I ;;« j , ! il IS p "'I'l'll'ln m i ;:¦:. »<)«!) : ¦ III I IB 11 ¦Illi v: ¦ ¦¦: ¦¦'¦¦¦ H" >i ¦ II 1 ¦ii ¦; 1 YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY DEPOSITED BY THE LINONIAN AND BROTHERS LIBRARY DOCTRINE AND LIFE A STUDY OF SOME OF THE PRINCIPAL TRUTHS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THEIR RELATION TO CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE GEORGE B. STEVENS, Ph.D., D.D. Professor in Yale University \ - Ay. \ o VA IPs/.., f > ., !• O SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY New York BOSTON Chicago I895 Copyright, 1895, by SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY. ,-*. il 4t*'k. Entered in Stationer's Hall. ,<' t A. ll '« / \ London, England. .' <\V '<^ V Slt7 TYPOGRAPHY BY C. J. PBTBRS & SON, BOSTON, U.S.A. THE SACRED MEMORY OF M% Jlotijer MY FIRST AND BEST TEACHER IN RELIGION PREFACE The aim of this volume is to present the principal doctrines of Christianity in their correlation with the Christian life. These doctrines have therefore been approached from the point of view of the Christian consciousness rather than from that of philosophy or criticism. Our main question in this study is not, How might the Christian philosopher justify the belief under review ? nor, How might the biblical scholar elaborate and defend it ? but, What is the adaptation of the given doctrine to the needs of the soul, and its use in the Christian life ? How is its truth attested in experience ? If will thus be seen that, while the volume deals with the subject-matter of theology, it differs consider ably in its aim from theoretical treatises on Christian doctrine. Although I have often referred to the grounds on which Christian doctrines are held, and to some of the ways in which they may be defended, my purpose has not been chiefly apologetic. It has rather been my effort to illustrate the value of certain fundamental doctrines for Christian thought, life, and character. This practical value of the doctrines I have endeavored to exhibit by suggestion rather than by elaborate analysis and discussion. I have aimed so to present these doctrines as to suggest and justify their VI PREFACE practical religious significance and value. The purpose of the work is more fully illustrated, and its method more fully explained, in the first chapter. I have written in the firm conviction that' the Chris tian religion involves certain great doctrinal truths which represent the deepest realities of the universe and of human life. While insisting upon the inability of the mind fully to comprehend and define these reali ties, I have also insisted that we need not, and, indeed, cannot, refuse to think about them, and that serious and reverent thought upon them is useful and reward ing. I have written in the belief that the truths of Christianity are a great treasure for the mind and heart, as well as a guide for the regulation of conduct. I hold that the Christian religion includes all our life in the largest sense of that word. It does not consist merely in a certain method of outward action, or in the performance of certain duties technically called religious ; far more fundamentally does it consist in an inner spiritual life, quickening into new power, and equipping for its highest exercise and use, every faculty of the souL With this conception of religion it is easy to show that doctrine is inseparable from life, since reflec tion and thought are themselves important parts of life. If, now, it be true, as I believe it is, that Christianity is the absolute religion, and that its truths represent eternal realities and universal principles and laws, then is our discussion really a study of the leading factors and forces which are concerned in producing and foster ing the life of the Spirit in man. Q. B, S, Yale University, March i, 1895. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGK I. The Relation of Doctrine to Life i II. "The Soul Naturally Christian" 17 III. The Belief in God 34 IV. Revelation and the Bible 52 V. The Character "of God 71 VI. The Trinity 87 VII. The Person of Christ 105 VIII. The Work of the Spirit 122 IX. The Fact of Sin 138 X. The Atonement 158 XI. The Intercession of Christ 176 XII. The Doctrine of Faith 191 XIII. The Doctrine of Love '203 XIV. The Doctrine of Prayer 216 XV. The Future Life 228 Index 245 DOCTRINE AND LIFE CHAPTER I THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE What is the relation of doctrine to life ; of theology to religion ? To this question we hear, in our time, the most diverse answers. One of the commonest statements is, that Christianity is not a dogma, but a life. On the other hand, we find that most churches expect of their members some manner of assent to cer tain doctrines, and that special tests are applied to those who are to assume the functions of teaching and gov ernment. The strifes of sects and the disputes of theo logical parties have proceeded upon the idea of the importance of correct doctrine. The Christian church still remains divided into a multitude of independent organizations, not, as a rule, because the members of any one of these doubt the Christian character of the members of the others, but because they differ from them in one or more points of theory or belief. These differences, however, have not commonly been regarded as merely intellectual or theoretic, but as having some important relation to Christian life and character. The Roman Catholic, for example, does not deny the 1 2 DOCTRINE AND LIFE Christian character of sincere Protestants. He admits the saving value of the faith which is exercised by them, and of the ordinances which are administered in Protestant communions. He does not deny the final salvation of true believers in Christ wheresoever found. He does, however, assert that the whole Protestant con ception of the church is false. He affirms that God has committed to the church certain divine graces and ben efits to bestow upon her children, and that the Protes tant, by remaining outside the church (as he conceives of it), necessarily forfeits those benefits, and suffers in his life and character in consequence. The Roman Catholic Church thus regards its views of the organiza tion and authority of the church, and of the nature and administration of its ordinances, as having important bearings upon the spiritual life. Its whole attitude toward Protestant organizations thus assumes that the differences between it and them have important rela tions to religious character and welfare. On the other side, intelligent Protestants do not deny the Christian character and acceptability to God of sincere and devout Catholics. But they hold, in contrast to Catholic belief, that the direct access of all souls to God, through the one only Priest, Jesus Christ, the doctrine of salvation by divine grace alone on condition of faith, and the right of free thought and of private judgment in theology and in Biblical interpretation, are truths of vital importance for the encouragement of Christian thinking and scholarship, and for the development of Christian character. Thus the Protestant dissent from Roman Catholic doctrines assumes that its characteristic positions are practically THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE 3 important ; that it makes a wide difference in all one's life and thinking, whether he accepts the Catholic or the Protestant view of the church and its sacraments, of the Pope and his authority, of the priesthood and its functions, of the Bible, its use and interpretation, and of many related points of divergence. In like manner, it would be easy to show that the differences among Protestants have been commonly assumed to involve important practical consequences. The Calvinist charges upon the Arminian a restriction of the absolute sovereignty of God, and a denial of the sole efficiency of God in salvation, which imperils the believer's assurance and security. In turn, the Armin ian affirms that Calvinism makes God an arbitrary despot, and virtually excludes, by its doctrine of uncon ditional election, the freedom and responsibility of man in respect to his destiny. Both these systems maintain that important religious consequences are involved in their respective philosophies. In like manner, the va rious divergences among sects and parties have arisen and have been perpetuated, because they were believed to involve matters of principle, and to be of practical importance in their relation to the religious life and character. And yet we discern under all this diversity of opinion and practice, a fundamental unity. Christian life and character are essentially the same in Catholic and Protestant, in High Churchman and Dissenter, in Calvinist and Arminian. It is certain that if their differences are important, they are, at most, only rela tively so ; they do not essentially involve the presence or absence of genuine religious character, sincere Chris- 4 DOCTRINE AND LIFE tian living. Those who insist upon a certain church order as of special value and importance would find it difficult to prove that the favor of Heaven has not been granted as abundantly to those who do not possess this advantage as to themselves. If the presence and power of divine grace are to be judged by the actual devel opment of Christian character and the actual fruits of Christian living, no monopoly of this grace can reason ably be claimed by the representatives of any particular church or creed as against all others. What we find, then, when we look abroad upon the Christian world, is a very general insistence upon doctrines and practices as being important to the Christian life, and, at the same time, a real development of that life under many diverse forms of doctrinal belief and of ecclesiastical organization and usage. In view of these facts of Christian history the question recurs : What is the real relation of doctrine to life ? We may observe at the outset that the reality and importance of this relation cannot, in general, be denied, unless we are prepared to maintain the entire separate- ness of theory from practice, of thought from conduct. That no such general separation can be justified be comes almost self-evident when a case in point is pre sented. Who can doubt, for example, that it makes a great difference with a man's life whether he believes in a personal God in whose moral likeness he is made, or only in a blind, unknowable force of which he is a product ? Such beliefs as the belief in God touch the very core of character ; they involve, beyond question, our whole conception of life's meaning, value, and destiny. Similar in respect to its importance for THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE 5 all thought and action is the question, what kind of a being God is. Whether God is a Moloch or a gracious Father makes an incalculable difference to the religious life. The same may be said respecting belief in such a fundamental doctrine as that of revelation. Who would maintain that it is a matter of moral indifference whether or not one believes that God has revealed to man his will and nature ? that the well-being of the world is in no way involved in the question, whether the Bible really represents a divine revelation, or is the mere product of man's own thinking upon religion ? Whether Christ was a divine Being, or only a wise and good man ? whether he was what he claimed to be, or a pretender ? whether man is sinful and guilty, or only unfortunate and imperfect ? whether his continu ance in sin is attended with moral peril or not ? All these are questions which bear powerfully upon life. We must, then, in general, admit and maintain the importance of doctrine in its bearing upon life. Not all doctrines, however, are equally important in this relation. They are important in -proportion as they concern what is central and essential in Christian thinking and living. The importance of various doc trines, when judged by this test, will, of course, be dif ferently estimated by different men. I shall make no effort to determine precisely the relative importance of the various doctrines which I am to review. I shall, however, assume, on the basis of the general consensus of the Christian world, that there is a set of doctrines which hold a close relation to the religious life and character. Of these doctrines I shall review those which seem to me to be most essential in Christianity, 6 DOCTRINE AND LIFE and shall aim to indicate their bearing upon the reli gious life. I shall dwell mainly upon that nucleus of doctrine which the great mass of Christians in all ages and churches have commonly considered to be closely correlated to the Christian life, and whose importance may therefore be presumed to have been attested by centuries of Christian thought and experience. Bearing in mind this general distinction between opinions which can be shown vitally to involve Chris tian living, and those which are, at most, but remotely related thereto, and fixing attention on the former only, let us now consider the nature of the relation between them and the actual life of religion. Let it be remem bered that I am here speaking of such fundamental doctrines as that of God, of revelation, of Christ, of sin, and of salvation. The doctrines of Christian theology represent the efforts of the human mind to define the content of revelation, and to describe the principles and processes of the religious life. Christian doctrine has always to take account of these two great facts, — divine revelation and Christian experience. The question as to the relations of these two facts in theology is warmly debated in our time. Into that discussion it is aside from my present purpose to enter. I shall take up the truths which are commonly believed by Christians to constitute the essential subject-matter of revelation, and shall dwell upon their relations to the Christian con sciousness, — to Christian thought, experience, and life. Looked at from this side, theology is an effort to construe the facts of religious experience. It is the approximate intellectual equivalent of the forces and THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE 7 processes which are operative in the religious life. The doctrine of God, for example, is an effort to define the knowledge of God which is involved in the Christian life. The doctrine will naturally have in it certain ideal elements ; that is, it will be an endeavor to define the highest conceivable Christian conception of God ; it will surpass the idea of God actually cherished by most persons ; it will aim to embody that notion of God which corresponds best to the full content of revela tion, and which is best adapted to minister to progress in actual Christian living and thinking. It will thus be seen that theology and religion are related to each other as theory to fact or reality. It involves no disparagement of theology to say that it is theory. In all human life theory and practice are inseparably conjoined, and react powerfully upon each other. That a vicious theory may be harmful is evi dent, since it may suggest or involve motives and methods of action. All theory is a product of thought, and thought is most closely related to conduct. There may, indeed, be theories which are so remote from all actual human interests as to involve no practical conse quences, but this cannot be said of those which concern the more essential truths of religion. Moreover, the view so commonly advanced, that a certain theory may be inherently right, but that the opposite of it may be justified in practice, is a sophism which no sound phi losophy can justify. It is important to adopt in theol ogy and morals the soundest and most adequate theories which are attainable. In our time indifference to doc trine seems to be thought by many to be the mark of supreme devotion to truth. But indifference to doc- 8 DOCTRINE AND LIFE trine is indifference to thought on the themes of religion, and religious thought can never be wisely dis paraged in the supposed interest of religious life. I grant that it is important to recognize the limits beyond which we cannot go in our efforts to describe the nature and action of God and the mysteries of our own being. But these limitations do not preclude all thought about those realities. If we know anything about them, we must have theology. If we know noth ing about them, how can we have even religion ? The relation of theology to religion may be compared to that of psychology to the facts of mental life. The science which we call psychology is an effort to describe and interpret the methods and laws of the mind's actual working. The two are not to be confounded, but neither are they to be separated. It would also be vain to dis parage psychology as being purely speculative and use less. Some sort of psychology must always exist where men are intelligent and thoughtful enough to turn their attention in upon the phenomena of their own mental life. All the objections which are made to theological doctrine can be made, and quite as plausibly, to mental philosophy and to metaphysics in general. The limita tions of our knowledge, the variations in theory, and the indefiniteness of the results, may all be urged as ob jections, and quite as cogently in the one case as in the other. It is vain to urge, in a comparison of the two sciences, that, because theology attempts to deal with God, and with a world of transcendent realities, while psychology deals with facts which are directly known in consciousness, psychology may be defended, while the ology must be discarded ; for religion also has it sub* THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE 9 jective side, and its facts, even with this limitation, challenge the effort to describe and interpret them. Theology cannot be wholly banished, unless the reli gious nature of man is utterly denied or ignored, as psychology cannot be wholly discredited, unless it can be shown that man can know nothing about himself. As long as man remains a religious being, and a thinking being, there will be theology of some sort. But a special occasion and incentive to theological thought must arise when one adopts any specifically Christian ideas concerning God and man and duty. It is true, as we have said, that theology is theory, and that religion is life ; that theology is the intellectual construction of the realities which in religion are known and experienced. But so long as the life and experience which we call religion remain, and so long as the mind thinks about them, there will be theology or doctrine. It is also true that religion is primary and theology sec ondary ; that the actual religious life and character are of first importance, and that the definition or descrip tion of the realities which they involve is less essential. The main concern of the Bible, for example, is religion rather than theology. But it would have been utterly impossible for the Bible to accomplish its end except by the teaching of much theological doctrine. The teaching of Jesus concerning the fatherhood of God, and that of John concerning God as love, have an immedi ately practical or religious aim, but they are not, on that account, less truly theological. All these teachings — the most practical of them — ¦ involve some view of what God is, of what God does, and of why God does it. It is utterly impossible to teach religion without teach- 10 DOCTRINE AND LIFE ing, at least, the elements of theology, as it is utterly impossible to live the life of religion without believing, and more or less fully defining to one's self, some doc trines. The most unreflecting believer has some idea about God, some conception of what kind of a Being he is, and of what he has done in revealing his goodness and love ; some idea about his own relations to God, and the duties which spring out of those relations. Those ideas, however crudely conceived or inaccurately defined, are theological. I can conceive of a man having a theology without personal religion, but not a religion without theology. The objections which are so commonly heard in our time against doctrinal theology are really aimed, in niost cases, at that over-subtlety and over-confidence in theo logical thought which have certainly been quite too common. When, for example, theology attempts to ex plore the interior nature of God, and to make a psychol ogy of the divine mind, it is natural that the^ effort should provoke dissent. Doctrinal theology has often exposed itself thus to the charge of presumption. It has sometimes attempted to construct a fully rounded system of thought concerning God's nature and action, involving a complete philosophy of the universe. It has sometimes assumed to solve well-nigh efcjaw ~<">,rstery, and to give an answer to almost every qk^s in whic> human curiosity might suggest. Of courJ^iije tv^cr 0f this sort can be done. To so ambitious a talHT'the powers of the human -mind are quite inadequate. It is proper and necessary that the limitations of theological thought should be recognized and even insisted upon ; but the recognition of these limitations is something THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE 11 very different from a repudiation of theology altogether, or from a general attitude of indifference toward it. I cannot help thinking that expressions of indif ference to theology from teachers of religion, and made apparently in the supposed interests of reli gion, are very ill-considered. We may wisely seek to shun all untenable theology, whether untenable by reason of its denials, or by reasons of its excessive affirmations and over-confidence ; but we should shun this sort of theology, not in the spirit of protest against all theology, but in the interest of more rational and defensible doctrine. There has been a great deal of objectionable theology in the world — objectionable, in some cases, on account of its lack of evidence, in others, on account of its conflict with evidence or with the best instincts and intuitions of the human heart. But so also has there been a great deal of objection able moral philosophy in the world ; yet this fact could hardly be urged as a valid reason for declining alto gether to search for the grounds of the right and the good, or for refusing to study the nature and scope of human obligations. The existence of false and perni cious systems of ethics might more properly be urged as a reason for the effort to construct the best and most salutary philosophy of the subject. That theol ogy is always imperfect, often untrue, and sometimes even pernicious in its teaching, is no reason for renoun cing its pursuit, but rather a reason for cautious but per severing zeal in its study and elaboration. If much of the thinking concerning God and man and their rela tions has been unsatisfactory, then there is the greater occasion for those who believe in the value and neces- 12 DOCTRINE AND LIFE sity of religion to define, as accurately and helpfully as possible within the limits of human knowledge, these great realities with which religion is concerned. In the light of these considerations, I believe it will appear that doctrine and life bear very much the same relation to each other in religion as thought bears to experience in any sphere of human interest and action. What we do cannot be uninfluenced by what we think. Especially true is this of religious opinions and be liefs ; since they pertain to a realm to which belong, to so great an extent, the motives and principles of action. Even if men do not often fully embody their religious beliefs in conduct, it is nevertheless true that such be liefs exert a powerful influence upon character. Nor do the virtuous lives of some men, who are reputed to be without a religious belief, prove the contrary. The number of men who are destitute of religious belief is not so great as is commonly supposed, and in many cases the practical fruitage in life and character of in herited and traditional belief is still seen in lives which give no sign of positive attachment to them. In many such cases, however, it is easy to see that the power of ancestral faiths still persists, even though they are no longer consciously cherished. Thus far I have spoken of doctrine and life as if they were generically different. I have considered " life " more in its outward aspect, as conduct or action. Even upon this method of regarding the subject, a close relation between doctrine and life may be established. It appears to me, however, that when we inquire more closely into what "life" fairly includes, the relation appears to be even more intimate; in fact, that life THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE 13 necessarily includes the formation of doctrines or be liefs, because life includes our thoughts and our con victions. The action of the intellect, to which we more directly attribute our opinions or beliefs, cannot, in actual fact, be separated from the motives and springs of action in the emotions and the will. Indifference to doctrine in the supposed interests of life rests upon a very narrow conception of what life is, that is, upon a very superficial analysis of human nature. Thought is a part of life, and a very significant part of it. If, as Matthew Arnold insists, conduct is three-fourths of life, thought is, at least, its other fourth. But to me Mr. Arnold's dictum seems to exaggerate the proportions of conduct as a part of life, unless conduct be made to include, not only behavior or action, but also that whole play of thought and feeling, of motive and aspiration, within man, in which action has its main source and spring. Life must not be narrowed to the limits of external conduct. The religious life is an affair of the heart, an affair of the inner man, before- it becomes an affair of outward action or conduct. The inner life rules the outer life ; the issues of life in action are from the heart of motive and desire. What a man does is rooted in what he is, in what he thinks and feels. We may, therefore, justly claim that in the relation of doctrine, to life something more is involved than the influence of Christian truth upon conduct. The relation of this truth to the inner life is even closer and more important than its relation to action. Our present subject, therefore, includes the adaptation of Christian truth to the wants of man's mind and con- 14 DOCTRINE AND LIFE science, and its bearings upon the depth and quality of character. Religious beliefs — at least, some of them — bear an essential relation to the life of thought, feel ing, and motive, and through these affect the issues of life in action. It is this close relation of truth to life, of doctrinal belief to experience, which I have in tended to suggest in the alternative title of this vol ume. In this title it is implied that both doctrine and life are involved in religion ; that religion may be contemplated more on its intellectual side as involving the acceptance of certain truths, or more on its prac tical side as involving a certain spirit or temper, and certain modes and principles of action. Religion is many-sided, and should not be too narrowly defined. It should not, for example, be defined as consisting merely in the belief of certain truths, although it necessarily involves such belief. Nor does it consist exclusively in conduct, although it essentially involves conduct. It will thus appear that a study of the leading doctrines of Christianity, especially when they are continually regarded from the standpoint of Christian experience, may properly be called a study of the Christian religion. The tenets of Christianity may be studied from va rious points of view. They may be presented with reference to showing their inherent reasonableness — this would be the method of philosophical theology. They may be considered with reference to the support which they find in the Bible — biblical theology pursues this plan. They may be approached more, as we shall seek to approach them, in the light of the constant inquiry, How is the doctrine in question correlated to practical Christian thinking and life ; not to the think- THE RELATION OF DOCTRINE TO LIFE 15 ing of the philosopher merely, nor to that of the bibli cal scholar, but to that of the average Christian man ? This inquiry involves to some extent, no doubt, a con sideration of the grounds on which Christian beliefs rest ; but it directly and primarily involves the question as to their value and use in forming a helpful working conception of Christian life and duty. The effort will, 'therefore, be constantly made to present those aspects of Christian doctrine which stand in the most vital relation to the best development of the Christian con sciousness and character. By applying, even if only imperfectly, this principle of limitation, we shall avoid, to a great extent, the realm of religious controversy. Most of the disputes among Christians have related to points and theories which, as the facts of Christian his tory prove, have not necessarily involved, to any great extent, the interests of healthy religious thought and life ; since, in. most such cases, men of diverse views concerning them have been equally earnest in teaching the great facts which underlie the various theories, and equally successful in conforming their own lives to the requirements of the gospel. Under various theories of the origin of sin, for example, men have held with equal strength of conviction to the doctrine that sin is uni versal and guilty, and should be repented of and for saken. A recognition of the fact of sin, and a clear conviction concerning its guilt and power, bear very important relations to practical Christian thought and life. But whether one believes, with the type of orthodoxy which has been most widely prevalent since Augustine, that all men actually and personally sinned in Adam, because all were seminally present in him as 16 DOCTRINE AND LIFE the head of the race ; or holds, with a later theory, that Adam stood forth as the representative of the race, and that all men sinned putatively in him, since he stood or fell for all his descendants, involves no inter est of evangelical faith or of Christian character and conduct. One may withhold assent from both these theories and adopt some other, or may believe that no theory on the subject is feasible, without loss to sound and sincere Christian living or thinking. With all the emphasis which we justly lay upon Christianity as the religion of a good life, we are not to forget the value of its truths as incentives to reflec tion and thought. In our busy age we may lay so great stress upon the outward acts and services of re ligion, as to obscure the importance of clear, well- considered thinking upon the nature, the elements, and the demands of our faith. Christianity offers its truths to us for«our contemplation, for the invigoration of. our minds, and the uplifting of our spirits, through the con sideration of the highest themes which can engage our attention. The deeds and services which we perform in the world will be in no small degree dependent for their effectiveness and power upon the maturity of religious thought, the depth of the inner life, and the richness of the spiritual experience out of which they spring. CHAPTER II " THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN " In the very first chapter of the Bible we read that man was made in the image of God (Gen. i. 27). The terms "image" and "likeness " which are here used, imply that man's nature is kindred to that of God from whom he came. This kinship of man to God includes, at least, two great points of likeness : (1) man is a per sonal being, as God is ; and (2) man is, like his Maker, a moral being. Let us briefly consider the significance of each of these points. By a person is meant a being who is conscious of himself as having an independent power of choice and action. The stone and the plant have no consciousness of their own existence ; the animal even has only a partial self-consciousness. He is governed mainly by impulse and instinct. He does not know himself. If the dog could say, "lama dog," he would no longer be a dog ; he would be a person. Man alone, of all beings on earth, is personal. He alone possesses the clear con sciousness of himself, and the power freely to direct his energies towards the ends which he chooses. He alone is, in the true sense of the word, a rational being ; that is, a being who knows himself as constituted capable of choice, of knowledge, and of thought. The innermost nature of God we cannot, indeed, 17 18 DOCTRINE AND LIFE know ; but such revelations of himself as he has made, as well as all our knowledge of our own natures, justify us in believing that in respect to personality we are really kindred to him. What else can be the meaning of the statement, that in the beginning God breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul (Gen. ii. 7) ? In our own mysterious personality, the full depths of which we can never sound, the per sonality of God is reflected. Our conviction that God is personal, and that we are not living in a world which is ruled by mere blind forces, is inseparably bound up with the certainty that we ourselves