself ? What attribute belongs to Him that does not belong to Jesus ? Or in what respect does this other and greater God differ from Jesus ? The attempt to candidly answer these questions is certain to lead to the discovery that all that enters into the conception of such a God has been uncon- sciously taken from the words and life of Jesus. It is His protraiture, as given in the Scripture, and His alone, that furnishes the data out of which this ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 267 other and greater is constructed. The moment we depart from Him, we leave reality behind us, and our vaunted God becomes but the product of our own subjective ideas. To get away from Him is to sever religion from the objective power which is the enduring basis of its experiences, for this power is not in thoughts or ideas, but in Jesus, who actually lived in the world. He is the only God whom we know, or can know. And it was this Deity who, in the days of His flesh, also called himself the Son of man. It was this Deity who, by His sympathy, His compassion, His fidelity as a friend, and His lovableness as a companion — in a word, by His ability to weep with those who wept, and to rejoice with those who did rejoice, proved the oneness of His soul with ours. But while thus testifying to His true humanity, He asserts, with equal emphasis, His real divinity. Affirming Himself to be the Son of man, He like- wise declares Himself to be the Son of God. Con- scious of His oneness with the Father, He says, " I am in the Father and the Father in me. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Conscious of His eternity, He declares, " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." "Before Abraham was, I 268 THE NATURE OF GOD. am." Could any utterance more clearly assert the humanity that is in God, or the divinity resident in the nature which -He assumed than these ? And is it still a matter of wonder, in view of the fact that our nature was so assumed, that anthropomorphisms should characterize our best conceptions of the Deity ? In the incarnation His personality is once and for all established. Identifying Himself with us, in the innermost of His life, He is also, as we are, both personal and spiritual. And this is the distinctive element of Christian- ity — its personal and incarnate God. It was this element that made it new to the thought of man and imparted to it that vitality without which it could not have held its place in the world. Hitherto the idea of a human deity, a God-man, had been foreign to human thought. Judaism had no place for it. Its Jehovah was too great, too exalted in His ineffable holiness and awful majesty to find in man a dwelling place. To the Jew an incarnate God was a stumbling-block, and to the Greek it was foolishness. For no philosophy from the days of Plato until now has left room for the conception of the essential oneness of the Deity with humanity as it is presented in Jesus. Philosophy has never ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 269 risen above an ideal unity, a unity of thought and image, a unity in appearance only. The essential unity accomplished in Jesus was Christianity's gift to the thought of the world. And it is this new and vital element that makes Christianity the only real religion. It opens a way for that fellowship with the Deity, without which true religion is impossible. Think of it as we will, the soul needs an anthropomorphic Deity ; a God that can be touched with a feeling of our infirmities for the reason that He Himself has been in all points tempted like ourselves. A God who can share all the struggles and travails of humanity ; who can sympathize ; who has Himself felt the extremity of human anguish and the agony of bereavement ; who has Himself submitted to the wrongs so oft inflicted on the innocent and become acquainted with the pangs of death. A Deity, not outside the universe and above its struggles, but who, on the contrary, enters into the storm and conflict and is subject to its conditions as the soul of it all. And such is the Deity that Christianity alone offers to the world. You may call Him a human God ; or, reversing the terms, a God-man if you choose. He is, nevertheless, the only God capable 270 THE NATURE OE GOD. of affording that consolation for the present and that hope for the future which are the deepest needs of the soul ; and it is this conception of an incarnate God, attested and confirmed in the experi- ence of innumerable multitudes, who, in finding Jesus, have also found God, that has given to Christianity its hold on the thoughts and hearts of men. It is this perception of an anthropomorphic God, which, in the words of Sir Oliver Lodge, " constitutes the vital element which has enabled Christianity to survive all the struggles for exist- ence and to dominate the most cultivated peoples of the world." For is it not true that the forces by which we are most dominated are those which emanate from persons, and that influences increase in their power over us just in the measure that they pass from the realm of the impersonal into that of the personal ? At last it is personality that moves the world. I do not deny that ideas, even pure abstractions, have a measure of power over us, or that mere precepts, when made a rule of conduct, mold us for the better. They do ; but alone they are incomparably weak in the presence of those in- fluences that radiate from a person. See how this is illustrated in the progress of the ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 27 1 revelation that God gave to His people. It began with the abstraction, " I am." But this revelation, so far as it was such, failed to inspire men's souls with devotion to the Deity. It awakened wonder and awe. It served to distinguish the living God from the lifeless deities of Egypt and Canaan, but that was about all. God needed to come nearer and to approach more closely the realm of the personal. Then He becomes something to men. He is now known as Refuge, Rock, Tower and Shield. Later He comes still nearer and becomes the Shepherd, a being capable of sympathy, tender and watchful. At last, in the fullness of times, all abstractions are removed ; His relations to man are no longer pict- ured in names, rich though they were in meaning. He became incarnate in the flesh and stood among men, the One altogether lovely. And when this was accomplished men found themselves within the grasp of a power that dominated every energy of their souls. It was the Deity, incarnate in Jesus, that lifted God out of an abstraction and presented the image of the Eternal Glory in His own person. And what happened to the men who first received this revelation? They were transfigured. Cold obedience was changed into enthusiastic service of a 272 THE NATURE OF GOD. person. Formal observance was changed into pas- sionate devotion to Him for whose sake suffering and even death became a joy. And herein is the utter impotence of all these deities that philosophy offers to the world. They are all mere abstractions, incapa- ble of inspiring men with enthusiasm, for the reason that they are wanting in personality. True, they stimulate the intellect, but they leave the heart cold and lifeless. " Monads " and " substances " and " ideas," have no power to quicken men in the inner- most. To the hungry soul they all offer a stone, in- stead of bread. What disciple of Leibnitz, or Spin- oza, or Hegel or Fichte has traversed sea and land, or traveled, though with weary feet, the waste and desert places of the earth, to bring to men a knowl- edge of these abstractions ? Such enthusiasm is born out of the soul's love for another, a being stronger than self, yet one with self, and in whom it finds the answer to its own infinite needs. LECTURE SEVENTH. THE TRINITY. In the year of our L,ord 325, there was given to the world the most important document ever produced by the uninspired genius of man. I speak of the Nicene Creed. It is an attempt to express in technical terms the content of the Scripture as it bears on the nature of God. For more than three centuries Christianity had lived and wrought without a formal expression of its great dogmatic idea. It accepted the simple state- ments of the Scripture as they bore on the question, derived its life from fellowship with the manifested God who had dwelt among men, and was preserved from laxness in theory by the extraordinary vigor and vitality of the Divine life that filled the souls of its early adherents. But, just because of what it was, Christianity could not escape the necessity of a scientific ex- pression of its cardinal truth. It was not a thing destined to live its life shut up to the inner and private experience of its early disciples. It had 18 (273) 274 THE NATURE OF GOD. also its intellectual side. It possessed its own dis- tinct concept of God, in that it thought of Him in the light of the manifestation which He had given of Himself in Jesus. It knew no God other than the one who had become incarnate in human flesh and who had lived among men. It saw in Jesus " the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image of His person," and accordingly worshiped Him as Deity. But a conception of an incarnate God — a Deity who could become the companion of man, because one in nature with him, could not in that age go unchallenged. It could not, for the reason that it was an age in which the prevailing philosophy had banished God from His universe. It was an age when philosophy had taught men to regard the Deity from the standpoint of absolute transcendence, and to think of Him as living His life in solitary and awful grandeur, apart from the world and men. Between the Deity and the world there yawned an impassable chasm, growing out of His own inherent majesty, on the one hand, and the evil resident in the world on the other. Thus, between the Chris- tian conception of a God brought near in Jesus, and that of a philosophy which conceived Him as utterly THE TRINITY. 