are free, self-acting beings ; that the human soul has a peculiar self-mov ing, self-knowing power which differentiates it from all lower orders of creation. But man's kinship to God is still more clearly seen when we contemplate his moral nature ; that is, his power of perceiving, distinguishing, and approving the good as opposed to the bad. This capacity separates man broadly from all inferior orders of being. The animal knows no right and wrong as such. He may have a keen perception, based on experience or training, of the consequences of certain actions ; but it does not follow that he can recognize the inherent blameworthiness or excellence of anything that he does, or be moved by what is properly called a good or an evil motive. Con sequently we never attach to the action of animals the notion of proper moral responsibility or that of guilt. If the master blames his dog for some misdemeanor, and punishes him, saying, " He knew better," all that he can properly mean is that the animal's action was contrary to his training. In such cases, half the reason for the "THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 19 punishment is always the hope of preventing through fear the recurrence of the same act. That the animal cherished any wicked purpose in his action, or is capable of the feeling of guilt or penitence for it, cannot be maintained. With man the case is different. He is not only con scious of the power to choose between objects and actions, but he is conscious of a peculiar difference in their nature which we distinguish by the words good and bad, right and wrong. This distinction between good and bad is the fundamental fact in morals ; and the intuitive perception and application of it by man kind are the fundamental facts of all law, order, and civilization. This distinction, and the capacity of man to recognize and apply it, lie at the basis of all moral philosophy. It is these facts which give to the word moral a distinctive meaning which cannot be merged or resolved into anything else. The difference between right and wrong refuses to be transformed into the difference between pleasant and painful, or into the dif ference between expedient and inexpedient. The origin and persistence of moral distinctions cannot be explained by association, experience, or utility. The consciousness of them is absolutely fundamental in human nature. Man is a moral being, not by habit, not by calculation, not by fear of consequences, but by nature. He is so because he is made in the image of God, in whose being the principles of all right and truth have their seat, and in whose consciousness all that is contrary to these must be known as wrong and false. Man is made in God's moral image, because, in some measure, like God himself, he knows and approves the good in motive, 20 DOCTRINE AND LIFE action, and character, while from it he distinguishes the bad as contrary to eternal law, and associates with the latter the idea of its desert or guilt. These considerations prepare us to see the grounds on which it is maintained that man is naturally religious. If he is allied to God by nature, if, in some essential respects, he is like God, it follows that he is capable of knowing God, and of living under a sense of his guid ance and care. The tendency of man to believe in a divine Being on whom he is dependent, and to whom he is responsible, and his tendency to regard this Being with reverence, and to render him some form of wor ship and service, are grounded in his kinship to God. The normal utterance of the soul is a cry for God' and no conviction of the human heart is stronger and more persistent than that of his existence and govern ment. Thus human nature itself attests the fundamen tal truths of religion. The great writers on religion in all ages have justly laid strong stress upon the native religiousness of man. Nowhere has this truth found nobler expression than in the fervent words of Augustine : " O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee." 1 And before Augustine, Tertullian appealed on behalf of Christian truth to the testimony of "the human soul, naturally Christian," 2 that is, adapted by nature to religion. This thought he has elaborated in a striking passage. He summons the soul of man into court to give its testimony to its sense 1 Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donee requiescat in te. Confessions, Bk. i ch. i. 2 O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae. Apology, Ch. 17. " THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 21 of God, and to its conviction of its own divine origin. " Take thy stand in the midst, O Soul," he exclaims, " and say whether thou art a divine and eternal sub stance, or the very opposite of divine, a mortal thing ; whether thou art received from heaven or sprung from earth; stand forth, I say, and give thy witness." He then proceeds to say that he seeks the verdict, not of the soul that has been warped and prejudiced by the tenets of some school, " trained in libraries, fed in Attic academies and porticoes," but of the soul which in native simplicity will utter its true natural feeling and conviction: "I address thee, simple, and rude, uncul tured and untaught ; I demand of thee the things which thou bringest with thee into man, which thou knowest either from thyself, or from thine author, whoever he may be." " These testimonies of the soul," he adds, " are as true as they are simple ; as simple as they are common ; as common as they are universal ; as universal as they are natural ; as natural as they are divine." 1 It would be difficult to find in all literature a more forcible presentation of the truth that man is by nature a religious being, than that which meets us in the pages of the ancient writer. It is an impressive evidence of the religious nature of man that history brings us no record of any people on the face of the globe wholly without a religion. There have been individual atheists, but never an atheistic peo ple. This fact can only be explained by holding that religion is natural to man. He has never been without it in some form, and never can be. Even those individ- 1 On the Testimony of the Soul. Chs. i, 5. 22 DOCTRINE AND LIFE uals who wish to have no religion seldom wholly suc ceed. There are times when their religious nature cries out of the depths of their unbelief. The material ists of our age who abjure Christianity still have at times words of reverence for the inscrutable " Power," the unknowable " Force," which seems to rule the world. For man to be wholly without a religion he must become something less than man. There is something in human nature which leads us to reach out beyond the bounds of the visible, and to people unseen realms with realities which to the eye of faith are as certain as are the forms discerned by the senses. " All men are born in faith," said the philos opher Fichte, meaning that the exercise of faith is natural to man. It is this tendency to faith, this in stinctive belief in the invisible world, which has always given, and must always give, religion its great hold upon the human heart. Christianity is, indeed, a religion of objective fact and revelation ; but even revelation, in order to accomplish its end, must find in man the crav ing and capacity to appropriate its truths. It must meet and satisfy native wants. The certainties which it discloses must be such as man has, from impulses within himself, desired and sought to possess. Just as the outer world could never reveal itself to us except by a forth-putting of our perceptive powers which corre sponds to the presentation of the,realities of the universe to us, so God and the spiritual world could never be come assured realities did not our natures yearn for them, and, as it were, go forth to meet the manifesta tions of the spiritual world which God is ever making to our spirits. We could never hear God's voice within "THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 23 us, speaking of himself and of a spiritual order, if we were not akin to God from whom we came, and who has made us for himself. If there were no capacity for faith in man, no deep and ineradicable tendency to belief in spiritual beings, there could be no religion ; or, at most, religion would be a mere matter pf conjecture and speculation, without the power of living conviction and confident hope. The counterpart of the truth that God has revealed himself to man is, that man has ever been feeling after God, if haply he might find him. I know of no finer expres sion of the truth that the soul of man, when it freely utters its own nature, cries out for God, than that which Longfellow has given us in the reminder that — "In all ages Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not; That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened." * We are thus justified in holding that religion, in the comprehensive sense of that word, rests upon facts of human nature which can neither be eradicated nor de nied. These cravings, convictions, and hopes of the human heart constitute the capacity for religion, and the power for perceiving and appropriating divine revela tion. The word of God in revelation is heard and wel comed because the human soul had been hoping to hear it. The well-springs of divine truth have refreshed i The Song of Hiawatha, Introduction. 24 DOCTRINE AND LIFE. mankind, and satisfied its soul's thirst, because in all ages the eager cry of the human spirit has been that which is voiced in the Psalmist's words : " As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God " (Ps. xiii. i). Religion, therefore, does not stay in the world merely because religious teachers have uttered and propagated its truths, it does not stay in the world because philosophers are arguing for it and theologians defending it, nor would it leave the world if all these should argue against it. Religion is here because it is at once the life of God in man and the expression of man's own nature, and because the human soul attests its truth in experience. But it may be asked, Has this native religiousness of man anything directly to do with Christianity ? Is not its significance confined to mere " natural religion " ? This question is partly answered by the consideration already presented ; namely, that the truths of religion could not be revealed to man, and made effective in his experience, if he did not possess a natural aptitude for them. This fact alone would give his religious nature a very important relation to Christian revelation. But a much more essential relation even than this may be established. It has been common among Christian writers to distinguish very sharply between " natural " and " re vealed " religion, and to treat the former as a product of man's " unaided reason." But we may well question, with John Henry Newman,1 whether the reason of man ever is unaided. Is it, indeed, probable that such is the case ? Does it accord with the New Testament to 1 Oxford University Sermons, p. 18. "THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 25 believe that all goodness outside Judaism and historic Christianity is mere " natural " goodness, and that all religion outside these is a mere product of man's own mind untouched by any divine influence? For an an swer to this question, let us turn to the two master spirits of the apostolic age, — John and Paul. In the prologue of his Gospel, the Apostle John tells us that the light, that is, the goodness, mercy, and love, which dwelt in the person of the eternal Son of God previous to his appearance on earth, "was the light of men " (John i. 4), and adds (verse 9) that this true light lights every individual man. These verses certainly contain the idea that Christ is a source of light to men universally ; that, in some way and in some degree, God reveals himself through Christ to mankind. We find that John makes this idea of Christ's uni versal relations and activity the keynote of his Gospel. Calling him, in accordance with a method of speech . current in his time, by the term " Word," he begins by declaring : " In the beginning was the Word " (John i. 1). Christ, the Revealer of God, the Saviour of men, does not begin to be at Bethlehem, and does not begin to work for men in Judea and Galilee. He was eternally with God and was God ; he bore a part in the creation of the world, — which includes the men whom he is to save, — and the life that dwelt in him was the light of men. Sin soon invaded human life, and shrouded the world in moral darkness. This light of the divine Christ, however, kept shining on, piercing the clouds that veiled the human spirit, even though the darkness did not apprehend it (John i. 5). As the sun shines on 26 DOCTRINE AND LIFE throughout the whole day, though clouds and storms may overspread the earth and darken our eyes to its brightness, so Christ through all the ages came invis ibly, spiritually, into the world, and illumined the mind of every human being, so far as that mind was capable of illumination. When, at length, he appeared in human form, he came first to his 'rown possession," as John calls the Jewish nation (John i. ii). They were "his own," because he had specially guided them throughout all their history, and sought to prepare them for fuller revelation. He had been their deliverer from bondage ; he had gone with them in their * wanderings in the desert, a " spiritual rock " of which they drank (to use Paul's expression, I Cor. x. 4) ; he had filled their temple with his glory, and inspired the visions of their prophets. They were thus " his own " by right ; but they received him not. The fundamental idea which runs through this whole description is, that the history of the world is the real sphere of Christ's manifestation. Scholars have been much divided on the question as to where the line runs in John's prologue between the thought of Christ's activity previous to his incarnation, and that of his life and work in the flesh. I do not think that any such line can be sharply drawn. The drawing of such a line is, indeed, made almost impos sible by John's very conception of Christ's work. For him the temporal is comprehended in the eternal. The work of Christ in all ages is one work. It is continu ous, unbroken. That which he did in the flesh is but a special form of that which he is always doing. It is, to use one of Horace Bushnell's words, a " transac- "THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 27 tional " revelation of principles of life and being, which are eternal in his essence and perpetually operative. When one attains to this conception, there is little occasion to mark off sharply his earthly career from all that preceded it, since his work on earth is but a con tinuance of his unceasing activity in revelation and redemption. The Fourth Gospel contains other illustrations of John's larger idea of the Christ. He treats the saying of the high priest Caiaphas, that Jesus should die for the nation (John xi. 50), as an unconscious prophecy, capable of being understood in such a sense that it would express the deepest truth of Jesus' mission. And this " prophecy " declared that the death of Jesus should not be for the Jewish nation only, " but that he might also gather together into one the children of God that are scattered abroad " (verse 52). The apostle clearly implies in this passage that there is a true sense in which children of God among the heathen nations may be spoken of, and that the work of Christ contem plated uniting them into one fellowship. Our Lord asserts the same truth very explicitly when he says : " Other sheep I have which are not of this fold," — not of this Jewish fold, — "them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice ; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd " (John x. 16). Let me now briefly illustrate Paul's idea. He teaches that revelation is universal. Among the heathen, God did not leave himself without a witness to his benevo lence and providence, but in the succession of the seasons, and the bounties of nature, taught them of himself (Acts xiv. 17). The course of history is also, 28 DOCTRINE AND LIFE to his mind, a method of divine revelation (Acts xvii. 26). Above all, is the moral nature, the conscience, a point of contact between God and man (Rom. ii. 14, 15). That which men were capable of knowing concerning God was manifested to them through the creations of the visible world, which the reason of man is able so to interpret as to assure him of God's power and divine- ness (Rom. i. 19, 20). But it may be asked, Had Christ anything to do with this general disclosure of God in nature and conscience ? How can we doubt it when we read that through him all things were created (Col. i. 16), that in him all things consist (Col. i. 17), and that his work of reconciliation contemplates the unifying and harmonizing of all things and all beings that in all of them he might have the pre-eminence (Col. i. 18, 20; Eph. ii. 14-18)? In the epistles just cited, Paul strikingly depicts the world-wide significance of Christ, whose work it is to abolish the discords of human life, and break down the barriers that separate men from God and from one another, so that there shall be neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, but Christ shall be all and in all (Col. iii. 11). It seems to me very significant that this larger idea of Christ and his work is presented to us by the two greatest teachers of the apostolic age, — John and Paul. So far as we can judge, these were the two men of that time who had penetrated most deeply into the heart of the gospel, and had attained the widest and noblest conception of salvation and redemption through Christ. It is evident that if we are to adopt these ideas of "THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 29 Christ's relation to all mankind, and of his spiritual presence in all man's life and history, we must greatly enlarge our conception of Christ beyond that ordinarily entertained. We must not limit our idea of his person and work to the few years during which Jesus lived in human form among men. Nor must we be content to expand this notion by merely adding to it the thought of a continued spiritual presence and activity of Christ in the world since his ascension. We must carry our conception of Christ and his work back into the ages previous to his incarnation, and extend it, not to the Jewish nation alone, but to mankind universally. And does not this view of our Saviour's world- redeeming mission best accord with our highest con ception of the character of God ? Why should we not think that God, as the absolutely good, the eternal sun of love and truth, the source of all light, pours down upon the whole world of souls his beneficent rays, illu minating, in different ways and degrees, all who open their hearts to his influence ? Who can believe that God is light (i John i. 5), and suppose that he shuts up his rays within himself, sending down only here and there a beam into the darkness of the world's ignorance and sin ? To me it seems more consonant with the character of God to suppose that in such ways as are possible and fully known only to himself, the Father of spirits reveals himself to all men, and that men are responsible for the way in which they welcome or reject such light as they have. I am far from claiming that on any view of this subject which we may take, we can explain the enigmas of history and the mysteries of Providence ; I am only urging that the idea of some 30 DOCTRINE AND LIFE kind of a manifestation of God to all men accords with the conception of his universal benevolence. 1 Now, if, as John and Paul teach, Christ is the me dium of this universal manifestation of God, then all revelation is Christian revelation. Christ is the light which lights every man; not within the limits of his toric Christendom, and within the bounds of Judaism merely, but in all nations and in all ages. In the early church the belief was common that God revealed him self in invisible ways, through Christ, to pure and lofty spirits in the heathen world. Justin Martyr says that Christ, who was and is in every man, was partially known to Socrates ; 2 and Augustine declares that Christianity is as old as the creation. 3 This concep tion is but a reproduction of John's idea of Christ as the source of life and the light of men. This view of Christ's universal relation to the race in revelation and redemption does not limit the unique sig nificance of that special course of revelation of which 1 The narrower idea of God's purpose of grace which was formerly dominant in theology, is well illustrated in the statements found in one of the letters of the eminent revival preacher, George Whitefield. He says : — " I frankly acknowledge I believe the doctrine of reprobation, that God intends to give saving grace, through Jesus Christ, only to a certain number, and that the rest of mankind, after the fall of Adam, being justly left by God to continue in sin, will at last suffer that eternal death which is its proper wages. . . . Our Lord knew for whom lie died. There was an eternal compact between Father and Son. A certain number (of souls) was then given to him as the purchase and reward of his obedience and death. For these he prayed, and not for the world. For these, and these only, he is now inter ceding, and with their salvation he will be fully satisfied." 2 Christ, who was partially known even by Socrates, for he was and is the Word who is in every man, etc. — Apology ii, io. 8 Nam res ipsa quae nunc Christiana religio nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nee defuit ab initio generis humani, quousque ipse Christus veniret in came, unde vera religio quae jam erat, coepit appellari Christiana. — Retractions I, xiii. 3. "THE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 31 the Bible is the product and record. That revelation, on the contrary, seems far more glorious when we remember that its central figure, Jesus Christ, is not merely an historic character like other men, who ap peared in the world for a few brief years, and then passed away, but that he is the eternal Son of God, the medium of revelation to all men in all times, who in his incarnation reveals the Father in a human life, and works, as he himself says (John v. 17), in accord with the ceaseless working of the Father, for the salvation of men. If Christ is, and always has been, everywhere touching and influencing the souls of men, it is none the less true that he has spoken in his life and teaching on earth with unexampled clearness, and that this most adequate revelation is the standard by which we are to estimate all less definite disclosures which, by their very nature, we can but imperfectly describe and measure. If, then, all revelation is, so far as it goes, Christian, and if man's religious nature constitutes a capacity for receiving revelation, it is easy to see a profound and true meaning in Tertullian's phrase (which I have adopted as a fitting title for this chapter) : " The human soul naturally Christian." If, as John says, without Christ nothing was made that has been made, it is but natural to conclude that he is everywhere active in his world. And if he is the true light which lights every man, then must all goodness in men be due to his illumination. All forms of morality and all types of religion are the product of man's divinely given reli gious nature illuminated and quickened by the spirit ual presence of the eternal Word. What, then, should 32 DOCTRINE AND LIFE prevent us from magnifying the spiritual significance and work of Christ by regarding him as the source of all good in men, and by claiming that all goodness is, so far as it goes, Christian ? Religion has taken many forms in the world; but wherever there is a true spirit of worship and service, there we may affirm the presence of Christ, even though it be unrecognized. If Christianity is, by its very nature, the universal religion, then must all reli gion, so far as it is real and genuine, be Christian, and all goodness, all love, kindness, and helpfulness, must be Christian, whether called so or not, since the Chris tian religion is the life of love in fellowship with God. All religion must be essentially one, and all goodness must be essentially one. If this world was made, as Paul says, through Christ and for Christ, and if Christ is, and always has been, in his world, as John teaches, then let us speak no more of mere " natural goodness " and "unaided reason," but rather recognize our Lord in the true dignity and glory of his world-wide significance and activity, and believe without hesitation that wher ever men, in sincere penitence and reverence, stretch out their hands to heaven, God sees the germs of that "faith" or acceptance which is the condition of entrance to the kingdom of his grace.1 i Those who have read the foregoing chapter with sympathy will be inter ested in the following noble passage from John Henry Newman : — " He * enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world.' His are the dictates of the moral sense, and the retributive reproaches of conscience. To him must be ascribed the rich endowments of the intellect, the radiation of genius, the imagination of the poet, the sagacity of the politician, the wisdom (as Scripture calls it) which now rears and decorates the temple, now manifests itself in proverb or in parable. The old saws of nations, the majestic precepts of philosophy, the luminous maxims of law, the oracles of individual wisdom, the traditionary rules of truth and justice and religion, even though u TJffJE SOUL NATURALLY CHRISTIAN" 33 embedded in the corruption, or alloyed with the pride of the world, bespeak his original agency and his long suffering presence. Even where there is habitual rebellion against him, or profound, far-spreading social depravity, still the undercurrent, or the heroic outburst of natural virtue, as well as the yearning of the heart after what it has not, and its presentiment of its remedies, are to be ascribed to the Author of all good. Anticipa tions or reminiscences of his glory haunt the mind of the self-sufficient sage, and of the pagan devotee ; his writing is upon the wall, whether of the Indian fane, or of the porti cos of Greece. He introduces himself, he all but concurs, according to his good pleasure and in his selected season, in the issues of unbelief, superstition, and false worship, and changes the character of acts by his overruling operation. He condescends, though he gives no sanction, to the altars and shrines of imposture, and he makes his own fiat the substitute for its sorceries. He speaks amid the incantations of Balaam, raises Samuel's spirit in the witch's cavern, prophesies of the Messias by the tongue of the sibyl, and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever. He is with the heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon , crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology he casts his shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from him." — Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Edu cation, pp. 96, 97. CHAPTER III THE BELIEF IN GOD "The question whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe, has been answered in the affirm ative by the highest intellects that have ever lived." These words of Charles Darwin state an undeniable fact. But the conviction of the divine Existence is not a peculiarity of the "highest intellects." How ever we may explain it, some form of belief in a su pernatural power is practically universal among men. Naturally enough, this belief appears in the most di verse forms, according to the differing native charac teristics and mental and moral development of the peo ple evincing it. Among the lowest tribes it emerges in the form of crude superstitions, the worship of animals and of inanimate objects. More developed heathen peoples have regarded the heavenly bodies or the elements as representing supreme power in the world. Highly cultivated nations, such as the Greeks, have developed elaborate systems of religious belief and worship by personifying and deifying natural pro cesses and forces. In such forms of religion a keen appreciation of natural beauty and a native poetic feel ing blend with the sense of the supernatural to fill the world with divine powers and agents. Each department of nature and of life is presided over by its appropriate 34 THE BELIEF IN GOD 35 divinity, who is more or less completely identified ih the popular thought with the functions and activities which are ascribed to him. Thus, Mars is the god of war, Neptune of the sea, Minerva the goddess of wisdom, and Ceres of the harvest. Apollo is the god of light, and the sun is conceived of as the fiery car in which he daily traverses the heavens. But it may be asked, " How can such forms of su perstition and polytheism be regarded as illustrations of belief in God ? They seem rather to imply the exist ence of innumerable gods, and to involve the identifi cation of these gods with nature." It is true that in such forms of religion the idea of the divine power which rules the world is not concentrated and unified into the conception of a single personal being, but is broken up and distributed so as to yield the notion of many divinities. But it is to be noticed that all forms of belief in a higher than human power, which presides over nature and the life of man, do, at least, illustrate the conviction of the supernatural among men. How ever gross the idea of divine power or powers may be, it represents man's native sense of his dependence upon some force or control which is superior to himself. The unification of the various divine potencies, as conceived of by the more primitive peoples, could hardly be expected. It is to be observed, however, that they are capable of unification, and that a distinct tendency to unify them is seen among the more reflec tive heathen nations. The philosophers of Greece, for example, speak of God as well as of gods, thereby showing a tendency to represent the various divinities as expressions or manifestations of one supreme, cen tral divine power. 