275 remote, there existed a fundamental antagonism. Both could not exist together, yet both claimed the right of supremacy which belongs to truth. Now, it was out of this soil that the various here- sies of the early centuries of the Church sprang. One and all they were attempts to mediate between these opposing conceptions by engrafting upon Christian- ity the ideas of Pagan and Oriental philosophy. They sought to give to the world a religion divested of an incarnate God, and, as before Herod, to again vest Jesus with a mock crown. In the interests of such a religion Monarchianism denied His essential deity, and Arianism made Him but one among a multitude of aeons which rilled the yawning chasm between a transcendent God and the world. The question which agitated the Church, and which had to be answered, was the one which Jesus had Him- self proposed, "What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?" Is He only David's son — a mere man ? Or is He not also David's Lord — the true God, the Lord of hosts ? Never has there been pre- sented a more important question, or one upon which the supreme interests of man were so de- pendent. Well, it was to this question, forced to the front 276 THE NATURE OF GOD. as it had been by the Arian heresy, to which the Council of Nicea was compelled to make answer. Let us own that the answer was not an easy one. It was one which required a profound knowledge of the Scripture as it bore on the question, as well as an intimacy with those metaphysical terms, in which, on account of its peculiar nature, the content of the Scripture could alone be expressed. It was the task of maintaining the distinct and eternal existence of the Father, Son and Spirit, on the one hand, with- out destroying the unity of God on the other. It was that of maintaining the complete Deity of Jesus without endangering the unity in the bosom of the Godhead. In a word, it was that of exhibiting the doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness, of bring- ing into the creed statement the total data of the Scripture as it bore on the side of both the unity and the trinity. With the results of that struggle at Nicea you are already well acquainted. Out of it there came a creed which ever since has been the joy and boast of entire Christendom. A creed in which Protestant and Catholic alike unite in glad acknowledgment of the deity of their common Lord. A creed which for well nigh sixteen centuries has stood against all op- THE TRINITY. 277 position, whether of Unitarian, subordinationism or philosophical analysis. A creed which by its vital- ity has vindicated its claim to being the true and only rational expression of the oneness of Jesus with God, as well as of the distinctions eternally existing in the bosom of the Godhead. A creed which in its confession of the unity in trinity and the trinity in unity in the Divine nature at once affirms the pro- found personality of God, and furnishes to thought a basis upon which it is yet to build its noblest and most enduring temple. It is my purpose in the pres- ent lecture to call attention to several items of this creed, in the hope of vindicating what may have seemed a very extravagant statement, made at the beginning, concerning its importance and worth. Permit me to quote the two confessional sentences of which this remarkable formula was originally composed. " We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible ; and in one Iyord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father. God of God, Light of light, very God of very God, Begotten not made, of one substance with the Father. . . . And in the Holy Ghost." You will observe that the creed first confesses the 278 THE NATURE OF GOD. important doctrine of the unity of God. " We be- lieve in one God." It conserves what Monarchian- ism and Arianism vainly sought to conserve, by sac- rificing the truth of the essential trinity. But it does it in the only way in which the spiritual oneness can possibly be maintained — that is, by the acknowl- edgment of the existence of hypostatic distinctions in the Divine nature itself. And it was able to ac- complish this, for the reason that its framers had laid hold of the higher idea of the Deity native to the Scripture, but utterly foreign to philosophy, in which the Divine unity is conceived as that of a spiritual being rather than that of a mathematical concept. It declared the Christian idea of God to be, indeed, monotheistic. But its monotheism was not the kind which is involved in the notion of a self -identical, solitary Deity, incapable of either movement or love, because of His abstract and barren singleness. The creed presented God in the richness of a complex nature, triple in His unity, and one in His triplicity, in opposition to absolute monotheism, with its barren and impoverished notion of oneness, as identical with singleness of essence. In other words, the creed presents God as a personal, a spiritual being, in whom oneness and THE TRINITY. 279 threeness finds its best analogue and exhibition in self-conscious and personal beings, such as we ourselves are. It is this Christian conception of God as personal and living, because He is one and yet three, that makes the Nicene Creed what it is to the world. Let us now observe how its repre- sentation of God, in which He is presented, not as a mathematical unit, but in the richness of a triune nature, enriches thought, opens the door for the in- carnation, and establishes once and for all the fact of the Divine personality. I remark, first, that the doctrine of the Trinity enriches thought in that it presents a universal formula. You will agree, that in all of its attempts to in- terpret the world, thought has experienced the need of a universal formula. By this, I mean some idea or conception or principle of unity in which the diverse and opposing realities of the world may be reconciled. To discover such a principle has been the aim of every philosophy. Liebnitz thought that he had discovered it in the " Monad " ; Spinoza in " Substance " ; Fichte, in the " Ego and the Non Ego " ; Shelling, in the " Absolute," and Hegel, in the "Idea." Every system has presented us with 28o THE NATURE OF GOD. some new and all-comprehensive category, by means of which it hopes to lead us through the laborin- thine structure of the world. And yet no formula yet proposed has proven itself capable of reconciling the antagonisms which a consideration of the world presents, or of uniting the world in a single conception. All have failed, for the reason that they have left out some impor- tant element, and by so doing have forfeited their claim to being a universal philosophy. Now, it is just this principle of unity that Chris- tianity furnishes to thought, in its doctrine of the trinity and unity of God. It takes up the truth in every system, puts it into its proper relation to other truth, and, by so doing, resolves into unity the dualism of the world, which has been the bane of every speculative system of thought that has yet been offered. I^et us see how it does this. It will be agreed, that from the beginning the mind of man, in its attempt to conceive the Abso- lute, has oscillated between the two poles of Abso- lute Monotheism and Pantheism. Between a con- ception of the Deity as transcendent, unknowable, unapproachable and separate from the world, and that of a Deity immanent in the world and insep- THE TRINITY. 28 1 arable from it. It is for the reason that both of these conceptions contain a truth that is vital, that they have expressed all that is highest and best in unassisted thought from the days of Plato to the present. Absolute Monotheism stands for a truth. It is that of the Divine transcendence. It lays stress on the eternal distinctions which separate between the infinite and the finite, on account of which God, as to His innermost nature and being must ever remain the unknown and utterly remote. For, in a sense, God is, indeed, the One past finding out ; the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, obscured by clouds and thick darkness. Job utters the truth of absolute Monotheism in his question, " Canst thou by searching find out God ? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection ? It is high as heaven, what canst thou do ? deeper than hell, what canst thou know?" And yet, such a statement taken alone does not tell the whole truth. It emphasizes the fact of the Divine transcendence, but omits the equally important truth, that of the Divine imma- nence. It makes much of God's unknowableness, and nothing of the fact that He is also well known. And that is to say, that Monotheism needs the 282 THE NATURE OF GOD. complementary truth for which Pantheism stands to save it from the barren shoals of Atheism, to which it inevitably tends. For man has little interest in a Deity whose dignity is compromised by fellow- ship with His creatures, or who regards their needs and sorrows from afar. Such a Deity is too subtle for the intellect and too cold for the heart, and is certain sooner or later to be conducted to the utter- most frontier of the universe, where, enthroned in majestic inaction, He is bidden a respectful adieu. And Pantheism also has its truth. As opposed to Deism and Agnosticism, it stands for the truth of the Divine nearness. In nature, in history, and, above all, in the spirit of man, God is. In the daisy by the dusty wayside ; in the mote that hangs lazily in the evening air ; in the planet shining in the dome above ; in the forces that control and bind into cosmic unity all that is, God's presence resides. It is the truth of Pantheism, or, if you please, the fact of the omnipresence of God that the psalmist puts into his question, " Whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, even there shall Thy THE TRINITY. 283 hand lead me and Thy right hand uphold me." It is the native longing of the soul for a God who is near, even by our side, that gives to Pantheism the place which it has always held in Oriental, and which it to-day holds in European thought. And we may be sure that what has obtained so wide a currency, or what has held so powerful a sway over the minds of men, is not wholly false. Pantheism, like Monotheism, has its truth, and that truth is the immanence of God. And yet the truth contained in philosophical Pantheism, like that contained in Deism, is but partial. Taken alone, Pantheism leads to Atheism. Reduced to its lowest terms, it forces the choice be- tween the alike fatal alternatives of affirming that God is all, or that He is nothing. If He is all, then He is also by inclusion the basest even of moral evil. If He is not all, He is evaporated into an abstraction so exaggerated as to transcend existence itself. Pantheism alone leads to Atheism. And thus the truth contained in each of these opposing systems needs the truth contained in the other to give it completeness and to make it satis- fying to the intelligent thought of men. Tran- scendence without immanence gives us Deism, cold, 284 THE NATURE OF GOD. barren and atheistic. Immanence without tran- scendence gives us Pantheism, fatalistic and morally palsying. Neither is without the other, and a true conception of the Absolute must include both. Now, it is here that the Christian doctrine of the trinity and triunity is of immense service to specu- lative thought. It mediates between the extremes of philosophical Pantheism and Deism, conserving the truth, while it at the same time corrects the errors of each. In its presentation of God as one in substance and three in persons, it opens the way for His transcendence as well as for His immanence. It declares that God is, indeed, one. But He is not one in the sense in which Deism thinks of Him as one. He is not a mathematical unit, but rather a spiritual unity. On account of His triune nature He not only exists in three modes, but also sustains a threefold relation to the world. Because of the richness of His nature He is capable of a life above the world and also in it. As the Lord of all, He is above the world. As the life of all, He is within it. Though dwelling in the world as its life and energy, He is yet above the world and distinct from it. Being the infinite Spirit, He is not wholly occupied with the world, nor are His powers exhausted in the THE TRINITY. 285 control of its processes. His relation to the world is not that of the life to the tree, which does all that it can do when it makes the tree what it is. God is in the world as the spirit of man is in the body, for, though it dwells in the body, controlling it and directing it, the spirit is yet greater than the body, and capable of activities that far transcend the physical realm. The Trinitarian idea of God is that of a free spirit, personal, self-directing and un- exhausted by His temporal world activities. And thus does the doctrine of the trinity, when rightly understood, mediate between the opposing systems of Deism and Pantheism. It absorbs into itself the truth in the Deistic contention that God is transcendent and infinite, as well as the truth of Pantheism that He is immanent in the world. But while it does this, it also rejects the errors of both. In its affirmation of the constant presence of God in the world, it rules out Deism, and discredits it as a valid and comprehensive philosophy. While in its conception of God as above and apart from the world, it rules out Pantheism. And so, likewise, the doctrine of the trinity and triunity also acknowledges the rightful claim even of Agnosticism, when it affirms that there is that in 286 THE NATURE OF GOD. the infinite and absolute Deity that transcends our finite comprehension. It acknowledges that as to His innermost nature and being God is the hidden, the unapproachable. That on this side He is, indeed, an abyss into which no thought can penetrate and from which we must turn back in despair. But, while it confesses this truth, it redeems Agnosticism from absolute hopelessness in its presentation of a God whose nature is such as that He can make Himself known to men if He so chooses. For a being whose nature is triune is capable of self- manifestation. To such a being a two-fold life is not an impossibility. In the life that He lives in the Son He can and does live in the world. In this mood of His being He became incarnate and bridged the chasm between heaven and earth, between the finite and the infinite. In a word, the doctrine of the trinity enables us to see in Jesus the transcend- ent God with us and in us. It recognizes in Jesus the Almighty restraining Himself and subordi- nating to Himself His illimitable power. It sees in Jesus the incomprehensible stooping to make Himself known to men. It sees in Jesus the Eternal Wisdom speaking out of the depths of infinite thought in human language. THK TRINITY. 287 And what shall I say even of Polytheism, which in its nobler forms and in its own dark way wit- nesses for a truth which a hard Monotheism ignores the truth, namely, that God is a plurality as well as a unity ; that in Him there is a manifoldness of life, a fulness and diversity of powers and manifes- tations which a rigid Monotheism fails to provide. Is not even this element of truth for which Poly- theism stands also taken up and put in its proper relation to the unity of God in its doctrine of the trinity and triunity in the Divine nature ? Well, does not this fact, that the doctrine of the trinity, when rightly apprehended, absorbs into itself all that is true in human thought, vindicate the claim made for it a moment ago, when I affirmed that it presented to thought a universal formula ? For what great and vital truth is there in any serious system from the day of Plato to Hegel that is not taken up and given a larger meaning in this very doctrine ? In the words of Samuel Harris : " No doctrine of God has so satisfactorily resolved into unity the dualisms, and the seeming antinomies arising in every attempt to construct a theory of the universe and to grasp the idea of the Absolute. None has ever so completely comprehended the 288 THE NATURE OF GOD. bipolar and complemental truths in the vast idea of the Absolute Being and His relation to the finite, as the docrine of the trinity." Coleridge had all the truth on his side when he affirmed that " The article of the Trinity is reason in its universal formula ; that there is not nor can be any religion, any reason, but what is an expression of the truth of the trinity." But the Christian doctrine of the trinity and unity in the Divine nature not only furnishes to thought a universal formula, it also presents to hope a sure ground for the redemption of the world. And it does this for the reason that it finds the basis of redemption in the Divine nature itself. Because of what God is ; because His very essence is Love, redemption ceases to be a mere hope and becomes a moral necessity. And man's need of redemption is part of his con- sciousness. In the presence of the evil that is about him and in him, he feels himself powerless. It is this fact of universal evil that has saddened the lives of the noblest among men and women everywhere, and evoked the bitter cry, " Oh, wretched man that I am ; who shall deliver me from this body of death ? " And what is true of THE TRINITY. 