36 DOCTRINE AND LIFE It is but reasonable to expect that peoples who are low in the scale of intelligence and moral development should possess only gross and crude ideas of divine power. Yet the same childlike reflection which leads them to associate this power with animal life or with natural processes, and thus to people the world with countless divinities, is capable, under enlightenment and training, of advancing to a stage in which it would elevate and combine all these various powers into the unity of a single supreme intelligence who governs all things, and directs them toward the realization of ra tional ends. That the " nature-peoples " are not able to carry their conceptions of supernatural power so far and so high, involves no objection to the claim that it is natural for man to believe in God. The form of this belief must always be largely dependent upon the con ditions in which he develops it. But the cruder forms in which the belief appears are as real testimony to man's natural sense of the divine as are the higher and more intelligent forms. This natural tendency to theistic belief bears a most important relation to Christian revelation. The Bible everywhere assumes the existence of God. Revela tion always presupposes it as true and admitted. The biblical writers point to the evidences of divine power and goodness, not as arguments by which men may be convinced of God's existence, but as motives whereby they may be incited to worship and obey him. Christ and his apostles always spoke of God as if men univer sally believed in his existence, and needed but to have their imperfect conceptions of his nature enlarged and elevated. We thus see that Christianity, and what is THE BELIEF IN GOD 37 called "natural religion," have, in great measure, a common basis. In some way man possesses an idea, a conviction, a knowledge of God. A great Christian teacher does not hesitate to affirm that this knowledge is " manifest in " man, because God himself " manifested it to" him (Rom. i. 19). Christianity thus appears as the supplement of that knowledge of God which is native to the human spirit, and as the completion of the crude and imperfect worship and service which are based upon such knowledge. Man's religious nature, and the instinctive belief in the supernatural, are the permanent ground for Christianity's appeal to the hu man heart, and are, therefore, an essential theme in any study of the Christian religion. Let us now, without adopting terms which are too technical, and without going into needless refinements, seek to describe the principal forms of thought in con nection with which the conviction of the divine Exist ence asserts itself in the mind. The contemplation of the external world probably furnishes to the mind the most immediate and obvious occasion for the belief in a divine Being. The phenom ena of nature and the outward events of life are the facts which the more primitive peoples seize upon as showing the presence of divine power in the world. And to the most cultured minds the beauty, order, and adaptation which the physical universe displays, ever remain an impressive evidence of supreme intelligence and power. Especially has the contemplation of the heavens, with their retinues of shining worlds, evoked in the human mind in all ages the conviction of the exist ence of God. To this fact all history and literature 38 DOCTRINE AND LIFE bear the most abundant witness. The principal divini ties of mythology were associated with the sky, or were even identified with the heavenly bodies. The devout exclamation of the Hebrew Psalmist, " The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps. xix. i), does not express this truth more strongly than did the English poet, Edward Young, when he said that " an undevout astronomer is mad." The famous saying of the philosopher Kant, that there were " two things which, the more he con templated them, filled his soul with awe, — the starry heavens above him, and the moral law within," is not stronger in its testimony to the effect of the wonders of nature upon the mind, than are the words of the scepti cal litterateur, Voltaire, who said, " The world embar rasses me, and I cannot think that so beautiful a clock is without a clockmaker." Probably most persons, if asked what is the clear est evidence of the existence of God, would answer by appealing to nature. This wonderful world is ever before our eyes ; its beauty and maj esty perpetually confront us ; and there are few minds so dull as never to have been powerfully moved by some of the grander aspects of nature, — the moonlit sky bejewelled with stars, the weird glories of the thunder-storm, or the fury of the ocean when lashed by the tempest. It is to the impression made upon the mind by "the things that are made " — the external world — that the apostle Paul attributes the belief of the heathen in the " invisi ble things " of God (Rom. i. 20). He declares that in all times the mind of man has clearly perceived in nature the evidence of "everlasting power and divin- THE BELIEF IN GOD 39 ity " — an assertion which the history of religions amply illustrates and confirms. In discussing the grounds of belief in God, philoso phy and theology have made great use of the fact that the contemplation of nature begets in the mind a con viction of the divine Existence. In connection with this fact two of the principal historical arguments for the being of God have been developed, — the argument from the relation of cause and effect, and that from the relation of means to end. To attempt a critical esti mate of the logical value of these " arguments " would lead us into very abstruse considerations. It is enough for our present purpose to point out their practical import. The former aims to put into logical form the conviction that the world -has an intelligent cause. This it does either by assuming that the world is con tingent, or that it shows marks of intelligence. In the latter case this argument easily merges into the " argu ment of design," which may be stated, in syllogistic form, thus : The adaptation of means to ends is the function of intelligence ; the world is a system in which we behold this adaptation ; therefore the world has its cause and ground in intelligence. Whatever may be thought of this syllogism as an "argument" or "proof," — and its logical value has been variously estimated, — it is certain that it expresses a strong and well-nigh universal conviction to which the contemplation of nature gives rise in the mind. My own opinion is that the belief in God has far deeper grounds than any "argument" or syllogism can fur nish ; that the conviction of a supreme Intelligence, which is evoked into clear consciousness by applying 40 DOCTRINE AND LIFE the ideas of cause and design to the universe, does not follow and is not derived from the contemplation of nature, but is a primary conviction of the mind which it brings to all its observation of nature. This convic tion is not attained by argument or inference from the facts of nature, but is possessed as an essential mental principle. The " argument " of design does not, there fore, conduct the mind beyond its own primary conviction. The contemplation of nature elicits this conviction into clear consciousness, and opens a sphere for its application ; but it does not originate it, and cannot make it a more sure possession of the mind than it already is. The grounds for this view of the subject may be better presented in connection with the reasons for belief in God which lie within man himself. In the last analysis, man himself is the only con vincing proof of the being of God. " The descent into our own souls is the ascent to God." The world is perceived to exhibit harmony, order, and design, and to show evidence of being the product of intelligence, because man's own reason is so constituted that he is able to perceive and appreciate beauty and adaptation- We could not arrive at the conviction that the universe is grounded in reason if we were not ourselves rational beings. It is the power of reason to interpret the universe which gives rise to the conviction that it must have had an intelligent cause, and that it is adapted to realize rational ends At this view of the matter, the Apostle Paul seems plainly to hint in the passage already quoted, where he says, that by means of the things that were made, God's eternal power and divinity are clearly per ceived by the reason of man (Rom. i. 20).1 It is not 1 The Greek is : roTg -itotijixaiiiv voobpteva Kadoparat, k. t. X. THE BELIEF IN GOD 41 the " things that were made " in and of themselves, but it is these as perceived and interpreted by the reason, that yield the assurance of the divine Existence. The reason brings to its contemplation of nature certain native convictions and principles. These are the light of all its seeing in the study of the world. We find causation in nature because causality is an inherent principle of our own mental life. We find purpose and adaptation in the world because we have first found them in ourselves. Our convictions respecting nature as a sphere of intelligence and design, when traced back, have their ground in the principles and laws of reason which we know directly only in ourselves. It is necessary, therefore, to ask in what way and on what grounds reason gives its testimony to the existence of God. The question has been much debated, whether or not the existence of God can be proved. I hold that it can be proved in the sense that adequate grounds for it can be shown to exist. It cannot be proved in the sense in which a proposition in geometry is proved, that is, by a process of putting together several more elemen tary propositions which combine to demonstrate the one in question. The existence of God is the most secure of all certainties, because it is itself the basis and pre supposition of all other truths. It would, therefore, be correct to say that, while the existence of God cannot be demonstrated, it can be proved that it must be assumed. The testimony of reason to the existence of God can best be considered under two heads, (i) the testimony of the speculative or thinking powers, and (2) the tes- 42 DOCTRINE AND LIFE timony of the moral reason or the conscience. Both these elements of our nature belong to reason, which is the total power of the mind to know ; but they are here distinguished for convenience, both because they are commonly separated in thought, and because they do represent two different aspects of our rational life. When, by reflection, we seek to trace to its primary source our conviction of the divine Existence, we dis cover that its deepest ground lies in the very nature of our own rational and moral being. It is not primarily the necessity of assuming a cause of the world, but the necessity of assuming an adequate cause of our selves, that gives to the belief in God its great strength and persistence. Our own rational natures are without explanation except upon the assumption that the world, of which we are a part, originated and is grounded in reason. This conviction we may formulate as follows : We are derived and dependent beings ; we possess in our very nature the principles and laws of reason — therefore, the cause of our existence must be a rational Being, and our reason must be a reflex of the reason of this Being. Our rational nature thus compels us to assume the existence of God. In claiming that the idea of God is a necessary idea oi reason, it is important to guard the statement from misconception. It is not meant that the full Christian conception of God is a native possession of reason. This more complete idea is complex, and has many roots. Nor is it meant that any idea of God at all must always be clearly present in the consciousness of every man. Such is not the fact. Since the truths of reason are not upon the surface, but in the depths THE BELIEF IN GOD 43 of the mind, only close and careful reflection can dis cover, analyze, and define them. The view which I maintain is, that, as upon condition of the experience of the relations of space and time, the ideas of space and time arise as necessary ideas in the mind ; so on condition of the use of reason and the discovery of rational principles and laws, the idea of a supreme and universal Reason necessarily arises in the mind as the ground of reason in man and the presupposition of all knowledge and thought. The form in which this idea arises, the clearness with which it is apprehended, and the influence which it exerts upon conduct and char acter, depend upon the degree of development to which men have attained, and upon their capacity for appre hending the deeper meaning of this idea. The process of reflection which I have just described is not the cause of our belief in God ; nor is it, ordi narily, its immediate occasion. The belief arises, as we have seen, spontaneously in connection with t*he impres sion made upon the mind by the order and beauty of the world, and in connection with those natural feelings of dependence and obligation which are the offspring of man's religious nature. Reflection simply discovers the deeper grounds of the belief in question by explor ing the contents of 'man's own rational and moral nature. It is when reason, by reflection, perceives its own ideas, principles, and laws to be universal, that it finds itself compelled to assume an adequate cause for itself ; that is, a supreme Reason, in which it has its origin and ground. Thus the reason of man, reflect ing upon itself, is compelled to assume the existence of the absolute Reason ; that is, the existence of God. 44 DOCTRINE AND LIFE If the view here stated be correct, it will be evident why the existence of God cannot, in the strict sense of the word, be demonstrated. That cannot be proved by reasoning which is the very ground and presupposi tion of all reasoning and of reason itself. Reason can no more prove the existence of God than it can prove its own existence, or the existence of the world. That a personal God exists is the first truth df reason, because it is the most fundamental element of human knowledge ; it is the condition and guaranty of all certainty and of all thought. The mind cannot rationally conceive of • any explanation of man's personality except that which refers it to a personal intelligence as its source. This conviction, therefore, has all the marks of first truths, — necessity, universality, and self-evidence. To deny the supremacy of reason in the universe, that is, to deny the existence of a personal God, is logically to deny the grounds of all certain truth, and thus to involve the mind in contradiction and absurdity. It is not a valid objection to the belief under consid eration that many never see it as necessary. Many have never arrived at the conscious acceptance of the truths most generally held to be necessary and universal. These truths are not " universal " in the sense of be ing universally perceived and acknowledged. They are thus perceived and acknowledged only when clear and rational reflection discovers them. They are, however, universally — though often unconsciously — present in reason, which would not be reason without them. Many men, the great majority perhaps, have never clearly apprehended the principle of causality or that of design, | or those fundamental distinctions in morals which we THE BELIEF IN GOD 45 justly regard as first truths. They belong to the very nature of mind ; but how little self-knowledge the mind often has ! This consideration applies with special force to the belief in God, which, just because it is the deepest certainty of all knowledge and thought, is the last to be discovered as such in the process of reflection. The existence of God is, therefore, a universal truth of reason in the sense that it is tacitly, that is, logically, assumed in all rational processes ; that the capacity for its development is universal in reason, and that as the necessary basis of the universal laws and principles of thought, morality, and religion, it cannot even be denied without being logically assumed. This, then, is our conclusion in regard to the universality of the conviction that God exists ; that, whenever the capaci ties of reason are unfolded, and the processes of knowl edge analyzed in their underlying assumptions, the mind is led to the conviction that the world must have originated in a rational Being, in whom all its order and harmony, and especially the laws of thought and methods of knowledge, have their basis. The considerations which have been advanced serve to show what is the real value of the theistic "argu ments." To two of these — the argument from cau sality and that from design — we have already alluded, and have seen that they arise from man's contemplation of the outer world. The other two historic " proofs " of the divine Existence are drawn from the study of man's self -consciousness. One of these — the so-called " ontological argument " — proceeds from certain ideas of the reason, regarded as "necessary," and concludes to the existence of a Being corresponding to those ideas ; 46 DOCTRINE AND LIFE the other — the " moral argument " — proceeds from those feelings of dependence and obligation which are natural to man, and from his native yearnings after God, and concludes that these presuppose a proper object. To these arguments I attach great importance, not, however, as syllogisms or "proofs," in the strict sense, but as forms in which the invincible convictions of our rational and religious nature find expression. The effort to put these convictions into a logical form on the supposition that the conclusion " God exists " can be drawn out of premises more fundamental and ele mentary than this truth, can never succeed, because God is the necessary assumption of all truth, and, there fore, there is nothing more fundamental than the fact of his existence from which the mind can start. His being is actually the "bottom fact " of all thought and all argument. All our most fundamental ideas assume and presuppose him as their basis ; all our certainties and our mental processes rest upon him. He cannot, therefore, be found at the end of any process of reason ing, however short or simple, because he is already at its beginning. There is no starting-place for thought where he is not. When the eyes of the mind are opened, God is there. If he is not seen, it is not because he is not present, but because the eyes have not sufficient clearness and strength of vision to see him. All our "arguments" on the subject are really only forms of thought in which we set forth, in as clear light as possible, the native certainty, the necessary assump tion of the mind, and show on what conditions of ex perience and reflection this certainty asserts itself in consciousness. THE BELIEF IN GOD 47 I have dwelt at some length upon the way in which the mind, the speculative reason, finds its way to its own deepest truth and certainty, — the conviction of the existence of God. Let me now, more briefly, explain what is the gist of the so-called moral argu ment. This argument consists in the formulation of those facts of man's moral and religious nature which, in reality, are most effective in arousing and sustaining the belief in God. In the consciousness of most per sons God is a religious rather than a speculative neces sity. They do not reflect with sufficient clearness on the nature and assumptions of knowledge to discover that God is a necessity for thought. The soul finds itself under moral law which seems to be supreme and universal, and which it naturally refers to some supernatural source. Religious feelings and instincts are strong in the human breast. The heart does not easily rest in the view that man is a mere product of nature, and that this changing and perishing world is all that is in store for him. Our nature persists in believing in God, and in a spiritual world of abiding realities. If it be urged that this is but an example of the way in which men commonly believe what they want to believe, or feel like believing, I reply that it is, at least, significant that this belief does meet and satisfy a persistent demand of our nature. It will always be hard to convince mankind that there is no reality corresponding to the instincts and feel ings of the moral and religious nature. As God can not be proved by argument to those who demand demonstration, so can he not be disproved to those 48 DOCTRINE AND LIFE who are willing to listen to the logic of their own hearts. ] It thus appears that the several " arguments " for the being of God are really efforts to describe the different aspects of God's self-revelation. We could not know God if he did not reveal himself to us. We could never by searching find him out. When we thoughtfully con template the world of which we are a part — -whether it be the world without us or the world within — the conviction of his existence forces itself upon us. The world is an enigma ; God is its solution. No other solution is reasonable or possible. Order, law, beauty, mind, conscience, will, — these all point unmistakably to reason as the cause and ground of the world. These most significant facts of our physical and moral system can find no explanation except in the existence of God. 2 God has thus — as the Apostle Paul says — made himself manifest to the minds of men. This he has done by revealing his wisdom and power in his works, and by implanting in the human spirit those instincts and convictions which, when not stifled or perverted, bear perpetual testimony to the supremacy over us of a moral Lawgiver whose vicegerent is conscience. We thus see God because he has revealed himself. We ' Wer Gott nicht fiihlt in sich und alien Lebenskreisen, Dem werdet ihr nicht ihn beweisen mit Beweisen. Ruckert. 2 Why do I believe in God ? I give one great reason — two great reasons which are really but one great reason — why I believe in God. I believe in God with all my soul, because this world is inexplicable without him and explicable with him, and because Jesus Christ believed in him ,- and it was Jesus Christ that showed me that this world demanded God and was inexplicable without him ; that made certain every suspicion and dream that I had had before and Jesus Christ believed in him. — Phillips Brooks. THE BELIEF IN GOD 49 hear his voice because he has spoken to us in nature and in the secret chambers of our own hearts. Look where we will, he is there, disclosed to our inner vision in some aspect of his infinite being. The universe is a vast cathedral through whose many windows our souls discern God. In any single view we see, perhaps, but one of his glorious attributes. Through one window of this temple we see God as Creator, through another as the supreme Reason, through another as the moral Governor ; but through each we see God ; through each we discern our Father's face, and discover that we are in our Father's house. What, now, is the relation of this " natural " revela tion of God, this disclosure of God to all men, to Chris tian revelation ? We are accustomed to say, and rightly, that Christ revealed God to men. We have already ob served, however, that our Saviour always assumed, and never sought to prove, the existence of God, and always assumed that men believed in his existence. He did not, therefore, come to earth to teach men that there is a God. He came — so far as this aspect of his work is concerned — ¦ to give to men a full and adequate dis closure of the character of God, to elevate and purify their conceptions of God, and to show them in his own life and spirit how God felt and thought toward them. In the language of the Apostle John, Jesus came to " in terpret " God to men.1 The basis, however, of this fuller revelation which Christ makes, is the universal self- revelation of God in his world. Nor are these two rev elations to be conceived of as merely related to each other by position. They are organically and essentially 1 'Ekuvos tfyiyfjoaro. John i. iS. 50 DOCTRINE AND LIFE connected. From the Christian point of view we must regard all divine revelation as Christian, in the sense that it is mediated through Christ who is the organ of God's self-communication. We are thus led to regard the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ as the crown of all the divine self-disclosures, and to con template nature and the life of man, not as standing in violent contrast to all that we find in the gospel, but as the spheres in which God has ever been revealing him self invisibly through Christ, and in which he has been fore-shadowing, even if dimly, his consummate revela tion in the person and work of Jesus our Lord. We are thus able to discern — even though we can but imperfectly trace its outline — what a distinguished scholar has called "the gospel of creation." 1 It seems to me to be right and important to magnify the significance of Christ and his work, and to make them comprehend everything which they can be seen legitimately to include. If the work of redemption through Christ is the great purpose of God that runs through the ages ; if the completion of this work is the goal of human history — then surely there can be no presumption in claiming that nature itself is framed and fitted with reference to this great end, and that all human life and history are penetrated by divine influ ences, which are operating in the effort to secure the same grand result that the historic .mission of our Sav iour contemplates. There may well be something more than poetic fancy in Paul's conception of the intense and eager interest of nature in the process of man's sal vation (Rom. viii. 19-22). The Christian man is enti- 1 See Bishop Westcott, The Epistles of St. John, p. 286, sq. THE BELIEF IN GOD 51 tied to believe that this world and " the fulness thereof " is ministrant to God's redeeming love to man. "All things " are his who belongs to Christ ; among them "the world" and life (i Cor. iii. 21-23). That God has filled the world with his presence, that he perpetually speaks to man in the beauties and glories of nature, and in the still, small voice of conscience, is a fundamental truth of the Christian religion. Man's whole nature, when he is true to it, cries out for God, and finds no repose till it rests secure in the conviction of his existence. To bring man to the full fruitage of this conviction, to unfold to him its full content and significance, and to develop in him the life which corre sponds to it, is certainly one of the principal aims of the Christian religion. CHAPTER IV REVELATION AND THE BIBLE If there is a personal God, and if we are akin to him, it is reasonable to believe that he should speak to us. The great question for philosophy and theology is that which exists between Theism and Pantheism, — is God personal ? The latter system, in its various forms, so identifies God with the world as to shut out the possi bility of his free, conscious action, and, therefore, the possibility of revelation. God comes to consciousness only in man, who is, therefore, the highest expression of the divine. There can thus be no revelation, unless the voice of man's own nature, speaking within him, be called revelation. The theistic conception, on the other hand, is that God is independent of the world. He is a self-conscious and self-determining Being upon whose will and power the world is dependent. He thus transcends nature ; and although natural processes and laws are modes of his operation, they are not the necessary and only meth ods of his action. He is everywhere in his world, but he remains supreme over it. Of this conception, revelation is a natural corollary. Nor need revelation be limited to those general dis closures of God in nature and conscience which we have been considering. That there should be unique and 52 REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 53 special manifestations of God to men is perfectly con sonant with theistic philosophy. The theist cannot deny the possibility of miracles, that is, acts of divine power outside the observed order of nature. From his standpoint, the only question is, whether the evidence of their actual occurrence is sufficient. Nor would mir acles be, in his view, contrary to nature. They are sim ply above or outside nature's ordinary course, so far as we know it. They are probably according to nature, that is, according to some higher law than those which we observe in nature, or according to higher applications of observed laws than those which we know. At any rate, if God is personal, free, and supreme over the world, his action cannot be restricted to the natural processes which we observe. If natural law is a method of God's free action, he cannot himself be limited and fettered by its processes, since they are dependent upon his own determination. It is a fundamental assumption of the Christian re ligion, that God has made a special revelation of himself to man, over and above that which he has made in nature and in the constitution of the soul. Of this revelation the Bible is a product and record. It was a great his toric process, extending through many centuries. Di vine Providence made the Jewish people the principal vehicle of this revelation. The reasons for this choice we cannot fully discover, but we may well suppose that by their position and native qualities the Jews were es pecially fitted to become the bearers and preservers of religious truth. The earliest stages of this revelation we can but dimly trace in the remote antiquity of an almost pre- 54 DOCTRINE AND LIFE historic age. The beginnings of the race, the begin nings of sin, and the beginnings of revelation, are all shrouded in impenetrable mystery. The early chapters of Genesis present these subjects in a series of pictorial legends which are analogous in form to the legends of other Oriental peoples touching the same themes. These traditions contain certain great religious truths which are consonant with the Jewish religion, under whose shaping influence they were preserved from age to age, and consonant with the teaching of Christianity. Among these conceptions we find the idea that God from the beginning manifested himself to man, whom he had made in his own image. The freedom and responsibility of man, who was able to live in fellow ship with God, or to forfeit that fellowship by sin, to gether with the justice and the graciousness of God in his treatment of man, are ideas which distinguish these traditions, and which are fundamental in the whole bib lical conception of religion. It must be candidly admitted that great obscurity overspreads the methods of divine revelation in Jewish history. This should not be thought strange. The his tory of the Jews is the history of an ancient Oriental people whose literature — of which the Old Testament is a part — gives rise to many perplexing literary and archaeological problems. The process of divine revela tion which the Old Testament books describe as con tinually going forward, may best be studied at the points at which its method and meaning become clearest. To my mind, the most significant phenomenon in Jewish religious history is prophecy. Nothing else so well il lustrates and justifies the idea that the Jewish people REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 55 were the vehicle of a unique divine revelation. Prophecy discovers to us the deeper meaning of Jewish history, and portrays the divinely appointed destiny which the nation was to fulfil among the peoples of the world. Hebrew prophecy has its central point of significance in the great conception that the Jewish religious system was simply a means of preparing for a greater dispen sation — the era of the Messiah. Judaism, in its high est moments of foresight and inspiration, is conscious of its own temporary and preparatory character. The cry of the Hebrew prophet is, " Prepare for something new ; expect a larger revelation of God." To me, one of the most impressive evidences of a divine factor in Jewish history is found in this profound consciousness in the heart of the nation that its glory was to be that of ushering in the surpassing glory of another system which should fulfil, and thus supplant it. It is remark able that a religion should prophesy its own abrogation. Prophecy, therefore, supplies the most convincing evi dence of God's revealing plan and purpose in Jewish history. It is during the great prophetic period that the stream of divine revelation runs clearest ; and, as we contemplate it there, we are encouraged to believe that it is really the same current which we elsewhere observe in places where its waters have been darkened by draw ing into them more of the soil of human ignorance and misconception through which they have passed. The significance of Hebrew prophecy and of the typology of the Old Testament is often viewed quite too narrowly. Prophecy is much more than a series of specific predictions for which we are to seek corre sponding events in the life of Jesus, or in Christian 56 DOCTRINE AND LIFE history. The typology of Judaism is something more than a series of symbolic objects and acts. The whole Old Testament history, the whole religious life of the nation, was prophetic. The Jewish people were "an incarnate hope." Their religious history was domi nated by a great ideal. Their golden age was always in the future, not in the past. The prophetic significance of Judaism is to be found, primarily, in the great conceptions of the Messiah and of his kingdom, which swayed the heart of the nation. The words of Jere miah sound the keynote of Israel's history : " Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah : not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers " (Jer. xxxi. 31, 32) ; and the New Testament, quoting this passage as expressing the deep est meaning of Judaism, takes up the refrain : " In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxeth aged is nigh unto vanishing away " (Heb. viii. 1 3). Such, in briefest outline, is the significance of Israel's history. When the fullest allowance is made for all the difficulties and obscurities which surround its begin nings and the earlier stages of its development, its main features stand out in clear relief, bearing the marks of a divine peculiarity. The Jews are, in a special sense, the people of revelation. " The (Messianic) salvation is from. the Jews."1 A special purpose of God runs through their history. They are a chosen instrument of Providence in preparing the way for Christianity, the universal religion. This conviction is strongly ex- 1 'H otarrigia Ik twv 'lovhaiuv ioriv. John iv. 22. REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 57 pressed by one of the greatest modern students of their history, Heinrich Ewald, who says, "The his tory of this ancient people is in reality the history of the growth of true religion, rising through all stages to perfection, pressing on through all conflicts to the highest victory, and finally revealing itself in full glory and power, in order to spread irresistibly from this cen tre, never again to be lost, but to become the eternal possession and blessing of all nations." x But the revelation whose salient features we are de scribing culminates in Christ. He is the central figure in the whole providential history which the Bible re cords, and all its parts are to be read in the light of his life and person. To him the religious hopes of Israel looked forward, and in him centred all the rays of divine light and truth which in all the ages God had been sending down into the life of mankind. It is Christ who, above all, gives to the Bible its unique character, its divine and permanent singularity. The Bible is differenced from all other literatures because Christ, its all-important personality, is differenced from other men. What makes biblical literature, and the history which it traces, powerful and precious for the Christian heart is mainly this, that it enshrines Christ, its chief treasure, who is the explanation of it all, and the divine secret of its power. There are many forms and methods of divine revelation, but the highest and most perfect form is that which we behold in Christ. As if God has exhausted all other possibilities of revela tion, he at last makes a personal revelation. He comes to men in a perfect life, full of humanity, full of divin- I History of Israel, i. 5. 58 DOCTRINE AND LIFE ity, which is able at once to reveal God to man, and to reveal man to himself. Thus revelation is, in its highest form, personal. Revelation by miracle, by com mandment, by prediction, are all secondary and subor dinate to revelation through a personality which both interprets God to man and discloses to man his own true and possible sonship to God, We must reserve to a later stage of our studies the effort to estimate the significance for thought and life of the personality of Christ. It is sufficient for our present purpose to point out the central place which he holds in that course of divine revelation which the Bible records and reflects. It has long seemed to me that this conception of Christ's relation to the Bible gives the most practical and helpful view of the nature and value of the book. Amid all the contro versies about the Bible, and the attacks upon it, the Christian heart may rest secure in this conviction that the unique character and value of the Bible are as secure as are the unique character and significance of the per son of Jesus Christ. The Bible may best be regarded as a group of books which have grown up around Christ, standing, some in a more, some in a less, direct relation to him. Speaking generally, the Old Testa ment is prophetically, and more distantly, related to his historic appearance ; the New Testament deals almost entirely with that appearance and its significance. Looking at the Old Testament alone, we perceive that the ritual system, which is the main subject of the Pentateuch, embodies in symbolic form certain truths concerning sin, guilt, and the divine grace and for giveness, which come to their fullest revelation in the REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 59 person and work of Christ. The prophetic writings are even more directly related to Christ, because, while they contain much that concerns their own time, their great burden is the hope of a coming Deliverer. In so far as the historical books of the Old Testament trace the career of the Jewish people, in whose life and history God was preparing the way for the Redeemer's coming, they, too, have a Messianic import, and make their contribution to our understanding of the "in creasing purpose " which culminated in the incarnation. There still remain the Psalms and the so-called "wis dom-books," such as Job and Proverbs. The relation of the former to Christ is partly seen in their prophetic Messianic contents, partly in their reflection of the deep piety of the noblest spirits in Israel, which formed the fruitful soil in which the seed of the gospel was to be planted. The wisdom-books are unquestionably more remote from the central figure of revelation ; yet they, too, by their representations of the struggles of the mind, during the earlier stages of revelation, after divine light and truth, add something to our knowledge of that movement of thought and that course of events in Israel's history, both of which culminate in Christ, " the wisdom of God and the power of God." It is obvious to every reader that the various books of the New Testament — Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse — concern themselves chiefly with the person of Christ, and the significance of his appearance in history. These books are the original documents — so far as rhese have been preserved to us — which relate to the life and work of Jesus. "The New Testament," says Rothe, "is the photograph which 60 DOCTRINE AND LIFE the historical Christ mirrored directly upon the con sciousness of those who surrounded him." How obvi ous it is, then, that the significance and value of the books which compose it must be altogether unique. They are the primary source of our knowledge concern ing Christ. To ascertain what the Christian religion is, in its spirit and in its great central truths, we must go to the New Testament. This group of books con tains what we want to know and need to know concern ing Christ. No other books do, except by derivation from these. Here are four sketches, at once similar in the total picture which they give, and different in view point and color, of his person, teaching, and deeds. There is one book — the Acts — which narrates the early efforts and successes of his first disciples in teaching his doctrines and in organizing those who adopted them into societies for their preservation and further propagation. Here are writings by his apostles, men who stood closest to his person, and who had imbibed his teaching and spirit. These writings are mainly in the form of letters, and were evidently com posed without thought, on the part of their authors, of their permanent preservation. But they are not, on this account, of less importance and value. They include epistles by Peter and John, and by James, believed by some to have been one of the twelve, by others a brother of Jesus. The New Testament prom inently includes writings by certain companions of the apostles, who, to make no further claim, must have had the best of advantages for knowing the facts of our Lord's life, and the generally received import of his work. The most important example under this head REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 61 is Paul, who always claimed to be an apostle by a special divine call, though not one of the original twelve. He was, however, acquainted with some of the primitive apostles, and not long after his con version had spent two weeks in company with Peter (Gal. i. 1 8). The view which I wish to urge is, that these un deniable historical facts give unique significance and value to our New Testament books. In the New Testament history we are treading on ground which has been hallowed by the footsteps of the Son of God. Is not this fact sufficient to place those books for all time in a peerless position among the literatures of the world ? It is necessary to say something at this point on the much disputed subject of the inspiration of the biblical books. This question relates to the kind and degree of divine influence which was exerted upon the biblical authors in the composition of their various writings. Were they the passive instruments of the divine Spirit, mere amanuenses or " sacred penmen," so that God himself may be said to be the author of the Bible ? If, on the contrary, they retained their individuality in writing, what were the limits which were set upon their liberty in expressing religious ideas or in writing his tory ? Did God secure through them the use of certain words, that is, was their inspiration verbal ? Or did he only secure the presentation, in their own freely chosen forms of thought and speech, of certain facts or truths ; that is, was their inspiration dynamic or conceptual ? Were all the biblical writers equally inspired ? If not, how are the degrees of their inspiration to be dis- 62 DOCTRINE AND LIFE tinguished? Were the men of the Bible differently inspired for purposes of writing than for purposes of teaching and leadership ? Did their inspiration guar antee infallibility in their statements and teachings ? and if so, does this infallibility concern only religious truth, or does it extend to their statements and teachings upon every subject upon which they touch ? Such are some of the problems with which many theologians in our time are grappling, and over which many thoughtful Christians are anxious and perplexed. I venture the opinion that theologians, in their efforts to defend the Bible, have commonly given to these questions a far greater prominence and importance than legitimately belong to them. The great question for the apologist is not the question of inspiration, but the question of revelation. In comparison with the former, this latter question is far more wide-reaching and fundamental. If the reality of revelation can be defended and maintained, it is comparatively unimpor tant to define the kind or degree of superintendence which God has exercised over the composition of those books which are its record and product. Inspiration as related to the biblical books is, at most, only an item in the process of preserving the history of revelation. If it is possible to define its nature and limits, it is very desirable to do so ; but it is far less important than it is to be able to show that the historical process which the Bible enables us to trace is such as to justify the claim that it involves a unique revelation of God. Moreover, the Bible cannot be successfully defended by arguing its inspiration. The Bible's primary claim for itself is not the claim of inspiration, but the claim REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 63 of historicity. If the substantial historical trustworthi ness of the Bible can be maintained, it is not greatly in need of any further defence. If that trustworthiness cannot be maintained, much less can the defence of its inspiration prove successful. The inspiration of the Bible — in whatever sense it is asserted — must be upheld upon the basis of its historicity. To seek to defend - the historical trustworthiness of the Bible on the basis of some doctrine of its inspiration, is to try to make a pyramid stand on its apex. The history of theology supplies no more conspicuous a case of mis placed emphasis than is seen in the effort to defend the Bible by maintaining some theory of its inspiration. If the history which it records does not justify the claim that it enshrines a unique revelation of God, it will be in vain to support that claim by asserting that God superintended the writing of its books. The doctrine of inspiration must always, in the na ture of the case, have the character and limitations of a theory. The historical facts which the Bible records are attested in all the ways in which other facts are attested. In starting from these in the maintenance of the reality of divine revelation, we are on solid ground. We hold, for example, that the Gospels can stand as history, and that the facts of Christ's person and work require the supposition of his unique character and divine mission. But what if we must prove the inspira tion of the Gospels before we can maintain the facts which they record ? How shall we do it ? Their au thors do not assert that they were divinely helped to compose them. We shall end, on this procedure, by pivoting our history upon a theory, instead of finding a 64 DOCTRINE AND LIFE secure historical basis for our estimate of the permanent religious value of the writings in question. Christianity is an historical religion ; that is, a religion of facts, — a religion that has entered the world, and spread itself among men by a long series of historical events. The Bible contains, so far as we have any means of judging, the most important literature which grew up in connection with this great historic process of revela tion. It is not itself the revelation ; it is rather a product of the revelation. It is a partial but sufficient record of this signal movement of God in history, enabling us to perceive its most important stages and objects, and to interpret its chief significance. The Bible is, therefore, a vehicle of paramount importance for communicating to us a knowledge of that great and special process of divine revelation which culminated in Christ. What ever theory be held as to the inspiration of its books, the Bible must ever hold an absolutely unique place in the thoughts and reverence of all who accept the truth of the main essential facts which it records. The Bible will ever stand high above all other books for all in whose hearts Christ stands high above all other charac ters in history. In endeavoring to form a just and intelligent opinion on the subject of inspiration, it is important to remem ber that a theory, in order to be tenable, must be built up by an induction of all the ascertainable facts which the Bible presents, and must, of course, accord with those facts. If it is clear, for example, that there are demonstrable inaccuracies and discrepancies in Scrip ture, then no theory which asserts a formal infallibility of the biblical books concerning all matters upon which . REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 65 they touch, can be correct. If it be true, as matter of fact, that there is a marked advance in ethical and spiritual truth in the later biblical books as compared with the earlier, then no theory which affirms the equal inspiration of all the Scripture writers can be tenable. The science of biblical criticism compels us to test all theories by a careful examination of the facts in the case, so far as they can be ascertained. An a priori theory as to what the Bible is, or as to the way in which its books must have been composed, fares no better at the hands of biblical science than do a priori theories in other realms at the hands of other sciences with whose subject-matter they undertake to deal. Such theories always lay great stress upon the perilous consequences of their rejection. But to this mode of argument it is to be answered, first, that nothing is more perilous in matters of religious thought and opinion than conflict with well-ascertained facts ; and, further, that theories are legitimately established, not by appeal to the fear of consequences, but by appeal to the grounds on which they can be shown to rest.1 For myself, I greatly distrust the success of all ef forts to frame an adequate theory of inspiration. The ways of the Spirit are various and inscrutable, and do not yield themselves to human definition. The Bible shares in the effects of that mighty working of God in 1 Some theologians begin with the a priori principle that the Bible must be absolutely inerrant, and boldly assert, that this is the case, not only in matters which pertain to the great purpose, but in all matters whatsoever. But if the facts show that this was not the case, which honors God the most, to accept his method of making a Bible as the best, or to insist that he followed the method which we think best ? ... It seems a very good and pious thing to insist that the Bible is absolutely without error. But nothing is good or pious that is con trary to facts. — Stearns, Present Day Theology, p. .105. 66 DOCTRINE AND LIFE revelation which gave it birth. But no description of the amount and method of the divine influence in its production can be given which will be applicable to all its parts and to all its writers. Who shall describe in one breath the inspiration of the author of Ecclesiastes and that of the Apostle John ? What formula descrip tive of inspiration would be equally applicable to Solo- man's Song and to the Epistles of Paul ? The effort to construct such formulas is} as I have already intimated, largely the result of a misplaced emphasis. The stress of our thought should be laid upon forming as clear and correct a conception as possible of the redemptive history in which God's revelation primarily consists. Inspiration pertains to the men who were, in various ways, the divinely chosen media of that revelation. It is best conceived of as the influence and leadership of God revealing himself in the actual history and life of men, rather than as a mere superintendence of the writing of books. Any person who has a fairly clear conception of revelation as an historical process, need have little trouble over this question of the inspiration of the biblical books. He rests assured that the great men of the Bible — men like Moses, Isaiah, John, and Paul — have been, next to the Son of man himself, the chief agents of divine Providence in acquainting the world with God. It is not infrequently urged in favor of the theory of verbal inspiration, which declares the Bible to be perfect and infallible in all its parts, that it is the easiest to define and to entertain. If this statement be granted, it may be doubted whether the alleged advantage is a real one. The simplest and most easily conceivable REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 67 astronomy is that which described the sky as a solid floor, and the stars as holes through which the light beyond shone through. This theory is, indeed, easy, unless one happens to study the phenomena of the heavens. The theory of the verbal and equal inspira tion of the biblical writers is no easier when the phe nomena of the Bible are candidly investigated. It is true that the theory in question requires little discrim ination ; it is sweeping, wholesale, and, therefore, sim ple. Even if the making of distinctions — which it is often hard, sometimes impossible, satisfactorily to make — were one from which the candid Christian scholar could regard himself as absolved, the simplicity of this theory could not recommend it. In fact, it breaks down from sheer weight of simplicity ; it is so much more simple than are the facts which it would explain. It is common to suppose that the interests of biblical religion are at present especially imperilled by the decay of what are called " strict " or " high " theories of the inspiration of the biblical writings. It does not seem to me that this is the point at which our faith is threat ened. The peril is that men should come to doubt the reality of revelation itself, should grow uncertain of God, and should degrade the person and work of Christ. Men will never fail in sufficient appreciation of the Bible so long as they believe in revelation and in Christ. If they doubt revelation and depreciate Christ, it is vain to talk to them of the inspiration of the Bible. If they accept the truth of revelation and the su preme significance of Christ, their conception of the Bible will take care of itself. Our estimate of Christ is absolutely primary in our religion. A man who be- 68 DOCTRINE AND LIFE lieves that the Bible gives us a trustworthy historical picture of him, and of his significance, and who seeks to live according to that belief, holds what is most es sential respecting the Bible, and may permit himself the largest liberty in the investigation of the various critical and historical questions which arise in connection with its study. He whose faith is pivoted on some theory of the Bible's inspiration, stands on precarious ground, especially if it be a theory" which all investigation tends more and more to disprove. He whose faith is centred in Christ, and in the historical action of God in prepar ing for him and his work, stands on a secure, immov able foundation, since he rests in no theoretic wisdom of man, but in the power of God.1 If, in what I am here saying, I seem to underestimate the importance of a doctrine of inspiration, it is only because I would emphasize the relatively greater impor tance of the doctrine of revelation. The . Bible is in spired in the sense that its authors were men who, in diverse ways and degrees, shared in that large enlight enment which was a great factor in the work of revela tion. The literary product of this process of revelation bears traces of divine influence, uplift, and guidance, the same in kind as does the actual providential history which was, as it were, the channel of revelation. The Bible is sacred literature in the same sense in which 1 All the New Testament is an earthen vessel containing a treasure of divine greatness and power. It is a fatal mistake to imagine that the vessel itself is the treasure. The treasure of the Gospels is the spirit of Christ. If the vessels are earthen, it is only that the treasure may the more surely be known to be of God. The workmanship of these pictures of Christ is not so perfect that there can be any doubt whence comes the superhuman beauty and glory of the face. — Prof. Frank C. Porter, in The Congregationalist, Sept. 20, 1894. REVELATION AND THE BIBLE 69 Jewish history and church history in the apostolic age are sacred history. In summing up these suggestions, I should say that the conception of the inspiration of the Bible should be held in relation to its essential and spiritual contents, and not in relation to its form or letter. Inspiration does not terminate upon the production of formally in fallible records, but upon the furnishing of men for the communication of religious truth. It is involved in this conception that inspiration is, in strict propriety, ap plicable only to men, and not to books. It is applicable to the latter only in a secondary and derivative sense. No doubt the enlightenment of the mind and the eleva tion of the spirit are reflected in what one writes, but this reflection is not restricted to the act of writing. Inspiration includes equipment for teaching, leadership, and other functions, as well as for the writing of books. It also follows that inspiration cannot be rigidly limited — except by arbitrary definition — to those who wrote some part of our canonical books. There is no reason to doubt that there were prophets as truly and fully in spired as were those whose writings we have, and that other apostles, who have not contributed to our canon, shared as richly in the promised gifts of the Spirit as did those whose epistles we possess. Conceding and even urging, as I do, that no sufficient definition of God's action and influence in securing the composition of the Bible can be given, I venture to pre sent the following statement as embodying a practical, working conception of the subject : Inspiration is a name for that guiding and enlightening influence of the divine Spirit upon the biblical writers, which enabled them, 70 DOCTRINE AND LIFE in different degrees of fulness and in varying forms, to present in their writings, narratives, examples, and interpretations of the history and contents of the di vine self-revelation, such as, when taken together and rightly interpreted, constitute an adequate and authori tative guide to religious faith and conduct. CHAPTER V THE CHARACTER OF GOD We have seen that we can know something of God from that general revelation which he makes of his power, wisdom, and goodness in nature and in con science. But we need to know more of him than we learn from this disclosure. Nothing is more important in religious thought and life than a true conception of the character of God. No idea is so powerful and wide-reaching in its effects as the idea which we cherish concerning him. The difference between the gross rites and absurd superstitions of heathenism and the highest forms of religious worship and service is, at bottom, a difference in the idea of God. There is noth ing upon which our whole conception of the world and of life so much depends as upon the idea of the charac ter of God which we cherish. Little as we may think of it, every day is bitter or hopeful, every duty com monplace or inspiring, every sacrifice irksome or joy ous — in short, every day's work and experience full of low and selfish meanings, or of noble and divine mean ings, according to the practical thought of God and of our relations to him which we are carrying about with us day by day. It will not seem true at first thought that our daily life has so deep a root ; but the more we reflect upon it, the more evident, I believe, it will appear, 71 72 DOCTRINE AND LIFE. In like manner the different religious opinions of men, and their different modes of worship, are chiefly accounted for by their different conceptions of the character of God. It was, for example, a prevalent idea in the early church that God had a special satis faction in the suffering of men. Hence, self-denial for its own sake and self-inflicted tortures were rigidly practised. All enjoyment was sin. Men wore gar ments of coarse hair, stood on pillars in all weathers, starved themselves, and practised flagellation, thinking they were doing God's service. Out of this idea grew the hermit and monastic life, and the vows of poverty and celibacy. In the same line are descended many of the rigors of our earlier Protestantism — tirades on harmless enjoyments, unwarmed and uninviting places of worship, and bald and monotonous forms of religious service. Now, if we, unlike the ascetics of earlier ages, believe that God made this world for a happy home, and not for a gloomy prison ; if we believe that he meant that our lives should be bright and cheerful, and that he gave us the capacity for enjoyment to use in all legiti mate and harmless ways ; if we believe that God would rather see us hopeful than despairing, and that no part of our nature is to be despised or tortured, but that all our faculties are to be developed harmoniously and sub jected to the sceptre of reason and love — it is simply because we have entered into the possession and application of a different thought of God from that which was dominant in early and mediaeval Christianity. The word life means to us what the word God means to us. THE CHARACTER OF GOD 73 And the same is true of the religious opinions of men. The strifes of sect and the disputes of theologi cal parties have been mainly due, in their last analysis, to different notions of God. The conflicting theological opinions of our own time are mainly traceable to this root. These controversies, however, are too near to permit us always to discern clearly their real basis and significance. But we discover the truth of the princi ple in question very clearly if we look into the past. Whenever in the history of the church we find ideas and practices which now seem to us to be gross exag gerations and perversions of the truth, we can com monly trace them to misconceptions of the divine nature. A modern theologian has justly said that " most, if not all, the errors in divinity have arisen from false or confused notions of the divine charac ter." x If, then, the idea of God bears so vital a rela tion to all religious thought and life, how important it is that we should seek to attain the highest possible conception of his nature. To know all that we can learn about God is an imperative need of our religious life. There are many problems of theology which we should like to solve, whose solution we can await with out detriment to our spiritual development, and without disaster to our religious faith. But we must be very sure of God, sure what kind of a Being he is in his feeling and disposition toward us, if our hearts are to rest in confidence and in peace. " The question of God's moral character is one which we cannot for a day leave unanswered. The sweetest sleep is embit tered if we know not what is the nature of the God 1 Stearns, Present Day Theology, p. 209, 74 DOCTRINE AND LIFE who rules us. Death is a terror if we are ignorant of the God into whose presence we are to be ushered." 2 For the fullest disclosure of the character of God we must turn to the teaching and life of Christ. We find that the word by which he was wont to speak of God was the term "Father." That word, therefore, may justly be regarded as expressing, better than any other, our Saviour's conception and revelation of the divine character. And this truth, that God is our Father, is the truth which, above all others, we need to know. The eager request of Philip : " Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us " (John xiv. 8), was born of the deepest need and longing of the human heart. When a child is lost, its bitterest cry is for its father or mother. Childhood's natural sense of dependence, the filial yearning for parental care, is one of those divinely given traits of nature in which we must all become as little children if we would enter into the kingdom of God. No revelation of God can suffice us except the reve lation of him as Father. It is not enough for us to know that he created us, and fashioned this great sys tem of which we are a part. We may go out at night under the soft light of the stars, and reflect on the great and wise Being who made and sustains this won derful world of order and beauty ; but what avails all this if he does not care for us ; if he will in no way reach down to guide and help us ; if he does not hear us when we speak to him ? Fatherhood is much more than creatorship. God's Fatherhood implies a native kinship, on our part, to 1 Stearns, op. til., p. 220, THE CHARACTER OF GOD 75 him ; some likeness of our nature to his own which makes us capable of fellowship with him. There is no such relation of God to the physical world as is ex pressed by the term " fatherhood." Love is an essen tial constituent of this fatherhood, and God does not make the orders of creation beneath man the objects of his love. Fatherhood and love are terms which ex press relations between God and beings kindred in spirit with himself. A question concerning which there is a wide prac tical difference among teachers of religion is the ques tion whether God is the Father of all men, or only of those who are obedient to his will. The question is one in regard to which clear discrimination is neces sary, since it is one which affects, in no small degree, the conception of the divine character. The question may be put from the other side, thus : "Are all men sons of God, or are only those such who are believing and obedient ? " For answer recourse must be had to the teaching of Christ. We should both consult specific expressions which bear upon the question, and consider the general spirit of his life and teaching. The conclusion to which such an examination will lead may be correctly stated, I think, in this paradoxical form : God is the Father of all men, but men become sons of God. Let us consider each part of this appar ently contradictory proposition. That Jesus conceives of God as the Father of all men is evident from the way in which he so often speaks of God as " the Father," without any definition or limitation, and especially from that epitome of the gospel, the parable of the Prodigal Son, which depicts 76 DOCTRINE AND LIFE the fatherly love of God in its tenderness and compas sion for the disobedient and undeserving. The state ment, then, that God is the Father of all men, means that God is always good and gracious ; that he is al ways, if we may so speak, what he ought to be ; that whatever men may be, he is always true to his own essential benevolence. Men are ideally, that is, ac cording to the true divine idea of humanity, sons of God ; but by reason of sin they are not actually what they are ideally and in possibility. We accordingly find that Jesus does not speak of sinful men as sons of God. The prodigal represents himself as no more worthy, by reason of his disobedience, to bear the name son. In the true moral sense of that term he has forfeited sonship. The natural relation to his father, and the father's gracious disposition and character, re main. The fatherhood is not impaired, although it is aggrieved and wounded ; it is the sonship which is impaired, and needs to be restored. In other words, Jesus reserved the term son to express the true moral relation of man to God in obedience and love. Son- ship meant for him something more than creaturehood. Hence he taught men to love even enemies, that they might be — as they would not otherwise — the sons of their Father who is in heaven (Matt. v. 44, 45) ; that is, that they might be like God in the spirit of their action. In like manner John teaches that men be come sons of God by a spiritual renewal or transfor mation. " As many as received him [Christ], to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name" (John i. 12). Here men are said to become, on certain conditions, children THE CHARACTER OF GOD 77 of God — a statement which clearly implies that, in the sense in which the terms are used, they were not such before. To the same purport is the apostle's language in i John iii. i, where he is addressing his fellow-Chris tians : " Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God : and such we are." It does not, however, follow, from what has been said, that there is no true sense in which all men may be spoken of as sons of God. In the special ethical sense in which Jesus was wont to use the term, all men are not children of God ; they are such, how ever, in the sense that they are made in God's image, and that they are the objects of his care and love. Let us now observe the importance and bearing in religious thought of these discriminations. On the one hand, the truth of God's universal Fatherhood must not be restricted. To do this would involve a limitation of the love and saving mercy of God. To such consequences this restriction has always led in theology. The doctrine that God from eternity chose out from the mass of mankind a certain definite number whom he would save, and consigned the rest to perdition, with its corollary that the work of Christ was intended to provide salvation only for this limited number, is an example of the consequences which flow from the limitation of God's fatherly love. On the other hand, the assertion of God's universal Fatherhood easily leads to what is, in one sense, its correlate, the universal sonship of all men to God. If, now, this statement is made and understood, not merely in the general sense in which it is true, but with the special 78 DOCTRINE AND LIFE and higher meaning in the word sonship which Jesus attached to it, it follows that the impairment of man's normal