289 man is also true of nature. For what has come to him has also come to it. Both are alike victims of evil, and mingled with his are the groans of a suf- fering creation, crying for deliverance. And then, too, wherever confidence in the future has inspired the soul ; wherever man has watched in hope for the morning, it has been because of his belief in the Divine interestedness, and the hope that sooner or later God would send help out of His sanctuary. But what if God is indifferent to our sorrows, as Deism teaches ? What if He be too great or too far removed to afford His help, as Agnosticism affirms ? What if, on account of His nature, He is incapable of sympathy, as Pantheism and Materialism alike hold ? Or what if He be a self -identical Deity, a being whose nature, on account of its very single- ness, is incapable of love, as absolute Monotheism affirms ? What hope is there then left for the re- demption of the world, or what refuge is there against the ills of existence except Stoicism, with its resignation to the evils of existence, from which there is no way of escape? It is the Christian conception of God as triune that awakens hope ; that makes the religion of Jesus a gospel as well as the mightiest of the forces that work for the better- 19 29O THE NATURE OF GOD. ment of men. And for this there are two reasons. The first is found in the fact that the doctrine of the trinity establishes the certainty that God in the innermost of His nature is love. Not that His threeness makes Him a loving God, or, if you please, a Being to whom love is a relative and secondary attribute, contingent on His relation to His creatures. The doctrine makes Him a Being whose very essence is love ; a Being for whose name love is the only possible synonym. And there is a vast difference between the conception of a loving God and that of a God whose essence is love. The former makes love itself contingent and transient. The latter makes it absolute, and the eternal cause of all. The one leaves the world unintelligible, cold, hopeless. The other makes it a world, amidst the mysteries of which we can move with confi- dence, knowing that all is well, and whose unsolved problems we can face with hope. The one is the highest guess of unassisted thought ; the other, the very nerve of that faith that has given hope and guaranteed redemption to the world. But how can we think of love as absolute and as distinct from a love that is merely contingent, ex- cept in the light of the conception of a plurality of THE TRINITY. 29 1 persons in the Godhead? Love is self-communi- cation to another. There cannot be love without an object to love. Accordingly, to affirm that God is eternally love, is to confess that He has from eternity an object of love. Nor does it meet the case to say that such an object is presented in the world. Eternal love demands an eternal object to make it real, and the world is not eternal. But what, then, can be the object of God's love through- out eternity, if it be not found in the plurality of persons eternally existing in the Godhead ? Apart from such a trinity of persons and the relations which such a trinity implies, God cannot be a God of love. Existing alone and in barren singleness, apart from someone upon whom from all eternity to expend His love, someone in whom He beholds Himself reflected, God is not from eternity love. In that case His Fatherhood, His love, are mere acces- sions to His being, and are not parts of His essen- tial nature. In the words of John Caird : " God cannot be without love. Eove implies a second, and the world is no second for God. That second must be eternal — that is, within the Divine nature." And so it comes that to think of God as love is of necessity to think of Him as triune. It is to see 292 THE NATURE OF GOD. in the innermost of His being that community of persons which the doctrine of the trinity in the Divine nature affirms, and apart from which He cannot be eternal love. Think of it as we may, it is the Christian doctrine of the trinity in the Divine nature that redeems the conception of God from that barren and infinite singleness with which philosophy vests it. It is this very threeness that vindicates the Christian position that the Divine Being as to His innermost nature is love, the in- tensest, the mightiest, the holiest thing that we know. From such a God we shall not hope in vain for redemption. But while the trinity of persons in the Godhead thus fixes the ground of redemption in the Divine nature itself, it also provides the means for its actual accomplishment in time. Let us not overlook the fact that a redeeming God must of necessity be triune. A Deity abso- lutely single as to His nature is by that very single- ness rendered incapable of redeeming a world unto Himself. It is so for the reason that redemption requires a Deity at once transcendent and imma- nent ; a being to whom existence in the world and apart from it are alike possible. THE TRINITY. 293 For redemption is not a change in our environ- ment or even in our attitude to God. It is nothing less than a transformation of the very inmost, the remaking of the entire personality, and its con- struction anew out of the moral substance of God. It is not that merely ideal union of God and man of which philosophy fondly speaks. The oneness of the redeemed soul with God is real and actual, a unity growing out of the oneness of its moral essence with His. No one is truly redeemed until, speaking of the power that dominates him, he is able to say, "It is no longer I, but God dwelling within me." In a word, to be made one with God, to be in- habited by Him, this it is to be redeemed. And that means that for our redemption God must unite Himself with the race and become in- carnate in human flesh. In the person of the Only Begotten, He must needs travel the pathway that leads through Bethlehem, in order that by assuming our nature He might unite it with the Divine. But while assuming ours, He must not part with His own. In the moment of His deepest humiliation, He must, as Redeemer, remain the eternal and tran- scendent. Otherwise He cannot form a perfect bond of union between man and God. In order 294 THE NATURE OF GOD. that such a real union may be effected He must needs be a member of the race and yet distinct from it, absolutely and fully God at the moment that He is truly man. In other words, the relation which as Redeemer He must sustain to the world must be that of transcendence as well as immanence. He must exist above the world and yet in it. See how this comes. It will not be denied that in the carrying forward of the work of redemption God must dwell within the individual soul. Because the new life begotten within by the Holy Spirit is not our own but God's, He must live within us. And this occupation of the entire field of our nature by God is the end sought by the Holy Spirit. " Behold, I stand at the door and knock," says Jesus. " If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and sup with him and he with me." It is, as you see, an admission on His part that He cannot accomplish His work from without ; that if we are to be made one in moral essence and in innermost life with God, the old self must be cast out and its place oc- cupied by another. It is not enough that the re- deeming God stand aloof, in infinite and sublime transcendence. He must dwell within, live within, THE TRINITY. 295 if He is to control and reform us in the springs of our being. And then, too, in his moral struggles man needs a pattern. In the shaping of our characters we re- quire an objective exhibition of what we are to be. For this reason, also, the One in whose image we have been created, and into whose likeness we are to be fashioned, must present Himself as the Divine ideal. He must be for us the pattern shown in the mount. And this ideal must, in the nature of the case, be a concrete one. It must present itself under all the phases of our varied and complex ex- periences. No private or personal conception of what we are to be is sufficient. All such concep- tions are inadequate, for the reason that we cannot see ourselves as we really are, or rightly estimate the breadth of the chasm that ever yawns between what we are and what we must be. And this is to say that for humanity, a perfect pattern must be a living one, it must be set forth in the ideal man. He must be one in nature with us, touch us shoulder to shoulder, be our companion in all our experiences, be tempted as we are, yet without sin. No ideal, or merely human pattern, has vitality enough to awaken a desire to realize in 296 THE NATURE OF GOD. ourselves its moral beauty. No other than a living and perfect man has power to woo us by the spell of a life controlled entirely by the indwelling God. Before such an objective and living ideal man must stand, before there will be heard from the depths of the soul the cry, " This is what I must be ; this is what I want to be." Well, just this is the power that the transcendent God, as brought near in Jesus, has always had upon the hearts of men. Beholding Him, the soul has felt itself overpowered, for in Him it has not only seen the ineffable beauty of God, but also the apoth- eosis of humanity. Indeed, so overpowering has been the vision of the King in His beauty, as that all who have truly beheld Him have also yearned to be in moral beauty what He was. And yet, paramount as may be this desire, does not our experience prove that alone and unaided it is utterly impossible for us to realize it? Jesus stands there on the heights ; we here in the valley, weak and helpless. He the perfect ideal unto which we wish to attain ; ours the conscious- ness that its attainment is beyond our ability. Well, how is this difficulty to be overcome ? How are we to climb the heights of moral perfection to THE TRINITY. 297 which Jesus woos us, and in so doing become like Him ? Is there any other way than the one which He Himself has opened — I mean the way indicated in the Scripture, in which the transcendent One in the person of the Spirit becomes also the imma- nent ; in which the One who is above is made to dwell within, and by His indwelling vest us with a power which is not our own but His ? One day in the gallery of Antwerp there sat an amateur painter before one of the masterpieces of Rubens. With easel and canvas and brush, he sat with soul transfigured before the great painting, striving to reproduce it. But somehow, he could not tell why, he could not accomplish the task. The colors refused to blend, the outline remained imperfect, the painting could not be made to live. And little wonder ; for the one who executed the masterpiece possessed genius. To him color and brush were alike servants. He painted with ease, for he painted with inspiration, he knew not how. Yet it was the reproduction of this work that the young artist attempted. But, after repeated fail- ures, he gave up in despair. " I cannot do this ; I cannot do it," he said. "It is utterly beyond my power, I ought never to have attempted it." Well, 298 THE NATURE OF GOD. suppose that out of the unseen there could at that moment have come into the soul of the young artist the spirit of the master. Suppose that the genius who had conceived and executed the masterpiece could have entered and possessed the soul of the young painter. Would he not by virtue of such indwelling have been made equal to the task ? I own the weakness of the illustration. I own that it does not tell in any adequate degree the full relation of the Divine Spirit to the human soul. I own that in the case of the human spirit all this would be impossible. No finite spirit can thus fill and actuate the spirit of another. But a Divine Spirit can. It is altogether within the ability of a Being who knows no limits to the exercise of His power save those of the human will. Because of the richness of His triune nature it is possible for Him to maintain a relation at once transcendent and im- manent, to dwell graciously within at the moment that He moves omnipotently without. And just this indwelling Spirit, whose work it is to create us anew after the Divine pattern, and in so doing to glorify Christ, was the promise of Jesus, when speaking of the Spirit, He said, " And if I depart I will send Him unto vou." THE TRINITY. 299 Well, now, does it need to be said that the ability to thus exist in three persons, and which we have just seen is an indispensable requirement of a re- deeming God, cannot be the possession of a being whose innermost nature is a unit? Does it need to be said that a power such as this is the possession of that One alone in whose nature there are distinc- tions, and who, on that account, without doing vio- lence to His unity, is capable of a threefold mode of existence ? For how is a Deity whose nature is a fixed unit, without inner distinctions and whose existence is, on that account, confined to a single mood ; how is such a one to live at once within and apart from His creatures ? Or what would become of the transcendent existence of such a one at the moment that He becomes immanent? Would He not at that moment cease to be the transcendent, and would not the universe be deprived of its absolute God ? Or what, on the contrary, would become of His immanent existence at the moment of His tran- scendence ? Would it not be made impossible ? One or the other of the Divine modes of existence essential to redemption must be sacrificed if the Deity be a monad, a mere unit, without inward and personal distinctions. 300 THE NATURE OF GOD. And this is the reason why no rigid system of Monotheism has ever had room for the incarnation, or the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. Judaism, with its self-identical Deity, denied both. Moham- medanism, with its Deity whose glory consists in His absolute and barren singleness, repudiated both. To the Patrapassian both were a stumbling-block, and to the Arian they were foolishness. At last, a Deity in whose nature there are personal distinc- tions, a Deity who lives His life in three persons, and who, on that account, is capable of existing above the world and also in it, alone has power to redeem. Such a Deity and such alone is able to unite Him- self with the race, and by so doing unite it with God. Thus, when the doctrine of the Trinity is consid- ered, not from the standpoint of its theoretical sig- nificance, but from its practical side alone, its su- preme value to the world is at once apparent. No truth has been of such value to thought. None has so vindicated the ways of God to men, or given to hope so sure a basis. If our newest philosophy is right in its contention that the most cogent and apposite proof of any particular item of our knowl- edge is that of its practical value to the world, then THE TRINITY. 3OI is the truth of the Trinity in God abundantly con- firmed, for no truth has been of equal value to men. LECTURE EIGHTH. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. In the present lecture we are to look into the ground upon which the doctrine of the Trinity itself rests. For those of us who are not philoso- phers, mere " value judgments " are not a sufficient guarantee of truth. We prefer the certainties of history and experience. We want, if possible, to feel the ground beneath our feet and to rest our be- liefs on reality. But is this possible in respect of the doctrine of the Trinity ? And is there any as- surance that we are not at last dealing with a mere theory ? I think an inquiry into the origin and his- tory of the doctrine will afford an answer to these questions. For how came this great truth of the Trinity and Unity in the Divine nature to be accepted as an important part of our religious knowledge? How came it to be regarded as so vital an element in the Christian consciousness as to command a place in the confession of Protestant and Catholic alike throughout the world? You will find the answer in two things : (302) THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 303 First, in the origin of the doctrine itself. Second, in the witness of experience to its truth. Let us not overlook the fact that the doctrine had its origin not in philosophical speculation, but in actual and undeniable facts of history ; facts to which no intellectual or scientific interpretation could possibly be given without arriving at the doctrine. It was in the three ways of Father, Son and Spirit, that God had manifested Himself in history. Centuries before Christ came, God was made known in the Fatherly relation that He bore to the He- brew people. Over against Polytheism, He was first known as the sole God of Israel, and then as the sole God of all. By those to whom the revela- tion came, He was conceived as the creator and sustainer of all things — the One to whom worship was to be given and filial obedience rendered. To them He was made known as the defender of His people and the One to whom they were to look for the supply of their every need. To Him, as a gracious and forgiving Father, they were taught to trustfully resort, in the full assurance that they would be forgiven. In the pity that He felt for those who feared Him, they saw the likeness that 304 THE NATURE OF GOD. He sustained to an earthly father, and in His uni- versal and paternal government, they saw the ful- fillment of their hopes for the world. While the revelation was gradual and progressive, and the actual conception of God in the minds of men was but partial and imperfect, yet the manifestation was such as that by its means men were taught to know the Living God as Father, and brought to serve Him in filial obedience. It is true, that before Christ, God was conceived as in every sense one. It could not have been otherwise. In the nature of the case, the threeuess in the Divine nature which the doctrine of the Trinity affirms, could only be foreshadowed in the Old Testament. Dependent as it was on the three- fold manifestation, it had to wait the fuller dis- closure that was afterward to be given in the life and person of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit. Even on the paternal side, the manifestation of God was not yet complete. It needed the incarnation of the Son, in order that the infinite richness of the Fatherly relation might be fully brought out. It needed that One should come into the world who sustained the relation of Son to God, in order that the wealth of the Divine Fatherhood might be dis- THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 305 closed and the loving relation, into which as Father, He desired to enter into with all men, might be correctly and concretely exhibited. And this complete manifestation of the Father was in the fulness of time afforded in Jesus. Claim- ing for Himself the unique relation of Son to God, the truth of His claim was owned by all who were brought into fellowship with Him. As God, Jesus was worshiped, and to Him prayer was offered. In Him the disciples were certain that they beheld the only true God, though disclosed in a way differ- ent from that in which He had manifested Himself to the fathers. But while seeing in Him the true God, Jesus did not displace for them the Father who had sent Him. They still thought of God ; but they thought of Him as the " God and Father of Jesus Christ." Jesus was to them God brought nigh and manifested in human form. He was God dwelling among men, sustaining to them the rela- tion of companion and friend. But just because Jesus was Son, He also enlarged their conceptions of the Father. In the loving rela- tions existing between Him and the Father, they not only learned the infinite richness of the Divine Fatherhood, but