relation to God by sin, and the necessity of his repentance and spiritual renewal, will be overlooked. Thus we see that, on the one side, the narrowness of many earlier forms of theological thought can be traced to a limitation of the divine Fatherhood ; while, on the other, the laxness of much modern teaching is seen to spring from the affirmation of man's sonship to God in a sense in which Jesus never affirmed it — a sense in which he always made it dependent upon repentance, faith, and obedience. The true procedure in dealing with the conceptions under review is to magnify to the utmost, on the one hand, the fatherly love and compassion of God. His benevolence is universal, unbounded. He loves all men, and wishes all to be saved, and has always done all that wisdom and love could do to secure this result. On the other hand, we must fully recognize the sinfulness and guilt of man. He is not naturally what he ought to be ; he does not fill out the idea of true, ethical sonship of God. -In actual fact, his sonship is not the perfect correlate to God's Father hood. We can, therefore, affirm it only in a qualified sense, and must accordingly emphasize the necessity of that spiritual renewal which the Bible calls the birth from above. These views of God's Fatherhood and of man's sonship are rightly adjusted by holding that God's mercy is conditioned, but never limited. He is always ready, and more than ready, to forgive ; but, in the nature of the case, his forgiveness is conditioned upon repentance. His fatherly compassion is denied THE CHARACTER OF GOD 79 to none ; it is unlimited ; but it can only establish har mony and fellowship where there exists, on the part of the creature, the reciprocal disposition of obedience and love. Thus the truth of our proposition appears, that God is the Father of all men. He is never actually anything less than what he is ideally ; men, on the other hand, become sons of God by faith and obedi ence, because they are not, apart from moral renewal, what they ought to be. This is but to say that the restoration of the normal relation between man and God must be from man's side, since it is on his side alone that the fellowship is impaired. There are two other statements respecting the char acter of God which are very fundamental in Christian teaching. One of these is, that God is righteous or holy ; the other, that God is love. These conceptions we can best consider together, since, in our view, they are very essentially related. We find that in the Old Testament the righteousness of God is more emphasized than his love, while in the New Testament the reverse is the case. This is what we should expect in view of the progressive character of revelation. The truth that God is love involves a more comprehensive and complete conception of his character than does the truth that he is righteous or holy. The doctrine of God's holiness, in the Old Tes tament, emphasizes the idea of his separateness from all impurity and wrong. His holiness is his moral ex altation. Looked at on its more positive side, it is the self -affirming, self-respecting quality of God's nature. It involves his repudiation of all sin as being contrary to his own perfect will and character. Righteousness 80 DOCTRINE AND LIFE emphasizes the retributive element of God's being which leads him to condemn and punish sin. It is obvious that the idea of righteousness is absolutely fundamental in the Christian conception of God. The word love, as a name for the moral character of God, suggests, at first thought, the qualities of mercy and compassion. These are the attributes which are the complement of righteousness. But love and right eousness must not be thought of as contrary or anti thetic. " God is love," says the Apostle John (i John iv. 8, 1 6). Love is a name for his moral nature, and not merely for one aspect of it. Love must therefore in clude the holiness as well as the benevolence of God. This truth can be justly emphasized by saying that God is holy love. Righteousness is the self-respect of love ; benevolence is its self-communication in blessing. No conception of God's nature as love is adequate which does not contain both of these elements. Mere good nature, which should take no account of righteousness, would not be love. Mere naked justice, which should deal with men without forbearance or compassion, would be no adequate definition of the character of God as Christ reveals him. God is both just and good, and neither his justice nor his goodness must be emphasized to the neglect of the other. Both these elements must be combined in the conception of God as self-imparting holiness or as holy love. These considerations respecting our conception of the character of God are of the first importance in religion and theology. The justice of God has often been made the fundamental attribute of his nature in such a sense as entirely to subordinate love. It has THE CHARACTER OF GOD 81 been widely held, for example, that justice is an at tribute which God must always exercise, while love is a quality which it is optional with him to exercise or not. It is said that God must be righteous, but that he may be benevolent and merciful, or not, as he chooses. According to this theology, God must punish sin. It would seem to follow that he cannot forgive it, and this theory admits that he cannot forgive it without first punishing it. This he does representatively in the penal sufferings which he lays upon his Son, Jesus Christ. It will be seen that this type of theologi cal reasoning completely subordinates love to justice. Strict, absolute justice must be done, and mercy can have no place until it is done. The just penalty of the world's sin having been vicariously endured by Christ, it is possible for God to exercise that benevolence, which, however, he might have refrained from exercis ing without the impairment of his moral perfection. It will thus be seen that this view really makes per fection of character to consist in strict justice alone. According to its premises, God might refrain from being merciful altogether and still be as perfect as he now is. Mercy cannot, therefore, be an essential quality in the character of God. The practical consequences in religious thought of this conception of the nature of God have been very marked. The whole view of salva tion and of life must be strongly colored by such a theory. It easily leads to the idea that God is hard and cruel, that the salvation of some is due to an ar bitrary choice, and that to others God has seen fit to deny his mercy. The preaching of an earlier time, which had for its leading themes divine sovereignty, 82 DOCTRINE AND LIFE election, and reprobation, took its color largely from that conception of God's character of which we are speaking. The gloom and despair which this teaching often brought into the most earnest souls were products of the belief that God dealt with men in mere naked sovereignty, and that grace was no essential attribute of his nature, but a name for a mode of action which was dependent wholly upon his will. It may well be doubted whether this doctrine did not logically shut out the possibility of salvation altogether. If justice is the one only essential and necessary attri bute of God, what room is left for the prevalence over it of a secondary and optional quality ? When it is an swered that absolute justice was done to sin in the penal sufferings of Christ, the question at once arises, What quality in God could have prompted the substitution of Christ for us in punishment ? It could not have sprung from justice ; for justice would have counselled the pun ishment of guilty man himself, and not that of an inno cent substitute. The only possible answer is 'that this provision looking toward man's salvation was due to the benevolence or mercy of God. But this answer makes mercy as fundamental in God as justice, since this just "plan of salvation" through Christ's death is ascribed to mercy as its motive. The theory in question be gins by logically excluding God's mercy, and ends by ascribing its " just " work of atonement to mercy as its only possible source and spring. It tells us at the out set that God must be just, but need not be merciful. But if this proposition is a correct description of his na ture, we should be led to suppose that absolute justice would be done in the exclusion of the guilty world from THE CHARACTER OF GOD 83 salvation altogether. At this point, however, we are told that absolute justice has been done ; that the world's sin has been punished vicariously in Christ ; but when we ask, why this was done, the only answer is, Because God was merciful. In other words, the essential mercy of God, which is excluded by definition at the beginning, is afterwards admitted when an effort is made to describe his actual procedure in relation to sin. God's action, thus, does not conform to this defi nition of his character. This brief sketch of a long-prevalent mode of theolo gical thought and argument may serve to illustrate the practical consequences of a one-sided conception of the character of God. When, on the other hand, the mercy of God has been emphasized at the expense of his jus tice, an equally false view has resulted. The character of God has been reduced to easy-going good nature and he has been thought too good to punish sin. On this view of- God the demands of righteousness and the restraints of law are relaxed, and the very foundations of morality are weakened. This conception easily leads those who entertain it to think lightly of sin. Its guilt and desert of punishment are denied, and sin is regarded as mere excusable weakness, mistake, or failure. The reaction in recent times from the harsh and arbitrary views of the older theology has carried many minds to an opposite extreme. Here, as so often, the true course is not to adopt either extreme, nor even to take a mid dle position between them, but to take a higher po sition than that assumed by either, and to combine the elements of truth upon which each insists. God is absolutely righteous. Justice and judgment are the 84 DOCTRINE AND LIFE foundation of his throne. Righteousness is absolutely essential in his nature. Were he for a moment unright eous, he would not be God. But God is also, in his very essence, good or benevolent. His mercy endureth forever. God cannot be imagined to cease for a mo ment from being benevolent and compassionate without an utter perversion of his nature. The holy displeasure of God against sin and its just punishment do not in volve the cessation of his mercy. Neither in his action nor in his nature is God ever divided against himself. From these illustrations the advantages of maintain ing, in its integrity, the truth that God is love should be apparent. AH moral perfections are fundamental and essential in God, and love is a name for moral com pleteness. God cannot be conceived as resigning or as suspending by an act of will the exercise of any moral perfection. He does not have to render his mercy quiescent that he may exercise justice, nor to surrender his justice that he may be merciful. He is both the righteous Ruler of the universe in whose being all principles of right and truth have their eternal seat, and the God of all grace, the Father of all tender mercies. We owe it to an undue narrowing of the idea of God's love, and to a one-sided emphasis of his justice, that many seem afraid that his holiness will be lost to us if we maintain in its fullest, largest meaning the truth that God is love ; I say, the truth that God is love, not merely that God may. be love ; not merely that God has love ; but that God is love ; that the centre of this universe is a heart whose affections are cease lessly poured forth upon the world which he has made. When it is maintained that God is, in his very nature, THE CHARACTER OF GOD 85 merciful and compassionate, it is not meant that he is so by any necessity which dwells outside of or above himself. The "necessity" is a purely moral necessity, springing out of his own perfect nature. The " neces sity " that God should be benevolent is precisely the same as the " necessity " that he should be just. He must be both, since he must be himself. The freedom and excellence of mercy are no more sacrificed by mak ing it essential in God's nature, than are the freedom and excellence of righteousness sacrificed by defining that attribute as fundamental in God. For God there is no necessity except that of conformity to his own perfection, but this necessity is the highest and the most inflexible that is conceivable. It is that absolute bondage to right-doing which is coincident with perfect freedom, and in which consists the consummation of personal excellence. I believe that these considerations accord with the actual disclosure of the character of God in the person, work, and teaching of Jesus Christ, and with the de mands of practical Christian thought and life. God is the Father and Friend of men, even of the most sin ful men. He is always ready to bless and to forgive, where to do so is morally possible. It is according to his changeless nature to give, to serve, to sympathize. The gracious work of Christ for man's salvation was born of God's compassionate heart. His justice is not such a mere demand for quid pro quo, such a passion for quantitative payment and vengeance, that the ex ercise of mercy appears as a violation or suspension of it. It is compatible with forgiveness when, in the method of forgiveness, the ill desert of sin and God's 86 DOCTRINE AND LIFE righteous displeasure against it, are revealed and vindi- ' cated. The Christian heart demands a conception of God in which every essential element of goodness shall be recognized. No real quality of moral perfection must be denied to God, or be defined to be merely subordinate and secondary in his nature and optional as respects its exercise. We should deny to a man the highest Christian character who chose not to be merciful, or who should feel himself at liberty so to choose. The Christian conception of God must not be lower than the Christian conception of the highest manhood. Let us have no low idea of God. He is great. He is greater than our hearts and our thoughts ; greater than the sum of all conceivable perfections which we ascribe to him. The perfection of our life can only consist in moral likeness to God. His bestow- ment of his love upon us has for its end to make us his children ; that is, to bring us into sympathy and fellow ship of life with himself. We can now easily see why Christianity teaches that love is the sum of all good ness. Since God is love, it follows that he that dwell eth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him (i John iv. 1 6). CHAPTER VI THE TRINITY In offering some remarks upon the doctrine of the Trinity, it is far from my purpose to undertake to eluci date the mystery which it involves. The inner nature of the Deity is an impenetrable secret, which the human mind cannot explore ; and the Trinity is, in one aspect of it, a name for this unfathomable mystery. We, there fore, freely concede at the outset the difficulties and the mysteriousness of the subject. To these difficulties those who reject the doctrine naturally and urgently appeal. On the basis of them they declare it to be inconceivable and irrational. In regard to this claim I would say that the intellectual difficulties which beset a truth are not necessarily a bar to belief in it. Nor is the credible always limited to the conceivable. The primary question respecting the Trinity is, whether there are adequate grounds for belief in it. If there are, the mystery of it should not deter the mihd from its acceptance. The essence of the doctrine of the Trinity is, that God exists in a threefold mode of being, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each of these is, in the strict sense, divine, that is, partakes of the nature of Deity. All three of them together constitute the one only God. There is a unity of nature or substance in God, and 87 88 DOCTRINE AND LIFE there is, at the same time, a threefoldness or trinality which represents eternal distinctions in the divine es sence. God is one and God is three, but not, of course, in the same sense. He is one in substance or essence ; but there exists within this one essence three persons or subsistences, which are revealed to us under the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are many notions of God's nature which stand in contrast to the Trinitarian idea. One of these is the Unitarian doctrine. On this view, God is one and soli tary ; he is in no sense three. There is no room, according to this conception, for interrelations or in tercommunion within the nature of the divine Being. God is, apart from creation, absolutely solitary. An other contrasted view is the pantheistic. On this view, God is at once the One and the All. The universe itself is taken up and lost in God ; or, stating the idea from its other side, God is identified with the universe and lost in it. This mode of thought almost necessa rily surrenders the personality of God. Still another view is the polytheistic, which admits the existence of many gods, and assigns to them various limitations of nature and function. The doctrine of the Trinity stands in contrast with the Unitarian view in affirming a certain manifoldness of life, an interplay and inter relation within the nature of God, as opposed to the idea of solitary existence. It differs from pantheism in dis tinguishing God from the world which he creates, and by ascribing to his nature all fulness of being and of fellowship, apart from creation. From polytheism the Trinitarian doctrine differs in affirming that the unity of the divine nature underlies the personal distinctions which it recognizes. THE TRINITY 89 It may, I think, be fairly assumed that since this doc trine, with all its difficulties, has been held for many centuries by the great majority of the most thoughtful and learned men of the Christian world, there must be some good reasons for its acceptance. A doctrine so mysterious and so difficult to define and defend could hardly have arisen and taken so strong a hold upon the Christian world, unless there had been some im portant facts of revelation which supported and re quired it. What these facts were may be, in part, briefly stated. The great fact which occasioned the development of the doctrine was the incarnation. The claims which Christ made for himself, and the claims which the New Testament writers make for him, compel the admission of his eternal pre-existence and his divine nature. The present difference among scholars in regard to this sub ject is not so much a difference respecting what the New Testament says and means, as a difference in re spect to the trustworthiness and value of its testimony. That our Gospels represent Jesus as claiming for him self pre-temporal existence, and participation in the divine nature, cannot, without great exegetical arbitra riness, be denied, and is commonly admitted at present by competent scholars of all schools. Before the world was, he existed in glory at the Father's side (John xvii. 5) ; and before Abraham was born, he is (John viii. 58). John affirms that the Logos, the pre-existent Christ, was God (John i. 1) ; and Paul speaks of him as existing, previous to his incarnation, in the form of God, and, by implication, refers to his equality with God (Phil. ii. 6). There is no escape from the conclu- 90 DOCTRINE AND LIFE sion that the New Testament teaches the essential deity of Christ. Those who reject the doctrine, therefore, — if they give any heed to New Testament teaching at all, — are bound to show that its testimony on this subject is inadequate or untrustworthy. With the methods of argument by which this effort is commonly made, we are not now concerned. If Christ is divine, and yet, at the same time, can speak of the Father in distinc tion from himself, these two facts, taken together, give us both the idea of the unity and that of the distinction between him and God. But a further fact meets us. Christ speaks of the Holy Spirit as distinct both from the Father and from himself, and yet ascribes to him divine prerogatives and powers. He is "another Advocate," distinct from Christ (John xiv. 16). He bears witness of Christ (John xv. 26) ; and his coming to the disciples is con ditioned upon the Saviour's departure (John xvi. 7). Personal pronouns are used in referring to the Spirit, and personal activities are constantly ascribed to him. If the deity of the Spirit is not explicitly asserted, it is certainly implied in the whole description of his work and significance. If the deity of Christ be admitted, it can hardly be doubted that his teaching concerning the function of the Spirit in redemption, and concerning the Spirit's relation to his own person and to the Father, clearly implies the conception of his essential deity. This conclusion is confirmed by those passages in the New Testament where we find an approach to the Trinitarian formula. I refer to the words in the " great commission : " " baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost " THE TRINITY 91 (Matt, xxviii. 19), and to the apostolic benediction : " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all" (2 Cor. xiii. 14). Let it not be supposed that the passages to which I have been referring represent the whole scriptural evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. They do, however, furnish the principal data which have given rise to Trinitarian doctrine and belief. It is true, as a matter of fact, that for most persons who accept the trustworthiness and truthfulness of the New Testament, the evidence for the Trinitarian view of the divine nature is sufficient. This evidence, in the nature of the case, will not appeal to those who hold that the New Testament is not sufficiently historical to yield us the actual teaching of Jesus on such subjects. Nor will it have force for those who distrust the truth fulness of Jesus' own self-testimony. But if one believes that what he claimed and asserted is true, and that the New Testament fairly represents his claims, no one can charge him with unreasonableness in holding that these claims and statements justify belief in the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrines of the deity of Christ, and of the Trinity, cannot be denied except upon grounds which involve the surrender of the historicity and truth fulness of the New Testament. Some persons who have acknowledged that the teach ing of Jesus and of the apostles involved the doctrine of the equal divinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, have avoided the acceptance of the commonly received doctrine of the Trinity by holding that these three terms designate three phases or modes of the divine self -manifestation, and not essential and eternal distinc- 92 DOCTRINE AND LIFE tions in the nature of God. This is the so-called Sa- bellian doctrine. It holds to a Trinity of revelation only, a moral as opposed to an immanent Trinity. It is, however, an unsatisfactory explanation of the facts with which it seeks to deal. It does not accord with the New Testament teaching respecting the eternal pre- existence of the Son of God in a form of being distinct from the Father. John teaches that the pre-existent Christ was in the beginning with God, and was God (John i. i). By this language, which he here chooses with great care, he expresses the view that the pre- existent Son was properly divine, and yet was distin guished from God the Father. To the same effect is the claim of the Son to absolute existence where he says : " Before Abraham was born, I am " (John viii. 58). Here Christ's absolute existence is expressed in the words " I am," in contrast to Abraham's coming into being.1 Moreover, if God is revealed as a Trinity, it is reasonable to suppose that he exists as such. He is revealed as he is. The doctrine of the moral Trinity represents a natural effort to escape from the difficulties which beset the commonly received view, but is inade quate to explain the teaching of Christ and of the New Testament generally. I have already alluded to the objection so often made to the doctrine of the Trinity, that it is inconceivable, 1 The Greek text of these passages is : 'Ev ipxv ?" & Myos, ttat b Uyos f» wpbs rbv OUv, koi Bibs Jy 5 Xdyos. npip 'Aflpaap ycvlcBat iyib cipt. The student of the original text will note that the Logos is called Be6; ; that is, God generically con sidered, but distinguished from 6 8c&s ; that is, the Father specifically considered. For a fuller discussion of this whole subject in its exegetical and theological aspects, I refer the reader to my work on The Johannine Theology, chaps, iv. and v. THE TRINITY 93 and therefore irrational. It is necessary to weigh this objection more carefully. If, when it is said that the Trinity is inconceivable, it is meant that the mind can form no mental picture of it, the statement is quite true. The truth of the Trinity transcends the reach and power of the imagination. But so also do thou sands of truths for which the evidence is commonly deemed to be overwhelming, and which are therefore generally accepted among men. We cannot imagine, that is, form any definite mental concept, of the hu man soul. The interrelation and interaction of the soul and the body are absolutely inconceivable. We cannot picture to ourselves the various faculties or powers of our own mysterious personalities. Yet we recognize this complexity of our personality, this ful ness and interplay of powers in our mental structure, as an unquestionable fact. Our powerlessness to con ceive of these things does not overbear the testimony in their behalf. This testimony we find in our own consciousness and experience ; and it is quite irresist ible, despite the inability of the imagination to deal with the truths of which it assures us. We also ac cept many inconceivable facts, for which the evidence is found outside our own mental life. Such are many of the truths of science. The nature and action of nat ural forces, arid especially the marvellous phenomena of psychical action — such as the influence of mind over body, and of one mind upon another — are utterly be yond the power of the imagination to construe. The truth is, that when we come to reflect upon the matter, we find that the province of the imagination is very restricted. It can never be made, in any sphere of 94 DOCTRINE AND LIFE knowledge, the measure of our convictions, or the final test of truth. That we cannot conceive of the Trinity, is, therefore, no real evidence against its truth. But when it is said that the Trinity is inconceivable, it is sometimes meant that it is contrary to reason. If it be true that the doctrine is contrary to the principles and laws of thought, that is, if it be inherently absurd, its acceptance cannot be justified, and all seeming evi dence of its truth must be really deceptive and false. If, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity were that God is one and three in the same sense, it would be absurd, and belief in it would be stultifying. But this is not the doctrine. It is affirmed that God is one in essence or substance, but three in the sense that there exists, in the unity of this one substance, a trinality of life. The truth of the Trinity is not contrary to rea son, although it is above and beyond reason.. What mental law forbids us to believe that there is an eter nal trinality in the one absolute Being ? What axiom is violated by the supposition that the mode of the divine existence is absolutely unique, and that to this mode of existence finite being furnishes no analogy ? The doctrine of the Trinity is, in no proper sense, irra tional. I repeat that the question concerning it is the question whether the evidence of its truth is sufficient to warrant its acceptance. It will be seen, from what has been said, that the Trinity is a formula or symbol which aims to gather up into unity and harmony several of the most essential truths of Christianity. It is sometimes called the cen tral truth of Christianity, and it is so in the sense that it conserves and combines the most fundamental truths THE TRINITY 95 of Christian revelation. With the acceptance or rejec tion of the doctrine the evangelical system of theology has commonly stood or fallen. The doctrine of the deity of Christ, and the significance of his saving work, are involved in the truth of the triune nature of God. The denial of the Trinity on account of its mysterious- ness has usually carried with it the denial of some of the most characteristic doctrines of Christianity on ac count of their mysteriousness. If men are too impatient of mystery to accept the Trinity, they will probably be too much so to believe in the incarnation, the atonement, and related truths. The doctrine of the Trinity repre sents the effort of the mind to define a conclusion re specting the internal nature of the Deity to which the facts of revelation conspire to lead. This effort can never be more than partially successful. The human mind can never adequately describe the interior consti tution of the divine Being. It has, therefore, been truly said that " the term ' Trinity ' is a hieroglyph, ... an al gebraic sign for an unknown, mysterious relation."1 It represents an effort to co-ordinate several fundamental and well-attested truths, and has, as respects the fact of it, all the evidence which supports these truths. This statement does not, however, involve the claim that any attempt to describe the threefold nature of God is to be regarded as adequate. The doctrine of the Trinity rests upon grounds similar to those on which many other Christian doctrines rest, that of the incar nation, for example. The facts of Christ's appearance justify belief in an incarnation of God in humanity. This conclusion is urged upon us with a constraining 1 Fisher, Faith and Rationalism, p. 53. 