also the relations into which 306 THE NATURE OF GOD. through the Son all might sustain to God. The Church was sure that God was in Christ as He was in no other ; that His manifestation in Jesus was not like any that He had made through Moses, or Isaiah, or the prophets, but was unique and effected by the personal indwelling that made Him truly Divine. Thus, in the twofold manifestation of the one God, as Father and as Son, was the foundation laid for the doctrine of the Trinity. It is accordingly not with a philosophical theory that we have to do, but, .on the contrary, with a fact of history ; for it was in actual history that the twofold modes of the divine existence were made known. But while the manifestation of the Father and the Son proved a duality in the Divine nature, it did not establish the fact of a Trinity in the Godhead. Before that could be established, a manifestation of God in yet another way was necessary. And this, I need hardly tell you, was afforded on the Day of Pentecost. It was on that day that the faith of the disciples in the prom- ise of Jesus, that He would send the Comforter, even the Spirit of truth, was rewarded in the com- ing of the Holy Spirit. And when He came the THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 7>°7 fulness of the Triune God was fully disclosed. The marvelous energy of that convincing and renewing power which thenceforth dwelt in the Church and wrought upon the world, was enough to identify the Holy Spirit as God Himself, indwelling, worthy to be adored and worshiped with the Father and the Son. As God Himself had come in the Son, so, it was felt, He had come in the Spirit. The one God of all, known to the fathers, had manifested Him- self in the divine-human Christ, and in the invis- ible Spirit of truth and life. Both were His, and yet each was truly Himself. But what was thus made known in the actual events of history was also confirmed in the experi- ence of the disciples. The God who had given to men a threefold manifestation of Himself, was also known to be triune in the experience that came through fellowship with Him. It was the one God, into communion with whom they had been brought through each of the manifested Persons. In the experience of salvation into which they were brought through fellowship with Jesus, the disciples knew the Father and the Spirit, for it was in this fellowship that both were brought nigh and made real. It was in this fellowship that the prom- 308 THE NATURE OF GOD. ise that He had made concerning the coming of the Spirit was realized, and His words, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," confirmed. And just this is the meaning of the Apostle's prayer at the end of the second letter to the Cor- inthians — " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all." He was speaking out of experience and invoking the gifts that were charac- teristic of the Christian life. It was the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose cross he gloried and whose heavenly gifts were making all things new, that had opened to him and to them the infi- nite riches of the love of God, and introduced them to the unspeakably precious communion of the Holy Spirit. And Paul wanted that this ex- perience should be continued ; that Christ might still bring home to His people the love of God and the Spirit's fellowship. And this is ever the power and the prerogative of Christ. The grace that is in Him does bring to glorious effect in men, the love of God and the communion of the Spirit. It is this fact, made known in the experience of every believer, that justifies the conviction that in Jesus dwelt " the fulness of the Godhead bodily." THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 309 Such, then, was the origin of the doctrine of the Trinity. It was not a product of human thinking about God. Philosophy had no part in it. Natural religion could not have conceived it. It came into the world through revelation. It had its origin in actual facts, facts that could not be disputed. As three, God had made Himself known, and as such the experience of all who believed the manifesta- tions proved Him to be. This was the Trinity of the early Church. It was all that was needed in an age of unquestioning faith — a faith that finds its analogue in childhood, when facts are accepted and experiences enjoyed, without a critical inquiry into their nature or meaning. L,et us own, that thought had not yet given to these facts and experi- ences an intellectual setting ; that the doctrine of the Trinity had not as yet assumed the scientific form in which it was afterward presented in the creed. The facts and the experiences were enough for the practical necessities which were then at the front. A simple belief in the Father, Son and Spirit, apart from any intellectual construction, was all that was necessary for the Church yet in its infancy, and whose life was not as yet threatened by heresies. Nevertheless, when thought did its work, 3IO THE NATURE OF GOD. as it had to do it, and the attempt was made to understand and justify the experience that came to the Church, the material out of which the doctrine was constructed was already given in actual his- tory and its truth confirmed in actual experience. Nothing was introduced into the intellectual state- ment that was not already given in history and Christian experience. But at this point we are confronted by the ques- tion, How can God be three and yet one ? What threeness can there be in a unipersonal Being? It is a question which, at some point or other, is cer- tain to present itself in our study of the doctrine of the Trinity. Apparently it presents a real diffi- culty. And yet the difficulty is one that arises out of a misunderstanding of terms rather than the truth itself. To think rightly of God is, indeed, to think of Him as three in Person, yet one in essence. It is to think of Him as a unipersonal Being, eternally existing in the three distinctions of Father, Son and Spirit. But, while God is three, His threeness is not that of three distinct indi- viduals or personalities. When we speak of a threeness in the divine nature, we must distinguish sharply between the terms personality and person. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 311 The terms are not synonymous. When we use the term personality, we have in mind a distinct indi- vidual. When we use the term person in the sense in which it is used in the creed, we mean by it, one or the other, of the three distinctions existing in the one God. The Father is a Person ; the Son is a Person ; the Spirit is a Person. Yet the three together constitute the one personal God. It will not, I think, be denied that the term Per- son as applied to the three separate members of the Trinity, is in our times quite unfortunate. In its modern sense it differs widely from the sense which it carried in the age in which the creed was for- mulated. Then the term was helpful, for the reason that it bore a looser and more flexible meaning. But, at present, amid the more clear-cut conceptions of personality, its use is almost certain to give encouragement to tritheistic belief. The three Per- sons of the Trinity are persons in the ancient sense of the term, but not in the modern. When first employed in the discussions, it carried with it a meaning much the same as the word " character " now has in the modern drama. In the modern sense of the term, it was not meant that there are three Persons in the Godhead ; but, rather, that 312 THE NATURE OF GOD. there are three modes, or ways, in which this one Personality exists and manifests Himself. It is largely for the reason that we are under the spell of a word now no longer used in its original sense, and unconsciously seek to find three modernly-con- ceived persons in the Godhead, that we find the doctrine of the Trinity so difficult. The moment we give to the term Person the meaning that it origi- nally had, much of the difficulty disappears. Something like this, then, is the conception to which the Nicene formula sought to give expres- sion. God is a Person ; one in essence, yet exist- ing in three distinct ways. Of this one essence the Father, Son and Spirit are alike possessed, yet in different ways. The oneness of essence in each constitutes the unity, the three ways in which it is possessed constitute the Trinity. The doctrine, accordingly, is not that of one nature and three Persons ; but of one nature in three Persons. Thus, when rightly interpreted, the doctrine of the Trinity loses much of its difficulty. I do not mean that by a proper interpretation its mystery is completely eliminated ; but, rather, that by such interpretation the doctrine is rendered intelligible in spite of the mystery that must forever enshroud THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 313 it to our finite minds. Yet it is well to remember that it is not the obscurity of the doctrine that puzzles us. It is the mystery of personality itself : for at last the mystery of the Trinity in God is one with the mystery of the trinity existing in our- selves as personal beings. But I must now call your attention to the answer that the doctrine of the Trinity gives to that old and persistent question, What is God ? For, what, let me ask, is this Trinitarian idea of God to which the Church in all ages has unitedly confessed, and which, on account of its fidelity to revelation and experience, makes it the norm of all correct think- ing about the divine Being ? Is it not a conception of God as a Personal Being — a Perfect Spirit, in whose nature there is a threeness ? In other words, is it not a presentation of God as a Person, in the sense in which we are persons, three as we are three, yet one as we are one ? I think it will be found that the idea of God as the Perfect Person includes all that the doctrine declares concerning the divine Unity and Trinity ; and that, contrari- wise, to affirm of God that He is Three in One and One in Three, is but to affirm His absolute and perfect personality. I^et us see how this position finds its justification in the facts. 314 THE NATURE OF GOD. I own that the ground upon which we are about to tread is holy. That it is to be trodden, if at all, in a spirit of reverence and with our shoes removed from off our feet. Nevertheless, if we are in fact, and not only in name, children of God ; if our greatness consists in the fact that we are actually in possession of the Divine image ; and, if above all, we are in nature one with God as the Incarnation proves us to be ; then we have right to affirm that in our human is to be found the most perfect analogue of the Divine nature. If we are like Him, then He is also like us. A relation cannot be essen- tial on the one side, and only accidental or arbi- trary on the other. Accordingly, we may affirm that what as spiritual beings we are in part, God is in its completeness. What we are but imperfectly, He is in all the fulness of its actual realization. But when we reflect upon ourselves, we discover that we, as personal beings, are essentially three at the moment that we are one. That, while in a sense we are three, as God is three, yet, in another sense we are one, as He is one. Indeed, it will be found that from any adequate conception of our our own personality it is impossible to eliminate either the trinity or the unity, for both together constitute the personal spirit. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 315 For one thing, there is within us a threeness. The moment we enter into an analysis of self, we discover that we are not single ; but that, on the contrary, we live and act in three distinct moods. Your psychologist will tell you that the constituent elements of our personality as such are three, self- consciousness, the power of self-determination, and desires ; in other words, reason, will and love. And these are more than mere functions. They are essen- tial elements of our selfhood. Together they make the person. More than these there are not ; less there cannot be. These three elements express the sum total of all of our activities, for, in every moment of our self-conscious existence we live in one or the other of these three modes. Subtract either and you destroy the person. Here, then, we have a trinity. But, while we are certain that there exists within us a threeness, we are just as certain that as per- sonal beings we are one. For these three elements of reason, and will, and love, are, in fact, not separa- ble, although we give them separate names for the sake of distinction. In every act, whether of thought, or will, or love, the whole person is in- volved. We cannot, for instance, pursue a train of 316 THE NATURE OF GOD. thought without attention. But attention is clearly an act of the will. We cannot think consecutively without desire. But desire is an act of the affec- tions. We cannot love, without thinking of the one we love, or without willing our relation to such a one. We cannot will without thinking of the object, or desiring its realization. And thus, in every act, whether of will, or thought, or love, the whole self is involved. While there is within us a threeness, yet we live and act as one. And, this is to say, that there is a synthetic unity in us as persons ; that there is not a numerical one- ness, but a spiritual unity in which the various elements of our complex personality are blended with an intimacy that defies analysis. As persons we are one in a sense in which we are not three, and three in a sense in which we are not one. And this trinity and unity, existing in us, and by virtue of which we are made personal, we possess because of our kinship with God. To be a child of God is to pos- sess His image, not, indeed, in that which is merely outward and accidental, but in that that belongs to the very innermost of His being. And so, reason- ing from analogy, we may conclude that in each of the three Persons that constitute the Trinity the THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 317 whole Divine Person goes forth. As with ns, every conscious act involves the whole self, so with God. It is not a part of God that we behold in each of the Persons. God Himself is in the Father ; God Himself is in the Son ; God Himself is in the Spirit. In each of the Persons the whole God is, and in each, though differentiated in operation and purpose from the others, the one God lives and acts. It is the one God whom Christendom knows, one Person, who reveals Himself in the threefold Per- son. But how about those particular distinctions, of Father, Son and Spirit, in the Godhead, whose names seem to imply the existence of distinct per- sonalities, rather than different modes of existence of one and the same Being? Considered in the light of the trinity and unity existing in ourselves as personal beings, it is easy enough to see that as personal, God may be one and yet three. But here are names which seem to stand for living relations between distinct and separate personalities. Here are designations which in common speech belong to individuals, rather than to persons, in the sense in which we have defined the term. And what one- ness can there be between Father and Son? Or 318 THE NATURE OF GOD. how are we to think of the Son as coequal and co- eternal with the Father ? L,et us own that, conceived in terms of our human relationship, this is impossible. Humanly speak- ing, the father precedes the son, the son derives his existence from the father and is subordinate to him. Clearly, if the unity of God is to be pre- served, some conception of sonship other than that derived from human relationship must be had. Well, it is just this higher conception of sonship that is presented in the Scripture and incorporated into the creed. Both present an idea of sonship stripped of all human limitations ; a conception of sonship in the light of which the full equality of the Divine Son with the Father becomes intelligible. See how it does this. You will recall that in the prologue to the fourth Gospel, it is affirmed of the Word that " He was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God." Here we have a distinction — God, and God with God. It is a distinction that is eternal and that pertains to the Divine nature. Not that we have here a Trinity, but we do have a distinction, a duality, if you please, in God. God, and God with God are not the same. It THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 319 is a declaration that in the beginning God existed both as Father and Son. That as the all-perfect Person, from all eternity, God contemplated Him- self in Another, Himself in Himself. And so we may say that the Father is the source of the Son. In the Son, the Father sees Himself reflected. In the Son, God eternally goes forth, reproduces Him- self to Himself, utters Himself into reality, by action that is eternal and necessary to His nature. Well, now, is there not something in the action of the human soul that corresponds with this act of God's, in which He reproduces Himself in His Son ? And is it not true, that as personal beings we also reproduce ourselves ; or, in other words, objectify ourselves to ourselves? Indeed, were it not that we possess this very ability, we would not be personal, for it is just this power in the subject of being an object to itself, or, as L,ocke states it, " Of considering itself and saying, ' I am I,'" that constitutes our personality. See how this is. We have already agreed that the essence of per- sonality is self-consciousness. That to be a person is to be conscious of self as self. Where this con- sciousness is present, there is the person ; where it is absent, there is the impersonal. But how do we 320 THE NATURE OF GOD. arrive at self-consciousness ? Is it not by objectify- ing ourselves to ourselves, and then by reflecting upon ourselves as thus objectified? We know per- fectly well how our knowledge of outward realities comes. We look outward on the world, open our- selves to the impressions which its objects make on the sense, and then reflect on the content as thus given. It is by means of such reflection that our knowledge of external things comes. But we could not possibly know them did they not present them- selves as objects distinct from ourselves. W T ell, in precisely the same way we arrive at self-conscious- ness, and learn to know ourselves as personal beings. In thought, we objectify ourselves to our- selves, reflect upon ourselves as thus presented, and out of such reflection knowledge of self comes. We speak, for instance, of " self-judgment ; " of " self- condemnation," of "self-approval." What do we mean by these phrases ? What can we mean other than that the self has power to summon itself be- fore its own bar in order that it may pass judgment upon itself as thus objectified ? Or what is remorse, but self-accusation — the self beholding itself and writhing under the sentence pronounced by no one other than self ? This is the tragedy of sin. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 32 1 This is the secret of an accusing conscience. It is the horrible vision of self that rises before Richard the Third that compels him to cry out : " O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me — The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. Cold, fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What do I fear? myself ? — there's none else by : Richard loves Richard : that is I, I am I. Is there a murderer here ? No ; — yes, I am. Then fly. What, from myself ? Great reason : why ? Lest I revenge. What ! Myself upon myself ? Alack ! I love myself. Wherefore ? for any good That I have done unto myself ? Oh, no : alas ! I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain. . . . My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain." Yes, we do make ourselves objects to ourselves, and the " I " of the subjective self does reflect on the "I" of the objective. This is the essence of self-consciousness ; this is the essential thing in personality. Now, it is true that in man this action through which we attain self-consciousness is always defective and its results but partial. We grope after the thought, and the vision of self comes 322 THE NATURE OF GOD. but slowly and laboriously. We only gradually become self-conscious, and at any particular moment are but partly personal. But not so with God. " The same yesterday, to-day and forever," His self-consciousness is, in the nature of the case, eter- nal. There never is nor can be anything potential or undeveloped in God. The self-consciousness which in us is the result of deliberate effort, and which continues only during the time of voluntary self-reflection, is ever present and ever existent in God. And this is equivalent to saying, that in the case of the Perfect Person, what is but partially attained by us, and even then only in thought, will be attained completely and actually. Such a One will be able perfectly to objectify Himself to Himself, to see Himself just as He is, and in all that He is ; and, at the same moment, recognize the objective as identical with the subjective self. Well, it is just this power essential to personality and which is so imperfectly possessed by us that the doctrine of the Trinity affirms to be completely possessed by God. It affirms that as Father God perpetually beholds Himself objectified in the Son ; while, as Holy Spirit, He unremittently perceives the essential THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 323 unity and identity of the Father and the Son. But a Being possessed of the power thus to perfectly ob- jectify self and to completely identify the objective with the subjective self, can be no other than the Perfect Person. Well, this was the thought that the Nicene Fathers sought to express in the phrase, " Eternal Generation," as applied to the Son. Not that they thought of the Son as dependent for His existence upon the Father, as is the case in human genera- tion. Against this they carefully guarded in the phrase, " Begotten, not made." They thought of the Son as coequal and coeternal with the Father. They saw clearly that an Eternal Father necessi- tated an Eternal Son, and that since the Father is eternal so also must be the Son. What they meant by the phrase, " eternal generation " was this : that in some manner God eternally repro- duces Himself within Himself, goes forth into reality, and thus is eternally the source of the Son. But a Being possessed of the power thus to eternally reproduce Himself, to behold Himself in all that He is in Another — Himself in Himself, is none other than the Perfect Person. Such a One is in the fullest sense Self-conscious, and to be per- 324 THE NATURE OF GOD. fectly self-conscious is to be completely personal. And this is to say that the doctrine of the Trinity and Triunity in the Divine nature, completely establishes the fact of the Divine personality. For how could God from all eternity be conscious of Himself as Father if He had not from eternity dis- tinguished Himself from Himself in the Son, or if He had not been as eternally one with the Son in the unity of the Spirit ? Or how is it possible to conceive of God as eternally self-conscious without thinking of Him as eternally making Himself His own object ? Such, then, is the answer that the Nicene creed gives to that most important question, How are we to think of God? Confessing Him as one in essence, yet eternally existing in the three dis- tinctions of Father, Son and Spirit, it also confesses His perfect self-conscious personality. It but reaffirms and emphasizes the statement of the Scripture that u God is a Spirit." What as spir- itual beings we are but imperfectly, God is in the realized fulness of its infinite perfection. And this answer, necessitated though it was by the heresies that sought to prevent its utterance and to distort its meaning, reaffirmed by the Council of THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 325 Constantinople in the year 381, has now for more than fifteen centuries been the reply that the Church has made to this same question. In her theology, in her ritual and in all of her utterances, she has unitedly confessed the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity, as the best expression of the nature of God as made known to men through his- tory and experience. But is it not marvelous that a conception of God so simple, yet so consonant with thought as oft to have been mistaken for a product of philosophy ; so true to experience, yet so rich in its intellectual content, should have come into -the world in the way in which it did ? That it has made the world immeasurably richer, no one acquainted with the facts will deny. For what has it not done for truth, for thought and for life ? It has given to thought a "universal formula" for the solution of the problems with which it has grappled in vain. De- spite its mysteriousness, it has made God more in- telligible to men and has helped to bring Him nearer to the hearts of His children. In the light that it has thrown on the Divine nature, it has made the Incarnation intelligible, and vindicated the hope that looks for the redemption of the world. 326 THE NATURE OF GOD. While conserving all that is true in thought about God, it has also stood as a bulwark against error and preserved the faith pure until now. Above all, it has effectually established the perfect Personality of the Divine Being, and, by so doing, has brought God nigh as the friend and companion of all who diligently seek Him. But how, let me ask again, came this idea into the world? There is but one answer. It came through history and experience. Philosophy had no part in it. Natural theology never discovered it. The men who first proclaimed it were the un- lettered fishermen of Galilee : men whose training had not been received in the schools of Alexandria or Athens, but, on the contrary, in daily fellowship with Jesus. But they were men who knew of a certainty that God had revealed Himself and entered their experience in three ways ; that He had made Himself known to them as Father, Redeemer and Sanctifier. And when afterward the command came to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, they understood that they were but to proclaim that " which was from the beginning ; which they had seen with their eyes ; which they THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 327 had looked upon, and, with their own hands, had handled of the word of life." It was a vital part of the gospel which they were sent to preach. It was more : for just this threefold mani- festation of the one God in history and experience is the very substance of Christianity. And this truth, first proclaimed in the simple story of the gospel, and afterward restated in a more concise and scientific form in the creed, is yet repeated in the experience of all who truly know God. To all such the Eternal God is still Father, Redeemer and Sanctifier — a Being who, in creation and providence, reveals His eternal Love as Father, whose eternal Reason utters itself forth through the Son, through Whom the world has been redeemed and whose eternal Will is executed by the Spirit, whose mission it is to bring into practical effect the love of the Father and the wis- dom of the Son by fulfilling the loving purpose of the One God. In God the eternal heart of Love ; in Christ the rational expression of the eternal heart ; and in the Spirit, the accomplisher of the work of both, the universal Church recognizes the One God whom she joyfully worships. And in the Being in whom eternal Wisdom, eternal Love and 328 THE NATURE OF GOD. eternal Will unite, she also beholds the Perfect Per s 07t — the self-conscious Iyord of all, to whom, as Father, Son and Spirit, she ascribes present and eternal praise. GLORY BE TO THE FATHER, AND TO THE SON, AND To the Holy Ghost ; as it was in the beginning, IS NOW, AND EVER SHAU, BE, WORLD WITHOUT END. — AMEN. JUM 7- 1910 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: July 2005 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724) 779-21 1 1 <5 T ' One copy del. to Cat. Div.