96 DOCTRINE AND LIFE force which arises from certain historical facts and events. But these facts yield us no knowledge which enables us to describe the mode of the incarnation. We have always carefully to distinguish between the acceptance of a truth upon adequate evidence, and the satisfactory explanation of that truth in itself. We should be ready to accept a theory or doctrine for which the evidence is sufficient, even if we cannot satisfactorily explain or justify the same when con sidered as a mental problem by itself. It seems to me to be a misfortune that the doctrine of the Trinity has been so generally presented as a problem or puzzle by itself, rather than as an insoluble mystery which we accept because the facts of revelation unmistakably point to it. The efforts at a close defi nition of the subject may well be regarded as some what presumptuous. They seem like attempts to break through the impenetrable mystery, and to fathom the very abyss of Deity. It is more natural and helpful to approach the subject from the side of the historic facts of revelation, and to stop short at the conclusion to which they lead us ; viz., that the person and teach ing of Christ, and the doctrine of the New Testament in general, justify and require the supposition of an essential trinality in the divine nature. If the doctrine of the Trinity is approached directly, and is taken up as a problem for solution, the mind will probably be baffled and repelled. The true method of approach is along the line of those facts of divine revelation which lead us at length to the heights of this mystery, where we can no longer define and describe, and where thought must acknowledge its bounds and find its resting-place. THE TRINITY 97 Christians do not believe in the Trinity because they suppose that they can explain it, or can solve the difficulties connected with it, nor do they believe in it because it is a doctrine which taken by itself they can satisfactorily defend ; they believe in it because Christ's teaching and person require it, and because it lies em bedded in the whole substance of Christian revelation. If it is urged, as it sometimes is, that the doctrine is not taught in the Bible, the answer is, that, while it is not explicitly and formally taught, the elements of truth which compose it, such as the deity of Christ and the personality of the Spirit, and the facts which re quire it, such as the incarnation and atonement, are fundamental factors in all biblical revelation and teach ing. In emphasizing, as I have done, the mysteriousness of the doctrine, and the undesirableness of approaching it in a priori way as a problem to be solved, or a mystery to be cleared of difficulties by explanation and defini tion, I do not wish to be understood as admitting that no rational considerations can be justly urged in sup port of it. It may fairly be said, in the first place, that it is not unreasonable to suppose that the Absolute exists in a mode of being to which finite nature fur nishes no adequate analogy. The Deity does not be long to any class of beings whose attributes can be made determining for the conception which we are to en tertain of his nature. He stands alone and unique. It cannot be argued that because nature and human life furnish no examples of such a Trinity in unity as we believe to exist in God, the belief is contrary to reason and experience. It is above and beyond all experience ; 98 DOCTRINE AND LIFE it may be, in important respects, above and beyond reason, but it is not on that account contrary to it. There are, moreover, some suggestive facts which present themselves to our view in contemplating the universe, with which the idea of the Trinity in God does strikingly accord. We find, for example, that as we ascend the scale of being, life becomes diversified and complex. Not only do we observe this general fact in the world of matter, but in the world of mind as well. The mental life of the lower orders of creation appears very simple. Their souls act in but a few directions and in but a very limited sphere. The mental organ ization of man, on the contrary, is very complex and diversified. Philosophers have always analyzed his na ture into distinguishable elements or faculties. One analysis, which regards his whole nature, distinguishes body, soul, and spirit. A more common analysis is that which describes the mental life as composed of in tellect, sensibility, and will. Psychology is compelled to recognize, as does our popular speech, that there is a certain threefoldness in man, three sets of distinguish able powers or faculties, which do not, however, impair the unity of the total man. The one indivisible mind or soul acts in three distinguishable ways and relations. I lay no stress on the threefoldness of this well-nigh universal analysis of man's mental constitution, nor do I urge the complexity of mental life in the highest form of being which we immediately know, as, in any strict sense, an argument for the doctrine of the Trinity. ' I do, however, claim that it would be according to analogy to expect that in the Supreme Being there should be a manifoldness and complexity of life surpassing those THE TRINITY 99 which we find to exist in the highest forms of finite being. While we cannot maintain that any such con siderations could ever conduct us to the Trinitarian doctrine of God, we do claim that when once divine revelation has furnished us adequate ground for form ing and holding that doctrine, we are confirmed in its reasonableness by finding that it accords with all that we can learn of the nature of being in general. Con siderations like this which I have presented, are not strictly a part of the evidence for the truth of the Trinity ; but they do fall into line with that evidence, and serve to confirm it from the side of reason and observation. I turn now to a brief consideration of the argument for the doctrine of the Trinity which is derived from the nature of God as love. We must suppose that there was once a time when this finite world did not exist. If God alone is uncreated and self-existent, then the entire universe, including all men and angels, must have begun to be. Let our thought now travel back to the time when God alone existed. Shall we think of him as absolutely single and solitary, dwelling in eternal silence and self -contemplation, or as having within him self the conditions of a social life ? Which conception best befits the notion of his inherent perfection ? If God is truly the absolute Being, as theists commonly suppose ; if he is not dependent upon the world in re spect to his own existence and perfection, but has freely created the same — then must his nature be perfect in itself, and in this nature all the conditions of blessedness must be realized. It seems to me that the Trinitarian doctrine of God, which affirms distinctions and relations 100 DOCTRINE AND LIFE as eternally existing in his essence, best answers to the idea of his inherent perfection, because it supposes the divine life to be, by its very nature, social and self- communicating. If this seem an abstract method of presenting the subject, let us approach it by saying that there is an eternal Fatherhood in God. He is not merely the Father of men and of all higher orders of created be ings. He did not at some point begin to be a Father. The relations of Fatherhood and Sonship which con cretely express to us what we count most dear in the nature of God, are eternal and constituent in his very being. Let me present this thought in the words of one of the most independent and suggestive living writers on theology, once himself a Unitarian, — Mr. Richard Holt Hutton : " If Christ is the eternal Son of .God, God is indeed and in essence a Father ; the social nature, the spring of love, is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of his life, the recip rocation of his affection, dates from beyond time, be longs, in other words, to the very being of God. Now, some persons think that such a certainty, even when attained, has very little to do with human life. ' What does it matter,' they say, ' what the absolute nature of God is, if we know what he is to us ? How can it con cern us to know what he was before our race existed, if we know what he is to all his creatures now ? ' These questions seem plausible, but I believe they point to a very deep error. I can answer for myself that the Uni tarian conviction that God is — as God and in his eternal essence — a single, solitary personality, influenced my imagination and the whole color of my faith most pro- THE TRINITY 101 foundly. Such a conviction, thoroughly realized, ren ders it impossible to identify any of the social attributes with his real essence — renders it difficult not to regard power as the true root of all other divine life. If we are to believe that the Father was from all time, we must believe that he was as a Father ; that is, that love was actual in him as well as potential,, that the communica tion of life and thought, and fulness of joy, was of the inmost nature of God, and never began to be, if God never began to be." 1 It is commonly agreed among Christians that the most perfect description which can be given of the divine nature is that which is contained in the scrip tural statement — "God is love." If this means, not merely that God, as a matter of fact, does love, not merely that he may be or that he has love, but that love is an eternal quality of his moral nature which is absolutely fundamental and constitutive in his being — then it would seem that there must be within his nature itself, occasion and scope for the exercise of love, apart from his relations to finite existence. Love is a social attribute, and the conditions and relations which love implies must exist in the very essence of God. In the Trinitarian view of God, these conditions have forever existed in the eternal personal distinctions and reciprocal relations of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. God did not begin to love when he created, nor is his love a mere potentiality which in the silent depths of eternity looks forward to creation for its satisfaction. Love is the very core and essence of God's moral nature, and as 1 Essay on The Incarnation and Principles of Evidence, in Theological Essays, page 257. 102 DOCTRINE AND LIFE such is ceaselessly active within the internal relations of Deity. Love is eternally in full exercise, since God is love, and love ever found in God's own perfect Being the full fruition and blessedness of its exercise in self-communication and fellowship. We thus see that,, despite the difficulties which the Trinitarian doctrine presents to the imagination, it has the great advantage of according with the highest con ception which revelation yields us of the moral nature of God. It enables us to maintain that God eternally is what he is revealed to be ; that the moral perfections of God, and the sum of all those perfections — love, are not mere modes of his action in relation to finite being, but component qualities of his ethical nature, absolutely fundamental in his essence. The Trinitarian doctrine, in this aspect of it, is a method of maintaining that the most sacred realities of personal existence, all of which are best summed up in the word love, are reflections in our nature of the glorious and eternal perfections of God in whose moral image we are made. This view of God, abstrusely as it may be stated, is not meaning less and valueless in its practical bearing on human life. It means that we are to think of God, not first of all as mere power or will, but as a Father. It puts love on the throne of the universe by making it central in the nature and action of God. The Trinity is a practical truth. High as it is above reason, baffling as it is to the imagination and to thought, it accords with the demands and deliver ances of the Christian consciousness. It conserves the truth of Christ's essential divinity and that of the reality and power of the work of the Spirit, which he THE TRINITY 103 described as the sequel and completion of his own work. It accords with belief in the incarnation, and makes the redemptive work of Christ a divine work. All this the Christian consciousness craves and requires. We want to know, not merely that God has sent us a message, not merely that in Jesus he has raised up an exception ally pure and holy member of the human race, but that in him God has come to us, and that his work of reve lation and redemption is a work of God. Our sense of sin is met and answered only by the knowledge of a divine Redeemer. Mystery as the Trinity is, it is a mystery which is full of heavenly light. If it defies all our powers of description and definition, it does, at the same time, enrich our whole conception of God, and heighten our estimate both of the Redeemer and of his work. It is a mystery of light, not of darkness. It does not becloud the mind and paralyze religious thought as would a doctrine which should run counter to the highest moral instincts and feelings of the soul ; it rather quickens devout reflection and kindles aspira tion, by the emphasis which it lays upon love as central in God, and upon the Son of God and the Holy Spirit as real powers which have ever been active in the human life and history, influencing and illuminating men, and reconciling the world unto God. The doctrine of the Trinity conserves the idea of the richness and fulness of the divine life and love, and of the amplitude of their manifestation. According to its terms, God is revealed to us as our Father, and his eter nal nature is shown to be fatherly ; Jesus Christ is pre sented to us as a true incarnation of God in humanity, a Redeemer whose divine person and, work are a veri- 104 DOCTRINE AND LIFE table revelation of God; and the Holy Spirit is con ceived of as an actual divine agent who dwells and works in human life, influencing and moulding it into the divine likeness. According to the Trinitarian doctrine, we have to do, in Christianity, with divine realities. Our religion is not a subjective play of fine ideas, memories, or aspirations. God is in his world. He has always been in his world, revealing himself, in invisible ways, through the Light that lighteth every man, and through the action of the all-pervading Spirit ; but at length he came by an incarnation into humanity, in order that, through union with man, he might make his self-disclosure more clear, adequate, and apprehensi ble. Our religion is intensely supernatural. It is fitted to quicken and foster in our hearts a living sense of God. The forces that provide and complete our sal vation are truly divine. It is God that has wrought for us and in us ; our life is ensphered in Deity, and filled with the fulness of him that filleth all in all. CHAPTER VII THE PERSON OF CHRIST The person of Jesus Christ is the great miracle of history. It is at once the mystery and the glory of the religion which is called by his name. Supreme and solitary, Christ stands among men, towering above all others. Yet his superiority to all other men does not involve a separateness from them in interest and sym pathy. He is most closely identified with his fellows ; he is ideally, intensely human. He is elevated above other men just because he represents humanity in its perfection, because in him we behold our common hu man nature dignified and glorified by the disclosure of its divine origin and destiny. We must approach the character of Christ from this human side. We must look upon him as he is pre sented to us in the clear light of the Gospels, and must listen to the words which he speaks to us concerning God and ourselves. We need bring with us no formu lated theory of his person, no definition of the mystery of his being ; enough that we bring a serious, reverent, and teachable mind, a willingness to hear and to learn what we know that we most want and most need to know. Let this, then, be our method of approach. Who he is, whence he came, and how his person is to be explained, need not now concern us. Let us hear 105 106 DOCTRINE AND LIFE what he says to us, and try to estimate its value and use for our life ; let us look, as far as we can, into his mind, and put ourselves under the power of his spirit — then we may naturally raise the question, what we are to think of the origin and nature of his person. When we listen to what the Gospels tell us of him, a remarkable fact meets us at the outset. He seems to have made it his first concern to induce men to accept his idea of God and his principles of human living, rather than to adopt any particular view of his own personality. A critical, comparative study of the Gos pels leads to the conclusion that he was very slow to announce himself as the Messiah, and that he wished to avoid exciting too keen an interest in the discussion of the nature of his person. His characteristic truths, however, concerning God and man and duty, he was always urging upon the minds of men. He certainly made important claims respecting his person and mis sion ; but he seemed willing to let these claims fake care of themselves, if only men would repent of sin, believe in God, and try to live lives of unselfish love. He offered himself to men through the truth which he brought to them, and the spirit of heavenly peace which pervaded his life. He refused to compel the wonder and homage of men by miracle. He sought to quicken faith by appealing to what was highest and holiest in men. He had little confidence in the zeal and devotion of any professed adherents who had not caught something of the sense of God and of the spirit of trust and service which filled his own heart, and who had not felt, in some measure, the attracting and uplift ing power of the ideal of life which he presented, THE PERSON OF CHRIST 107 The Gospels set vividly before us many a scene in which Jesus is heard speaking to a motley company about him. What is he saying ? Let us listen. He is speaking to men about God, and is teaching them to pray to him, beginning, " Our Father." He is telling them how to be like him in love, in sympathy, and pity. He is telling them what the kingdom of God is, and how it is to come on earth and in the hearts of men. Here is certainly a man whose whole mind is filled with the thought of God, and whose whole life is inspired with the sense of his presence. Here is a man who speaks to his fellow-men about God in a clear, confident, and assuring tone. He is one who is himself absolutely sure of God, sure of his existence, his character, his providence, and his love. Moreover, he speaks in a tone of calm, yet commanding conviction. The peo ple, as they listened, were astonished ; they had never heard religious truth taught with such a sense of inner certitude, with such an apparent consciousness of divine authority. He also speaks to men about themselves. He at once discloses to men their true destiny, and their actual failures in achieving it. His ideal of life is the highest possible - — likeness to God himself ; and his inter pretation of life's true - meaning opens to the spirit of man a large, free world of thought and achievement. His words search the hiding-places of human motive. He knows what is in man, and how firmly, yet kindly, does he lay bare the secrets of the human heart. There never was such an interpreter of human life as Jesus was. He was not merely a critic who mercilessly ex posed the faults and sins of men ; he was the friend of 108 DOCTRINE AND LIFE those whose misguided lives he sought to restore to purity and strength. He brought his appeal to bear upon man's whole nature. The sense of God and of the divine origin and meaning of life which he aimed to kindle in man, roused mind, heart, and will to new activity and energy. The truths concerning God and concerning man's kinship to God which he brought to men were" fitted to impart a new incentive to thought, and to fire every noble emotion of which the soul is capable. Another remarkable thing about the personality of Jesus is that, while he had the keenest sense of what was sinful and wrong, he never in any way implied that he was personally conscious of sin. It is inconceiv able that he should have failed to apply his penetrating analysis of sin to himself unless he had believed himself to be free from sin. Moreover, his marvellous knowl edge of the human heart and character excludes the sup position that he did not know himself. As he appears to us to be sinless, so we must believe that he appeared to himself. Or, to state the thought positively, he was conscious of perfect holiness of motive and action, of perfect harmony in purpose and desire with the will of God. He prays often to God ; but he never asks for forgiveness, for he does always those things that please God. He intercedes for the sinful world, but he does not intercede for himself ; and he challenges the men of his time to convict him of an act of sin (John viii. 46). With these brief hints respecting the import of Jesus' teaching, his searching analysis of motive, and his personal sense of sinlessness, let us turn to a study of the principal elements of his perfection of character. THE PERSON OF CHRIST 109 The completeness of his character is seen in the full and harmonious development of all the legitimate qual ities of manhood. We feel at once, as soon as we be gin to examine the character of Jesus, that it is free from all oddities and exaggerations. It would sound strangely inappropriate to speak of " peculiarities " in him. There is no abnormal development of some spe cial qualities such as make the marked traits of the men and women whom we know. We could ascribe, I am sure, no particular " temperament " to him. We should not think for a moment of applying to him any of those terms by which we are wont to designate the special qualities which stand out with peculiar promi nence in the characters of our friends. We feel their inadequacy, almost their impropriety, at once. Who would think of saying of Jesus, for example, that he was a very intellectual man, or that he possessed a logical mind ? Who would ever speak of him as a person of specially strong will, or as a man of the emo tional type ? We feel at once that to speak thus is to imply a one-sided development in his character, and from this we almost instinctively shrink. When we speak thus of our fellow-men, we take it for granted — as well we may — that certain qualities are dispropor tionately prominent. When we approach the character of Jesus, we see at once that there is something absolutely unique about it. It is peculiar just because it possesses no "peculiari ties." There is a repose, strength, and completeness about it which almost disarm criticism, and seem to forbid any comparison of qualities. If one were asked, for example, " Was Jesus an energetic person ? " he 110 DOCTRINE AND LIFE might half hesitate to answer, not, indeed, because he can doubt the silent but powerful energy of his life, but because by answering " Yes " he might seem to imply that his energy was disproportionate to the quietness and repose of his character, as we are wont to do when we speak of one another. His energy was wonderful, and that just because it was not fitful and impulsive, like that of the men whom we com monly distinguish as energetic, but quiet and unobtru sive always. With what a calm, steady perseverance did he walk through human life ; and yet with such an unassuming quietness that he attracted no attention in the world save within the narrow limits of one of the more remote Roman provinces. No writer of his time makes any mention of his name except the evan gelists whose records lie before us in the Gospels. Yet he was no recluse. He mingled freely with his fellow-men in their work and at their feasts, in their joys and in their sorrows. None of the words which designate a peculiar type of man are applicable to him. Wonderfully energetic, patient, and persevering, yet no enthusiast ; wonderfully calm, quiet, and even reserved, yet no recluse. What can we call him if we wish to keep to the language of our every-day life ? Only what the Scriptures do — "The man, Christ Jesus," " The Son of man," the true type, the perfect realiza tion of sinless humanity. If we choose to take any other qualities of the truest manhood, and see how they are illustrated in the char acter of Jesus, we shall reach, I am sure, the same conclusion. We shall , see that they belong to him, but that they are set in such perfect equipoise with THE PERSON OF CHRIST 111 what we are accustomed to call the opposite qualities, that they do not attract special attention to them selves. With us it is generally the marked features of character which attract attention ; in Jesus it is no special quality or set of qualities, but the rounded com pleteness of the whole character. The ideal of good taste in dress is, to effect such a combination that there shall be absolutely nothing espe cially noticeable except the harmony and fitness of the whole. The law for beauty in character is analogous. When single qualities shine out with such unique and peculiar splendor, the brightness is often but the con trast with the real background of character. The ideal character is found only in the complete, symmetrical development of the total man. This completeness of character we see in Jesus when we consider the har mony of will and emotion, of firmness and tenderness, which always characterized his life. Always firm, and even severe, in the presence of hypocrisy and sin ; always gentle and sympathetic in the presence of sor row and distress ; yet there was never anything arbi trary in his firmness, never anything weak in his gentleness. There was no clashing of opposing feel ings and passions in his life. The tender and kindly emotions of his heart were never, as so often with us, subdued and stifled under the action of a stalwart will ; and the will, the true rudder of character, was not swayed hither and thither by every passing current of emotion. There was harmony among all the elements of character, because all were normally developed to gether. It should, however, be observed that this harmony 112 DOCTRINE AND LIFE did not result from any toning down of the powers and activities of the soul. The whole life was at its maxi mum of energy and strength. It was the harmony of intense vigor, in which all the powers operated in their fullest force/ but without clashing upon one an other. It was the harmony of the most real, but of complete manhood. Jesus is thus seen to be humanity at its climax. His life gathers up into itself all that is most truly and grandly human, and holds it up as the promise of what we shall be when we are like him. The completeness of Jesus' life is also seen in the fact that in him appears no single, local, or national type of character, but the "universal man." Cicero relates that when Socrates was asked to what state he belonged, he answered : " To the world ; " for, adds Cicero, " he considered himself a citizen of the world at large." Not even the greatest men of antiquity, however, seem to have risen wholly above national limits. It is not difficult to see that Socrates did not do so. The lives of these men were closely bound up with the state in which they lived. The limits of country marked men off sharply from one another, and created barriers over which the mutual sympathies and interests of men were not accustomed to cross. Indeed, one of the choicest virtues among the ancients was supreme devotion to the state. The chief significance of the individual was found, not so much in an indepen dent spirit and in broad and generous sympathy, as in identification with the social organism. And even now how few characters there are that unite local and national interests with a sympathy as wide as the world — how few that are raised above the limits of THE PERSON OF CHRIST 113 social or class affiliations, and are in the broadest sense human ! Now let us notice how the character of Jesus stands in contrast with these limited types of character with which we are familiar. ' If we look for this universality of his character in indifference to the friends among whom he lived, or to the nation of which he was a part, we shall go widely astray. Jesus was a Jew by birth and education ; he lived and labored among Jews ; he respected their customs, and obeyed their laws. He was in no sense an ec centric or lawless person. He was a loyal and obedient citizen of the country in which he lived. But of Jewish peculiarities and prejudices we find nothing whatever in him. His character is in no sense local or national ; his sympathies are in no degree limited by any boundaries of country or limits of time. They are as wide as the race — as wide as the interests, needs, and sins of mankind. Here, again, we see how in Christ is realized the idea of common, universal humanity. He is conformed to the .type of social and religious life which belongs to the age and country in which he lives ; but his life is in no way restricted or narrowed by these. It is evident that they are incidental to his life, and in no way the measure of it. His outlook on the world is too wide, and his insight into human life is too deep, to allow him to set his heart on any temporary social organ ization as essential and necessary. We find the same breadth in the character of Jesus if we consider his relations to his kindred and nearest friends. He is never indifferent to those relations. He is a true and affectionate son, brother, and friend. 114 DOCTRINE AND LIFE But his life knows no family or social limits. He is more than the friend of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, for he called all trustful disciples friends ; he is more than the brother of James and Joses and Simon, for every one who does the will of God is to him a sister or brother ; he is more than the son of Mary, for he is the Son of man. In a word, he embraces in his mind and heart all mankind ; and, by the principles which he introduces and applies to life, he transforms what is special into that which is genuinely human and universally true. The completeness of the character of Jesus is further seen in the union in him of the qualities that are most truly womanly with those that are considered as more distinctively masculine. His nature had the blended qualities of both sexes. Frederick W. Robertson con siders that the loss or obscuration of this truth in the thought and life of the early church goes far to explain the origin and development of the worship of Mary.1 Jesus was pictured to the minds of men chiefly in the stern aspect of the Judge. The severer elements of his character were emphasized to the neglect of his more than human gentleness, tenderness, and patience. In a word, the men of that time held but one side of the character of Christ. They held a half-truth, which, as so often happens, tends to complete itself by taking on an entire error. Christ as presented in this stern, cold aspect could not satisfy the Christian heart. Men felt that the milder elements of character, which are the glory of woman, are also divine. But not perceiving 1 See the discourse on the Glory of the Virgin Mother, in his Sermons preached at Brighton, page 383 ff., Harper & Brothers, New York, 1880. THE PERSON OF CHRIST 115 that all that was most truly womanly, and all that was most truly manly, were met in Christ ; that his divine manhood meant, not divine masculineness, but divine humanity ; not perceiving that in Christ " there is neither male nor female," and yet feeling that these milder qualities must be recognized and honored, they naturally sought some other embodiment of them. Having practically forgotten one side of the charac ter of Jesus, the Christian consciousness spontane ously tried to supply the place that was left, by crowning a queen of heaven by the side of the Son of God. All this was the result of a fragmentary, one-sided view of Christ. Such, in outline, is Mr. Robertson's view of the real motive and origin of the cultus of Mary. It is cer tainly suggestive, and is probably essentially true. The church needed to see and hold the completeness of Christ ; to see that in him, and in the ideal of charac- ter which he presents, are met all the qualities that are most truly, most nobly human. It is these facts to which we have called attention — the elevation of the teaching of Jesus, the dignity of his person, his sinlessness, and positive completeness of character — which, in connection with the special claims which he makes, give rise to the problem of his unique personality. That according to our Gospels he asserts his pre-existence before the world was, and declares that he shared the glory of the Father and enjoyed a pe culiarly close fellowship with him, cannot be denied. These extraordinary claims, however, might well be questioned were they not re-enforced by the facts of his life and character. Moreover, we find this lofty con- 116 DOCTRINE AND LIFE ception of the person of Jesus reflected in the writings of those who had known him best. When all these considerations are combined, we cannot wonder that the church has asserted that Jesus Christ was more than a man ; that no possible compound of mere human quali ties could produce such a character, The facts which have just been mentioned have led to the formulation of the doctrine that Jesus Christ mys teriously united in himself both divinity and human ity. This mystery has been accepted and cherished by the greater part of the Christian world, not because the mind was able to construe or resolve it, but because the facts of Christ's teaching, person, and claims were held to require it, and because it was believed to be attested by his power in human life and history. It is true that there have not been wanting believers in the divineness of Christ's mission and the peerless superiority of his character, who have declined to accept the doctrine of his proper divinity, or even that of his pre-existence. In such cases, I think it may fairly be said, that impa tience of mystery has overborne evidence of which no candid mind can fail to feel the force. It is not strange, however, that some minds, looking at the doc trine of Christ's Deity rather on the side of its mysteri- ousness, than on that of its evidence and its adaptation to meet the needs of man's religious nature, have with held from it their assent. That God should reveal himself through an incarna tion in humanity is, indeed, an unparalleled mystery, but is not without some confirmation from analogy. God reveals himself in all his works, and especially in man, who is, in a special sense, kindred in his moral THE PERSON OF CHRIST 117 nature to God, and in whom God is believed by all religious minds to make himself felt and known. The moral likeness of man to God suggests the possibility of the incarnation. If, now, the Trinitarian conception of the divine nature be adopted, there remains no for midable barrier to the acceptance of the doctrine of the incarnation. I am convinced that if we can separate the problem of the method of the incarnation from the considerations which favor the fact, and can frankly admit that the former is an absolute mystery, we shall find that the idea of the incarnation will commend itself as both fitting into the process of biblical revelation, and as answering to the demands of man's religious nature in general, and to the verdict of the Christian conscious ness in particular. Let us briefly notice each of these points in order. The Bible represents a process of progressive revela tion. Of this process the incarnation is the culmina tion. All earlier and less complete forms of revelation point toward God's final personal disclosure of himself in the person of the eternal Son. This revelation is in terms of human life and experience. Earlier revelations of God through the providential guidance of nations, the equipment of chosen leaders, and the inspiration of prophets, were, by their very nature, less direct and perfect than is the personal self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The will of God may, indeed, be partially revealed by commandments and decrees, but the nature of God is adequately disclosed to mankind only in him who can say, " I and the Father are one ; he that hath seen me hath seen the Father " (John x. 30 ; xiv. 9). Having exhausted all other possibilities of revela- 118 DOCTRINE AND LIFE tion, God at length makes a personal revelation ; he comes into humanity in the person of his Son ; he assumes human conditions and relations ; he passes through the human experiences of temptation and trial, yet without sin ; he sits beneath the shadow of every human woe, and passing, at length, through death itself, re-enters his heavenly glory. It was this life which reveals God as nothing else does or can. It is in what Jesus Christ was that God has expressed most plainly his own nature and his thoughts and purposes toward man. This conception of the significance of the incarnation Tennyson has aptly embodied in the lines : — And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds.1 This revelation of God in Christ throws a most sig nificant light upon the whole purpose of God in history. Mystery as it is in its nature and method, it is not a mystery which darkens and confuses, but one which illumines. In its light the phenomena of more rudi mentary religions assume new meaning. The truths which underlie their rites and observances are set in plainer relief by the revelation in Christ, while the misconceptions and crudities of such systems are more clearly seen by its light and are allowed to fall away. Especially important is the light which the truth of the incarnation throws upon Jewish history. The rev elation of God in Christ is its fulfilment and its ex planation. The religious peculiarities of that history . 1 In Memoriam, Canto xxxvi. THE PERSON OF CHRIST 119 present to us an insoluble enigma, except upon the view that God was preparing for some signal self-mani festation such as Christianity finds in the incarnation. Involving as it does an inexplicable mystery, the in carnation crowns the scheme of divine revelation as the Bible represents it, and itself helps to explain many other facts of biblical history and teaching which on no other supposition can be so satisfactorily explained. The truth of the incarnation also answers important demands of man's religious nature. Deeply impressed, as man must ever be, with the mystery of the world and of life, believing that the world must have its origin and ground in reason, and that man must be destined for immortality, yet finding the world full of perplexity, the human spirit longs for nothing so much as for an adequate and authoritative disclosure of God. After all our searching, God is still invisible. We seem to hear his voice, but it is a voice out of a realm of mystery into which our eyes cannot penetrate. We are still left vacillating between our native convic tion of God and the uncertainty which arises from the lack of a direct manifestation of him. We can say with confidence that if God should disclose himself in a wholly unique manner through an incarnation, that disclosure, when properly attested, would afford satis faction to one of man's deepest wants. I do not claim that we should be warranted in arguing that these desires of man's religious nature for a fuller and more direct knowedge of God than nature and conscience supply, are an evidence that the person and work of Christ are the divinely appointed media of communi cating such knowledge. I do, however, maintain that 120 DOCTRINE AND LIFE when such a revelation as that which purports to have been made in Christ gives credible evidence of its gen uineness, this evidence is powerfully re-enforced by the evident adaptation of the revelation to human needs. These needs cannot, indeed, prove that God will reveal himself; but they can bear impressive testimony to the reality of revelation, when once it is made. It matters not how adequate the external or historic evidence of religious truths may be, they are never clothed for the mind with- their highest certitude until the heart attests their truth in experience. We are thus led to the consideration of a final point — the answer of the Christian consciousness to the truth of the incarnation. In Christ the craving of the soul for some embodiment of divinity in a form which it can apprehend and construe is met. In him the vagueness and abstractness which surround the name of God are, in a measure, dispelled, and he is brought near to men. His person has been to mankind the most helpful inter pretation of God. In Jesus Christ God is — if we may so speak — translated into terms of human life. I do not forget that this general statement of what Christ is for the Christian heart might be assented to by those who hold various conceptions of his person. I cannot help thinking, however, that the statement has its truest, highest meaning only on the presupposition of the proper divinity of Christ. On this view, God has come to us. Christ's work is the action of God in re demption. This view clothes his work with an intense and solemn reality. When we follow the Christ in his teaching, miracles, suffering, and death, we are read ing in terms of human experience what God is doing THE PERSON OF CHRIST 121 • for our salvation, I believe that the consensus of the Christian world attests the true deity of Christ. We need such an authoritative and direct disclosure of God as this view of his person presupposes. It is not enough that God should send us a prophet, even though he be the greatest of all prophets, and bear a fuller and clearer message than any other. It is not enough that God should send into our world some supernal intelli gence to speak to us of himself and of heaven. It is not merely a message from God that we want ; it is God himself. For man's salvation is required, not merely a proclamation of truths about God, but an actual residence and operation of God in human life and history. Many lines of evidence converge to establish the truth of this high conception of our Saviour's person. Such a revelation of God in humanity is a fitting culmination of the magnificent drama of revelation. The self-testi mony of Jesus, and the teachings of those who had pen etrated most deeply into the knowledge of his person and spirit, unite to proclaim the deity of our Lord. To the idea of an incarnation of God correspond the in eradicable longings of the human soul to know God in some apprehensible form ; and when God is thus re vealed, he is recognized and welcomed by those who have the spiritual perception to behold him. Thus do the voices oi revelation unite and blend with the testi mony of the Christian faith and experience of the world in the confession which is voiced in one of the noblest hymns of the ages : — Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ; Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. CHAPTER VIII THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT The nature and office of the Holy Spirit are pro gressively disclosed in Scripture. In the Old Testa ment, " the Spirit " is hardly more than a name for the power or presence of God. In the narrative of the Creation, for example, the Spirit of God is represented as brooding upon the dark waste of waters (Gen. i. 2). The Spirit is the wonder-working power of God. He sends forth his Spirit, and men are created (Ps. civ. 30). By his Spirit he bestows strength upon heroes, skill upon artificers, and the knowledge of his will upon prophets. But in the Old Testament the Spirit is not regarded as a person, nor is his sanctifying function in the life of man to any great extent recognized. The completed doctrine of the Spirit, as it appears in the Bible, is found in those farewell discourses of our Lord to his disciples which are recorded in chap ters xiv. - xvi. of the Gospel of John.1 Here the Spirit is described as a person — a self distinct from Christ. He is " another Comforter " or " Advocate." He is to be sent by the Father in Christ's name, and is to bring to the remembrance of the disci ples what Christ has taught. Personal pronouns are 1 For a critical discussion of the doctrine of the Spirit as there presented, I would refer the reader to my treatise on Thejohannine Theology, chap, viii, 122 THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 123 applied to him : " Me shall he glorify " 1 (John xvi. 14) ; " He shall teach you all things " (xiv. 26) ; " He shall bear witness concerning me" (xv. 26), etc. The acts and offices of a person are continually attributed to him, such as speaking, interpreting, glorifying Christ, and convincing the world of sin. The doctrine of the Spirit is thus one of the most distinctive elements of the Christian gospel. It was most fully elaborated by our Saviour himself in those solemn hours just before his passion, when he opened the deepest treasures of his mind and heart to his dis ciples. The language in which he sets forth the office and work which the Spirit is to discharge is most im pressive. The Spirit is not only to be his representative in the world, but is to carry forward and complete his work. Jesus regarded his own work as but a beginning of the great process of redemption and sanctification. The work of the Spirit is invested with special interest and importance on account of the significant relations into which that work is set. Its relation to Christ's own historic manifestation and to the advance of Chris tian truth and life in the world, offers a theme of un surpassed interest to the student of Christian thought and history. Let us now observe some of the more important bearings of the doctrine of the Spirit upon religious thought and life. This doctrine accentuates the truth of an actual presence -of God in the world and in human life. Ex perience shows that the thought of mankind concerning God tends strongly toward one of two extremes. It 1 The Greek is : ckeIpo; ipi Sofoet. 124 DOCTRINE AND LIFE tends either toward a pantheistic identification of God with nature, or toward a deistic separation of God from the world and from human life. The Christian doctrine avoids both these extremes with their pernicious conse quences. It conserves the truth which pantheism ex aggerates, by affirming the presence of God in his world, while it also conserves the truth which deism exaggerates, by maintaining the independence and su premacy of God in his relation to the world. Now, it is the former of these truths — that of the living pres ence of God in his world - — which the doctrine of the Spirit especially emphasizes. This it does, of course, with special reference to the religious life of mankind, without excluding, however, the elements of truth which the Old Testament contains respecting the re lations of the divine Spirit to nature and to the physi cal and mental life of man. A living sense of the presence of God, an intense conviction of the supernatural, is an essential element in all religion which is to have great power in the life of men. When that sense of God is lost, religion soon loses its hold upon the conscience and the heart. One of the greatest elements of power in Roman Catholic teaching lies in the stress which is laid upon the divine presence in the services and sacraments of the church. The devout worshipper feels, as he kneels at her altars and participates in her rites, that he is brought into contact with the supernatural, and that through the mediations of the church real divine power is bestowed upon him. In this whole conception of religion there lies a truth which must be cherished by those who would conserve the reality and value of public worship. THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 125 The presence of God should not be limited to priestly mediations or confined to holy places or holy rites. It should be more broadly and spiritually conceived ; but it must not be less clearly recognized and felt by us than by those who associate it with special religious rites. The vivid realization of the presence of God, and the reverence which springs out of that realization, lie at the foundation of all sincere worship and of all deep religious conviction and experience. Religion is correlation with God. Now, the truth of the Holy Spirit's office and func tion is fitted to fulfil the conditions of a deep and strong religious life. It assures us that the religious life is a divine reality. It is no mere subjective play of our own thought and feeling. Religion involves rela tions with the divine; real divine powers operate upon and within the Christian man. The religious life, ac cording to the doctrine of the Spirit, begins in an im- partation from God, and is fostered by the presence and power of God. The life of love, and all the virtues of the Christian character, spring from fellowship with God through the indwelling of the Spirit. The doc trine of the Spirit proclaims that God is very near us, and that forces of the spiritual and eternal order constantly penetrate our life. This conception makes religion intensely real. It is the divine life in man. Eternal life is already here ; the world of time and sense is swallowed up in the world of the Spirit, and life is transfigured by the presence and the love of God. The bearing of the work of the Spirit upon the re ligious life and character is still more clearly seen 126 DOCTRINE AND LIFE when we consider the relation of his work to the his toric mission of Christ. If, now, we turn to those chapters of John which contain our Lord's fullest teaching upon the work of the Spirit, we observe, first of all, that the Spirit is said to come "in his name" (John xiv. 26), that is, in continuation of Christ's own purpose and work for men. The work of Christ and that of the Spirit belong to the same sphere and con template the same great end, — the salvation and sanc tification of men. The Spirit's office represents the completion and application of the Saviour's work. This carrying forward of our Lord's saving mission the Spirit accomplishes by reminding the disciples of what Jesus had said, and by interpreting and applying his truth so as to bring their lives increasingly under its power and into accord with its demands (John xiv. 26 ; xvi. 13-15). Thus the mission of the Spirit is accom plished on the basis of the historic work of Christ, and is continually realizing, in the actual life of the world, the ends which the work of Christ contemplated. The doctrine of the Spirit thus clothes the incarna tion with new dignity and significance. The work of Christ while on earth is taken up and carried forward through all the ages of time, by the interpreting, sanc tifying, and convincing work of the Spirit ; and this great process of redemption will never cease till the purposes of God in man's salvation shall be complete. The appearance of Christ on earth is, in this view, no isolated event. It is not a mere incident of ancient history. It is a fact of world-wide significance. It represents truths and forces which are of permanent validity and perpetual power. It does not stand in THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 127 the dim distance, vague, undefined, and separate from the life of to-day. Through the work of the Spirit, it is related to every age, and to the life of every man. It makes its appeal anew to every generation and to every individual soul. The voice of God to man is not sa mere echo from the Judean hills ; it is a living voice speaking directly to the heart through the Spirit. To all this one may exclaim, " Oh, the mystery of it ! " to which we may well respond, " Yes ; but the need — the necessity of it!" No religion can satisfy the soul of man which consists merely of fine ideas and memories. The power of religion must rapidly wane when the sense of actual divine powers operating in human life is supplanted by a play of man's own sentiments and reflections. Now, the truth of the Spirit's function stands in perpetual protest against this weakening subjectivism in religion ; it affirms that the realm of faith is a realm of realities, not of phantoms, and that, in accepting Christ as our Master, we do not merely adopt a moral ideal, but we put our lives under the transforming power of a living, present Saviour. The doctrine of the Spirit is adapted to the pres ervation of the mystical element in religion. Mys ticism, it is to be admitted, has its own peculiar dangers. It may lead, for example, to a disregard of the historic facts of Christianity, and to an ex aggerated estimate of personal conviction and expe rience. Its representatives may sometimes confuse their own views of religious truth with revelation it self, and may assign to the inner light which the 128 DOCTRINE AND LIFE individual enjoys a greater value and authority than to the words of the Master himself. But these ten dencies spring from the perversion of a truth. A mystical element is essential in religion ; that is to say, religion is a matter of inner experience. It in volves a secret, spiritual union with God — an assured conviction of fellowship with the divine. The certi tude which is begotten of this conviction is an ele ment of no small importance in our religious life. If we cannot call it a source of authority in matters of faith, we can, at least, say that no voice of authority which speaks to us from without could ever win our complete assent without this answer of the heart in experience — this inward attestation of the truth of revelation. No word of God becomes truly such to us except through that appropriation and testing of it in our own lives by which it approves itself to be the truth. Upon the importance of this inner experience, and upon the value of the certitude which it begets, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit lays strong emphasis. It warrants the conviction that the experience of a mul titude of believers in the course of many centuries is a source of evidence for the truth of Christianity. The religion of Christ is continually proving itself true in the life of the individual Christian, and in the collective life of the church.1 If the doctrine of the Spirit be true, we are justified in appealing, not merely to historical proofs of the divine origin of our religion, but to the verification of its truth in 1 On this subject I would refer the reader to the classic treatise of the late Professor Stearns, The Evidence of Christian Experience, New York, 1891. THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 129 the Christian life of the ages. If the divine Spirit does really continue Christ's work in the world, we are certainly justified in holding that his testimony in the hearts of men is of the utmost importance in attesting its divine reality and power. The work of the Spirit makes Christianity something living and real. It was never more powerfully operative in the world than it is to-day. The historic mission of the Christ was an interpretation in terms of human speech and action, of divine powers and processes, which are in constant movement in the life of mankind. Many Christian people have felt that it would have been an inestimable privilege to live in the time and place of the Saviour's incarnation, and to have seen his human form and heard his voice. There is reason to be lieve that among the Christians of the apostolic age some who had enjoyed this privilege regarded themselves as highly favored beyond their brethren. But the words of Jesus himself would seem to suggest a different view of the matter. He tells his disciples that it is better for them that he should depart from them. To possess the Spirit whom he will send as his representative is better than to have his bodily presence (John xvi. 7). He clearly intimates that greater benefits are in store for his followers in the day of the Spirit than can be theirs in the day of his visible presence. Greater works than he has done, greater conquests for the truth, greater achievements in righteousness, shall follow his departure (John xiv. 1 2) ; while, under the illumination of the Spirit, prayer shall assume new value and power (John xvi. 23, 24). There is, indeed, a blessing in store for him who sees the Saviour in his beneficent human 130 DOCTRINE AND LIFE activity and, on that account, believes on him ; but there is a still greater blessing reserved for him who believes without having seen (John xx. 29), because such faith is, in the nature of the case, freer from all elements of human imperfection, and springs from a deeper spiritual apprehension of what Christ essentially is. Such a faith arises from the soul's sense of its need, and from its per ception of the adaptation of Christ to satisfy that need. Such faith, therefore, springs from what is deepest in human nature, and lays hold upon what is deepest in Christ. It sees Christ as the bread of life to the soul because of what he is. It mounts to the very heart of Christ, and is satisfied with nothing less than the hiding of its life with him in God. Though, like the Apostle Paul, it may once have known Christ after the flesh, yet as it grows and deepens, it at length knows him so no more (2 Cor. v. 16). This beatitude of those who have never seen Christ in the flesh Mr. Whittier has inter preted thus : — And what if my feet may not tread where he stood, Nor my ears hear the dashing of Galilee's flood, Nor my eyes see the cross which he bowed him to bear, Nor my knees press Gethsemane's altar of prayer? Yet, Loved of the Father, thy Spirit is near To the meek, and the lowly, and penitent here; And the voice of thy love is the same even now As at Bethany's tomb or on Olivet's brow. Oh, the outward hath gone ! — but in glory and power, The Spirit surviveth the things of an hour; Unchanged, undecaying, its Pentecost flame On the heart's secret altar is burning the same ! * 1 Palestine, closing stanzas. THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 131 The observations which have thus far engaged our attention lead us to a more direct consideration of the question, What is the work of the Spirit in the Chris tian man ? Briefly defined, his work is to foster the spiritual life. The Spirit secures in the Christian man the increasing realization of the purpose of Christ in his redemption. By his gracious and potent influence, Christian character is deepened and developed. The Christian virtues are the fruit of the Spirit. The enter prises of Christian charity and philanthropy are results of his indwelling in the hearts of men. Christian so ciety itself, with all its multiform institutions and organ izations for the betterment of mankind, is a product of the Spirit's power, working in the hearts of men, and leading them on into obedience to the truth of Christ. When we consider the development of Christian life in the world, it does not seem so strange that Jesus should have declared that in the days of the Spirit greater things than he had done should be accom plished by his disciples. Of course, in saying this, he assumes that these "greater things" are to be done in his name, and in the power of that " other Advocate '' who is to carry forward and apply his work. It is as if Jesus had said, " I have planted the seed of a new life in the soil of the world ; it will be for my disciples to the end of time to see its growth and to reap its rich fruitage." The principles and laws which he taught and illustrated in his life have been wrought into the thoughts and lives of men by the subtle processes of the Spirit ; they have permeated the civilization of the most advanced nations, and have left an indelible im press upon their institutions, their education, and their 132 DOCTRINE AND LIFE whole conception of the meaning and end of life. These are examples of the greater works which belong to the dispensation of the Spirit. No less wonderful has been the work of the Spirit in elevating and enriching the personal lives of men. The apostolic age presents striking examples. Look at the Apostle Peter. By nature rash, impetuous, and fickle, capable of denying his Lord almost while mak ing protestations of love ; capable of an inconsistency with his own principles and conduct which called down upon him the vehement rebuke of Paul ; yet see what he became — the rock-apostle upon whom Christ could, in some true sense, build his church, as he said he would. Look at John. Like his fellow-apostles he, at first, looked for an earthly kingdom which should come with" pomp and power, and in which the followers of the Messiah should hold high places ; he was ready to call down fire from heaven to consume the enemies of his Master. His views of the person and mission of Jesus, and his appreciation of his spiritual truth, seem to have been as defective as were those of his fel low-disciples. Yet this is the man who has given us that interpretation of the gospel which has been aptly called " the heart of Christ." Theologians have gen erally maintained that John has given us the deepest views of the divine character and the noblest portrayal of the gracious action of God in redemption which are to be found in all Christian literature. No other New Testament writer has risen to such lofty heights of contemplation as has John. This fact found recogni tion in the ancient church in the title "theologian," or " divine," that was applied to this apostle ; and even THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 133 more strikingly in the mediaeval church which repre sented the heavenward flight of his spirit by the soar ing of the eagle toward the sun. His character and career are a striking fulfilment of the promise of the Spirit. The "things of Christ" were wonderfully shown to him. He reveals an insight into the mind of the Saviour which is unequalled. In his writings are found the fullest description and the loftiest doctrine of the person of Christ which the New Testament any where presents. For him the work of Christ is divine, since Christ himself is divine. The whole historic mis sion of Jesus is grounded in the nature of God, and is as all-embracing in its purpose as the love of God which gave it birth. What folly to seek to explain the match less splendor of these conceptions apart from the work of the Holy Spirit of truth who unsealed the heavenly secrets of Christ to the mind of his beloved disciple. One great effect of the Holy Spirit's influence is to elevate and enrich faith. We have seen that the Spirit was to come "in Christ's name," that is, that his whole work was to be in line with Christ's work for men. In accord with this thought we are told that in the day of the Spirit, prayer shall be offered in his name. " Hith erto," said Jesus, "have ye asked nothing in my name " (John xvi. 24). He then proceeds to assure his disci ples that in the dispensation of the Spirit they shall ask in his name. It is thus evident that, to the mind of Jesus, prayer "in his name" involved some higher ele ment, and that this element is the result of the gift and illumination of the Spirit. The influence of the Spirit, when received and cherished, so fosters in the Christian man "the mind of Christ," that he is enabled to pray 134 DOCTRINE AND LIFE in accord with the wish and purpose of Christ for him — to hold all his desires and petitions subject to the thought and will of Christ. This, I think, must be prayer in Christ's name ; prayer, as we may say, in Christ himself, in his spirit ; prayer which seeks first of all, and most of all, what Christ, as the manifestation of the perfect life, is aiming to secure to men. Essentially the same truth is presented in the teach ing that the Spirit will bring to the remembrance of the disciples what Jesus had said to them (John xiv. 26), will guide them into all the truth (John xv. 26), and will glorify Christ by taking of his and declaring it unto them (John xvi. 14, 1 5). The Spirit's work deepens and completes the work, in the actual lives of men, which is provided for and begun by the historic manifestation of Jesus. Faith in him thus becomes a larger and richer thing through the purifying and elevating influences of the Spirit. There were marked limitations and de fects in the faith of the first disciples, which more and more disappeared through the power of the Spirit in their lives. Prejudices faded away, misconceptions were replaced, and misunderstandings vanished under the illumination of the Spirit of truth. Faith became larger and more spiritual. It was purified from the dross of worldly ambition and selfish expectation, and be came more and more a high and pure spiritual union with Christ. The defects which were incidental to faith on account of the bodily presence of the Saviour disappeared. Faith became something more than attachment to his human person, and penetrated more deeply into the heart of Christ. Thus it came to rest upon the truest and deepest grounds. What Jesus had THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 135 said proved true ; it was expedient for the disciples that he should go away, for only by so doing could he open the way to this enlargement and deepening of faith ; only in this way could the veil of sense which prevented them from seeing the deeper things of the gospel be taken away, and their eyes be opened to the larger and clearer vision of the Christ. On this point Archdeacon Hare has well said : " So long as he continued with them, they lived by sight, rather than by faith ; and sight disturbs faith, and shakes it, and weakens it. Sight, as belonging to the world of sense, partakes of its frailties and imperfections. To put forth all its power, faith must be purely and wholly faith." 1 Another element in the doctrine of the Spirit is that, through the development of Christian life and the ele vation of men's ideals, he is to convince the world of its sinfulness and of its need of Christ (John xvi. 8— 1 1). In the presence of the Spirit's work, the world stands convicted of its sin and of its exposure to the divine judgment. In the light which the same divine saving process throws upon history, the work .of Christ, and the principles and laws of life which he enthroned, are powerfully vindicated. This is the conviction of the world " concerning righteousness," of which Jesus speaks. This convincing or conviction of the world has thus two sides. Its negative side is the demon stration of the world's sin ; its positive side is the vin dication of the Christian ideal of life. The moral history of mankind is perpetually fulfilling these predictions of Jesus. Imperfectly as the motives and principles of Christ have been embodied in Chris- 1 The Mission of the Comforter, p. 140. 136 DOCTRINE AND LIFE tian society, they have demonstrated their divineness and their elevating and transforming power in the life of the world. Christian character and Christian institu tions — faulty as they have ever been — have, by their very presence and effects in the world, pronounced the verdict of condemnation upon the principles of selfish ness and sordidness which characterize the unchristian world. The righteousness which Christ defined and exemplified — the life of unselfish love — is triumph antly vindicated before the world by its appeal to all that is best in human nature, and by its inherent beauty and beneficent effects wherever it holds sway over the minds and hearts of men. Directly or indirectly, the world is compelled to confess the peerless superiority of Christian righteousness. This practical acknowledgment by the world of its own sinfulness, and of the excellence and desirableness of the Christian ideal of life, must, I think, become more and more general and explicit, as the achieve ments of the Spirit in personal life and in society be come greater. As civilization advances, as the tone of human life is heightened, and as the grosser elements of human nature are increasingly subjected to the sceptre of reason and love by the power and working of the divine Spirit, the verdict of Christ upon human sinfulness will be reaffirmed and justified, and the con ception of life which he presented will shine out with unique and peculiar splendor. It is the part of Chris tian faith to believe that the movements of the ages are the processes of the Spirit, and that the great enter prises of education and reform, of charity and benefi cence, which characterize our time are among the fruits THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 137 of those divine influences which mysteriously penetrate our life from God. It is the privilege of Christian hope to believe that these mighty tides of spiritual power will continue to rise and sweep over our world, and that results, in fulfilment of the Saviour's promises, of which we can now but faintly dream, are embraced within the purpose of Almighty Love, and are held in store for our race. CHAPTER IX THE FACT OF SIN In the foregoing studies we have dealt mainly with theology in the narrower sense of that term ; that is, with the Christian doctrine of the nature and action of God. We turn now to the doctrine of man. It might be thought that in turning away from the study of God to that of man, we should emerge from a region of mys tery and uncertainty into a realm where we could pro ceed with much confidence and certainty. And this is true in so far as, in this transition, we enter the world of direct personal knowledge and experience. But how soon are the limits of this knowledge reached ! A little inquiry suffices to show us that we know too little of ourselves to solve with confidence the problems of our own being. We consequently find that there is not only as great a difference of opinion among scholars in regard to man as in regard to God, but that there are problems quite as perplexing in the realm of anthropology as in that of theology proper. One side of our human nature we have already con sidered. We saw that it was a fundamental assump tion of Christian teaching that man is morally kindred to God, and that he therefore possesses by his very nature the capacity to know, love, and serve God. But there is another side of human nature upon which 138 THE FACT OF SIN 139 Christianity lays great stress — man is sinful. Our re ligion constantly assumes the fact of sin. The proce dure of God in revealing himself to men is determined by the fact of sin. Christ came into the world to save sinners. The Christian gospel is a message and means of salvation from sin. That gospel would certainly be a very different thing from what it now is, were it not for the presence of sin in the world. Many theologians hold that sin was the sole occasion of Christ's coming into the world. Others suppose that, even apart from sin, there would have been so great a need, on man's part, of such a revelation of God as we have in Christ, as to make it reasonable to believe that the incarnation would have taken place. No one, of course, can give a certain answer to such a problem. I can conceive of reasons why Christ should have come into the world, even if sin had not invaded human life ; but I cannot imagine that, if such had been the case, some of the most significant ele ments of our present Christianity would be in exist ence. The experiences of Christ would necessarily have been very different. His death, had it taken place, could not have happened at the hands of sinners and for sin. Whatever we may think in regard to what might have been, it is certain that God's action in redemption through Christ has been directed and shaped in view of sin, and that the fact of sin is there fore very fundamental in that whole view of the world and of human life which Christianity presupposes. I have purposely taken as the title of this chapter " The Fact of Sin." I mean by this expression to in timate that what is practically important is to see how 140 DOCTRINE AND LIFE Christianity regards the actual sinfulness of men. It is less essential to frame a formal definition of sin, or to adopt a theory of its origin, than it is to discern the Christian view of its inner nature and effects. Most Christian thinkers now agree that the word " selfishness " best describes the nature of sin. Sin is the assertion of the human will against the divine. In scriptural language it is the " transgression of the law," or " lawlessness " (i John iii. 4). This viola tion of the divine law is of the nature of selfishness in the most comprehensive sense of that term. As all virtue consists in harmony with the " good and holy and acceptable will of God," so all moral evil consists in disharmony with God's will. Now, since the moral nature of God is love, all goodness is comprehended in love or in likeness to God. In like manner, all sin is comprehended in the opposite of love, which is self ishness. It may not seem evident at first thought that selfish ness is the opposite of love. When, however, we con sider that love in man consists in the supreme choice of God as the object of his desire and service, it ap pears that sin consists in the choice of self instead of God. Sin is self-will in some of its forms, and leads inevitably to self-righteousness and self-glorification. Love seeks to secure our own true good and the true good of all other men, by desiring and striving to pro mote obedience and likeness to God. Selfishness wil fully breaks away from God, and seeks its own gratifica tion and indulgence. Selfishness is, therefore, radically different from self-love. Jesus assumes in his teaching that men ought to love themselves. They are accord- THE FACT OF SIN 141 ingly commanded to love their neighbors as them selves. Love of self is not only right in itself, but it is so necessary that without it love of others would be quite impossible. Self-love, in the true sense of the word love, is the choice and pursuit of one's own best good in accord with the will of God, which is ever ruled by love. Selfishness, on the contrary, ignores God, and finds its only law in man's own will and pleasure. It is now readily seen how self-love differs from self ishness. They differ chiefly in the objects which they seek. Selfishness seeks to further personal ends which are not connected with the true interests of life, or which) at least, are not so sought and pursued as to further those interests. Selfishness operates in the sphere of the inferior concerns of life. It aims at self- gratification, rather than self-discipline ; at ends that terminate on self, rather than at those which, in turn, become means for the benefit of others as well as self. Self-love and selfishness may, in certain cases, seek the same objects ; but they seek them with such different motives, and in such a different spirit, that the two qualities are most clearly distinguished. Suppose two men are seeking the same office or position. The altogether predominant, perhaps exclusive, thought of one is that the position will bring to him some personal distinction and benefits which he can enjoy with and for himself. He sees the place and all the opportunities connected with it only as related to his own comfort, or the gratification of his personal ambition. This is the temper of selfishness. Another man makes an equally earnest effort for the place. But his thought of it is 142 DOCTRINE AND LIFE that it is a post of usefulness, a position of influence. It gives personal distinction, to which he is not insen sible ; but what is far more and better, it gives oppor tunities for service, for the development of the man's own character, and thus for the exertion of wide and good influence. This man has his own interests at heart too ; but in how different a way ! And what a different range of interests is uppermost in his mind ! He has self-love, because he strives to put himself where he can be the most of a man possible, and do his best work ; but his interest in himself, being of the nature of real love, cannot aim chiefly at the lower ends, or stop with the consideration of mere personal aims, but necessarily goes out to embrace other lives, and tends constantly upward toward the lofty ideal of Jesus, the making of others the objects of as eager an interest as that which we ought to feel in our own true welfare. Who can doubt that, in the two cases supposed, there would be a world-wide dif ference in the ways in which these men would admin ister and use the position so sought, and in the personal influence which they would exert in it ? With what different motives and spirit are men doing the same tasks all around us ! After all, it is the ends which they have in view which make the greatest dif ference in the lives of men. Two men make money side by side at the same counter. What different things that money-making means to them ! To one it means selfishness ; to the other love, — self-love, no doubt, but also love to others, for self-love never goes alone. Self-love, from its very nature, involves and leads to love for others; since we soon find that we THE FACT OF SIN 143 cannot seek and promote our true well-being in isola tion from others. Selfishness is the principle of isola tion ; love is the principle of society. Its motto is, " We are members one of another." There is a radical difference between these two qual ities. Selfishness belittles life and narrows the world by making the individual the measure of all things ; self-love ennobles life by making the individual a part of a social order, in which men have mutual rights and duties, and are bound together by common interests. Thus selfishness drags the world down to its own little measure, while self-love lifts the individual up upon the plane of universal human interests, and becomes the in spiration to doing unto others as we should wish others to do unto us. And all love, whether to self or to others, has its source and spring in our moral kinship to God, and its only perfect norm in the love of him who made us in his own image, and made us for himself. Sin is a perversion — a perversion of the will from its true harmony with the will of God, and a conse quent perversion of the whole character. Sin is dis harmony with the divine order ; it is failure on man's part to realize the true idea of his nature and destiny. It is significant that the root meaning of the biblical words for sin is — missing the mark. They suggest that sin is failure, misdirected effort, perverted choice and action. It follows from this conception that sin does not belong to human nature as such; it is alien to the original, divine idea of man. It arises only from the perverse use of human powers. The narrative of crea tion in Genesis asserts that all the works of God — in cluding man — were, in their divine idea and constitution, 144 DOCTRINE AND LIFE " very good." " And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Gen. i. 31). The theory has been widely held that sin is an in cident of man's finiteness ; that it is a name for the metaphysical imperfection of human nature. The ten dency of this view is to ascribe to sin a purely nega tive character ; to make it a mere absence of good. In this view sin consists only in imperfection, ignorance; or mistake. It is an inevitable accompaniment of moral development. The very idea of progress in goodness implies the existence, at any given point in the process, of imperfection or sin. The cure for sin, then, is en lightenment or culture. To substantially this conclu sion many current theories of evolution inevitably lead. Sin is incidental to man's moral development out of savagery into civilization and culture. It is the sur vival in human nature of the animal impulses and passions which have not yet been eliminated in the process of moral evolution. This view easily allies itself with the theory that sin is inherent in the body or flesh. Some Christian theologians have adopted this opinion, and have sought to defend it on biblical grounds. The Apostle Paul frequently speaks of the flesh as contrary to man's better part, the spirit or reason, and describes it as a sinful power or principle. At first sight the view appears very plausible that Paul regarded sin as consisting in the impulses and passions of the flesh. This was a method of thought concerning sin which was current in Greek philosophy ; and some scholars have, with considerable plausibility, sought to prove that Paul adopted it and elaborated it in his epistles. THE FACT OF SIN 145 A close analysis of his teaching on this point, how ever, will suffice to show that the apostle distinguishes between sin and the flesh, despite the fact that he does so closely associate them. The course of his thought on the subject, so far as we can trace it in his epistles, seems to have been something like this : The flesh is — as so commonly represented in the Old' Testament — a symbol of man's weakness, both physical and moral. Viewing it as a symbol of moral weakness, it rfeturally stands for those impulses, appetites, and pas sions which reside in the body. In a conspicuous degree do these impulses act as occasions and incen tives to sin. Thus sin may be said to have its special seat and sphere of manifestation in the flesh. In this way sin and the flesh are closely allied, and may, within certain limits, be spoken of as synonymous. "The flesh " becomes a name for man's unrenewed nature in general, because the sinful man is one in whom the natural desires, rather than the spiritual nature, are dominant. Sin is not, however, with Paul strictly synonymous with the flesh. Sin dwells in the flesh, it thrives in the soil of carnal appetites and inclina tions, but it is itself distinguishable from the flesh. Its origin is not in the flesh, and in its essential nature it does not pertain to it. It has its origin In the will, and its seat in the permanent preferences which are the result of the will's action. The Apostle Paul, and the Bible generally, treat sin, not as a physical, but as a voluntary affair. Sin belongs to the realm of action, choice, and character. It is impossible to reconcile the Christian doctrine of sin with any pantheistic theory which regards moral 146 DOCTRINE AND LIFE evil as a metaphysical imperfection, or with any evo lutionary philosophy which treats it as a defect inci dental to the development of the race. The divergence between these views of sin and that which pervades the Bible does not relate merely or mainly to the doctrine of the fall, but to the nature and guilt of sin. viewed as a matter of history and experience. According to the Bible, the correlative of sin is guilt. If sin is a mere privation of good, if it is mere mis take, misconception, or natural imperfection, there need be, there can be, no sense of guilt on account of it. Christ and the biblical writers, however, teach that sin is guilty, and that the human conscience attests its guilt. The sense of blameworthiness on account of sin may, of course, be relatively obscured ; but the very fact that the feeling of guilt asserts itself when the conscience is allowed its normal utterance, is proof that guilt is the natural concomitant of sin. The con fessions qf sin throughout the Bible breathe language which springs from the sense of guilt. The prodigal son did not merely acknowledge misapprehension and mistake. His language was : " I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight : I am no more worthy to be called thy son " (Luke xv. 18). Every prayer for forgiveness involves a confession of the guilt of sin. The very idea of the divine mercy or grace involves as its correlative the blameworthiness of mankind. The publican's prayer, " God be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke xviii. 13), couples together in their inseparable relations the idea of God as merciful and of sin as guilty. One further illustration may be drawn from the Psalmist's prayer and confession : — THE FACT OF SIN 147 Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness : According to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my trans gressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: And my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done this evil in thy sight : That thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest (Ps. Ii. 1-4). To the guilt which attaches to sin, the common con sciousness of mankind, as well as the Bible, bears wit ness. It finds ample recognition in literature. I will adduce two or three illustrations. Victor Hugo, in Les Mis/rabies,1 pauses in the midst of his narrative to take a glance into the conscience of Jean Valjean. He says : " There is nothing more terrifying than this species of contemplation. The mental eye can nowhere find greater brilliancy or greater darkness than within man ; it cannot dwell on anything which is more formidable, complicated, mysterious, or infinite. There is a specta cle grander than the ocean, and that is the conscience ; there is a spectacle grander than the sky, and it is the interior of the soul." Hugo proceeds to describe the ef forts of Valjean to escape the terrors of remorse which darkened his soul : " He rose from his chair and bolted the door. He was afraid lest something might enter, and he barricaded himself against the possible. A mo ment later, he blew out his light, for it annoyed him, and he fancied that he might be overseen. By whom ? Alas, what he wanted to keep out had entered ; what he wished to blind was looking at him ! It was his con- 1 Ch. Ii. A Tempest in a Brain. 148 DOCTRINE AND LIFE science, that is to say, God." Commenting on this ex perience, our author adds : " It is no more possible to prevent thought from reverting to an idea than it is to prevent the sea from returning to the shore. With the sailor this is called the tide, with the guilty it is called remorse ; God upheaves the soul as well as the ocean." The many powerful passages in which Shakespeare illustrates the saying which he puts into the mouth of Hamlet, that " conscience does make cowards of us all," are doubtless familiar to the reader. I will quote but one. Macbeth, led on by "vaulting ambition," has ac complished the murder of Duncan. When the deed is done, he finds, as he had feared, that " even-handed justice commends the ingredients of his poisoned chal ice to his own lips." Afterward in his chamber in com pany with Lady Macbeth he hears a knocking and exclaims : — i Whence is that knocking? How is't with me, when every noise appals me? What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.1 The fact that sin pertains to the will involves the conclusion that sin does not consist merely of isolated sinful acts. There is such a thing as a state of sin fulness, a sinful character. Jesus taught that in God's sight a man may be guilty of murder, even if he does not commit the overt act. Hate is the essence of mur- 1 Macbeth, Act ii., Scene 2. THE FACT OF SIN 149 der, as lust is the essence of unchastity. Christian teaching accords with the verdict of the human con science in affirming that sin inheres in the charac ter, in the disposition. Out of the sinful heart are the issues of the sinful life in specific evil acts. The phi losopher Kant said : " Nothing can possibly be con ceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will." x If this statement is true, its converse must also be true, that nothing can be called evil without qualifica tion, except an evil will. It is the fact that sin inheres in the will, and thus has its seat in the character, which lends such great significance to the law and power of habit. We may define habit as the facility which comes from the fre quent repetition of an action. The law of habit, then, means that the oftener a given moral action is repeated, the greater becomes the facility with which it is done, and the greater the inclination to do it. This law is a beneficent one, since it holds as well with regard to good actions as to evil. The law of habit helps the good man as much as it harms the bad man. It is not the law which is to blame for men's sins ; it is the way in which men, by evil choices and actions, per mit the law to confirm them in the commission of sin. " The facility with which we commit sin," says Augus tine, "is a punishment for sins already committed." This is but to say that every evil choice or action passes into character, and makes its contribution to our permanent preferences. The most terrible penalty of sin is the sinful character which sin engenders. The 1 T. K, Abbott's edition of Kant's Theory of Ethics, page 9. 150 DOCTRINE AND LIFE most fearful consequences of sin are its moral conse quences in the life of him who commits it. It is the operation of the law of evil habit which creates what is called in theology "moral inability" to choose and do the right. The deeper one descends into the sinful life, the less desirous and the less able is he to return from it. Evil habit multiplies its power over the sinner as the banyan-tree strengthens its hold upon the earth. This tree drops its roots from its branches as well as from its trunk. These strike into the ground until every limb is held as with a rod of iron. Many of these roots grow until they at length become as large as the original trunk, which thus becomes lost in the multitude of new growths. Once the tree might have been transplanted with ease ; but who could uproot and remove the tangled forest which it has at length become ? It is thus that evil habit expands itself, and strengthens its sway over the whole scope of human activities and powers, until at length every faculty is held within its grasp, and the work of change becomes next to impossible. Every evil choice is one more blow of the hammer by which the soul forges the chains of evil thought and habit which bind it to earthliness and sin. But it may be asked, Does this "moral inability," which evil habit induces, mean the loss of free will ? It means the fixity of the will in a certain direction or line of action. There is nothing outside the will of the worst of men which is compelling him to go on in his evil courses ; it is his own fixed choice ; it is the character which is in his own will which is urging him forward. The will of man is free within THE FACT OF SIN 151 the limits of its own state. The best of men is free to commit the worst crime so far as any preventing cause outside himself is concerned. When we say he cannot, we mean he will not. His will is so con firmed in goodness that we rightly say it is morally impossible for him to do the evil act in question. The case is similar with the wicked man. His will, by a long course of wrong choice and action, has practically restricted its own moral liberty. Desire for the good is so weakened that the will spontane ously takes a wrong direction. This truth, concern ing the power of evil habit to confirm the will in a given course of action, and to weaken the motives which would incline it to pursue the contrary course, Whittier has strikingly depicted in his poem entitled The Answer, two stanzas of which I quote : — Forever round the Mercy-seat The guiding lights of Love shall burn; But what if, habit-bound, thy feet Shall lack the will to turn? What if thine eyes refuse to see, Thine ear to Heaven's free welcome fail, And thou a willing captive be, Thyself thy own dark jail? We have now reviewed the main points in the Chris- tain doctrine of sin. I apprehend that with the state ments thus far made most Christian thinkers would substantially agree. The Christian consciousness rec ognizes sin as guilty; that is, as incurring the divine displeasure, and as needing the divine forgiveness. It recognizes that sin is more than the sum of specific 152 DOCTRINE AND LIFE sins ; that it pervades the whole character, and corrupts the springs of motive and feeling. When, however, we pass beyond the more obvious teaching of Scripture ana the common verdict of experience on these and allied points, we find little agreement among theologians. Concerning the origin of sin, its relation to the fall of Adam described in Genesis, its relation to the nature which we bring with us into the world, and the man ner in which it spreads itself abroad among mankind, the widest differences of theory prevail. We might leave out of view all these questions on the ground that our purpose contemplates the study of our various themes chiefly from the standpoint of Christian experi ence. It will be useful, however, to enter into the consideration of them far enough to make it apparent that they stand on quite different grounds from those facts of life on which the elements of the doctrine of sin thus far described are seen to rest. I shall first briefly describe the two historic theories which have prevailed in Calvinistic theology respect ing what is called "original sin;" that is, the native or inherited sinfulness of mankind. The first theory to be noticed is that which was elaborated by Augustine (354-430) under the influence of Neoplatonic philos ophy. It maintains that all men are guilty for Adam's sin because all men committed it. All mankind was seminally present in Adam, and therefore sinned when he sinned. Human nature had not yet been distributed into individuals. Adam was the race, and hence the race sinned in him. Human nature in its totality is therefore sinful and guilty. One of the maxims of this theory is, "Sin is a nature, and that nature is THE FACT OF SIN 153 guilt." The principal American treatises on doctrinal theology which advocate this theory are those of Dr. W. G. T. Shedd and Dr. A. H. Strong. The second theory to be noticed had its origin in Holland in the seventeenth century, and is called the Federal or Cove nant theory. This theory denies that all men really participated in Adam's sin, and maintains that, ac cording to a covenant with Adam, God made him the representative of mankind in general, and that Adam, therefore, was to stand or fall for the race. He fell, and the guilt of his fall is therefore imputed to those whom he represented. In this view men did not sin in Adam actually, but only putatively or. represen tatively. The principal defenders of this theory in this country are the Princeton theologians. A distinguished German theologian, Dr. Julius Muller (i 801-1878), in a masterly treatise on the Christian doctrine of sin, has propounded a different theory of man's native sinfulness. He laid down the following principles : Guilt can only attach to personal sin ; it cannot be inherited; it cannot be imputed. At the same time, we must hold to the organic unity of the race ; and all are sinful and guilty, as a matter of fact, and that from the very beginning of moral action. Where, then, is that wrong self-determination of all to be found in which guilt took its rise ? Augustine an swers, in Adam ; but his descendants had no personal, conscious existence in Adam, and therefore could not responsibly choose and act in him. This answer can not establish the existence in Adam of that self-decis ion which is the necessary basis of guilt. The Federal theory answers, Guilt is not correlative to self-deter- 154 DOCTRINE AND LIFE mination, but to God's imputation ; but this view obscures the very nature of guilt, and directly violates our first principle, that guilt attaches only to personal transgression. Miiller concludes that we can only ex plain the universality and the guilt of sin by suppos ing that men existed in some previous state of being in which they sinned, and from which, therefore, they brought a corrupt nature into the world. To most per sons this theory will seem like carrying the problem to the utmost bounds of thought, and throwing it over into the abyss of absolute mystery. The New England theologians also devoted them selves energetically to this problem. They elaborated the view that by virtue of their race-connection with Adam all men had inherited a corruption or deprava tion of nature, which, however, could not be called, in the strict sense, sinful, and on account of which alone men were not condemned. They recognized the princi ple of heredity as affecting the moral life, but held that men were not responsible or guilty for inherited ten dency, but only for their own personal, voluntary action. This theory involved the, denial that infant children were sinners, and were objects of God's wrath from the very moment of birth. It is beyond my purpose to discuss these theories ; since they do not, for the most part, belong to the Christian doctrine of sin considered as a matter of experience. My object in referring to them is to make it appear that the Christian and scriptural doctrine concerning real sin as known in experience, and as everywhere operative in human life, is to be broadly distinguished from these discordant and unverifiable THE FACT OF SIN 155 speculations respecting " original sin " and " native de pravity." I will only add the following suggestions in regard to them : — I. There is very little in Scripture which, on any method of interpretation, can be made to bear upon these theories ; and it may well be doubted whether, on a critical and historical view of Scripture, there is any teaching therein respecting "original sin." The the ories which have been current in the church all rest upon the assumption that the narrative of the first sin in Genesis is strictly historical. Biblical criticism, how ever, has rendered this supposition more than doubtful. The legends of the early chapters of Genesis are widely different from historical narratives ; and their meaning is to be found, not by regarding them as history, but by observing the general religious conceptions which they embody and symbolize. But even if theology continues to regard these stories as history, there is little scrip tural support for any doctrine of original sin. The principal proof-texts are : " As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive " (i Cor. xv. 22) ; " As through one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin," etc. (Rom. v. 12 sq.) ; and, "And were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest " (Eph. ii. 3).1 The context shows that the last of these passages refers, not to inherited sinfulness as such, but to sin fulness which had been acquired through actual diso bedience. The second passage refers, I believe, to a sinning of all men when Adam sinned, but in a figura tive sense, as all Christians are said to have been cruci- 1 For a critical consideration of these passages I would refer the reader to my Pauline Theology, in loco. 156 DOCTRINE AND LIFE fied with Christ. The first passage, no doubt, assumes a natural relation of sinful humanity with Adam, but neither states nor implies anything as to the nature of that relation. 2. There is a great and mysterious fact which the various theories of " original sin," seek to interpret, — a race-connection, by virtue of which the individual shares in the physical and moral consequences of the life of his progenitors. This fact the Bible recognizes. The passages in which it is recognized theology has com monly interpreted in accord with preconceived theories respecting God and the world. It has thus far taken little account of the natural law of heredity, concerning which science has taught us so much in recent years. " Original sin " has been chiefly studied by theologians as a matter of pure theory. An acute critic, himself an accomplished theologian, reviewing one of the ablest and most famous of our " bodies of divinity," expresses his regret that its author "borrows so little from the scientific discoveries of our age to confirm the teachings of the Bible. In fact [continues the reviewer], he seems to prefer theology pure and simple to theology allied with science. The teachings of the Bible, inter preted by his own exegesis, are more conclusive to him than the same truths interpreted and buttressed by natural laws."1 The transmission of sinful tendencies is a mystery which there is no reason to believe that human wisdom will ever be able to resolve ; but I believe that much more light will yet be thrown upon it by the study of 1 From an article entitled " Original Sin and Evolution," by Professor Heman Lincoln in The Independent, Sept. 2, 1880. THE FACT OF SIN 157 the natural laws of heredity, than it has hitherto re ceived from centuries of a priori speculation and equally a priori exegesis. Even if the study of heredity should finally teach us but little concerning the mystery, the little which it does teach will have the advantage of agreeing — so far as it goes — with the facts of life. I do not believe that what we shall learn from actual observation and experience, that is, from the study of God's action in natural law, will serve to baffle all rational interpretation, and to perplex our moral intui tions, as do the theories that we come into the world under the curse of God on account of a sin which we committed centuries before we were born, or that God condemns us for the sin of a representative in whose selection we had no share. CHAPTER X THE ATONEMENT The doctrine of the atonement is the correlate of the doctrine of sin. But for the fact of sin, there could be no atonement. It follows that the conception which one entertains concerning sin will powerfully affect his notions of atonement. If sin is merely an inci dent of man's moral developrhent, if it is a mere de fect or imperfection which is due to our finiteness or imprisonment in the flesh, there can be no atonement for it. Unless sin involves guilt, it requires no atone ment, since it requires no forgiveness. The word " atonement " denotes the method of God's action in providing for the forgiveness^ of sin. Any theory, therefore, which eliminates from sin the element of guilt renders forgiveness unnecessary, and logically involves a denial of atonement. There is another conception which must always strongly influence the doctrine of atonerhent ; that is, the idea of God. A glance at the religions of the world serves to show that the conception of the Deity which is cherished by any people powerfully affects all their thoughts respecting the way in which his favor is to be procured, and the way in which he manifests that favor toward mankind. The same prin ciple holds true in Christianity. If, for example, it 158 THE ATONEMENT 159 be said that God's nature is primarily strict and un bending justice, so that he must mete out to all sin its full desert of penalty, then^when it is asked, How does he provide for the forgiveness of sin ? the answer must be, By inflicting upon a 'substitute for man the full penalty due the world's sin. In this view, God must punish sin. He cannot forgive it until he has first punished it. If, then, he is not to punish, but to forgive it, in the case of the men who have com mitted it, he must punish it vicariously in a substitute who takes the place of sinful man and endures fiis punishment. Suppose, on the other hand, that the divine nature be conceived as benevolence. In that case, nothing will be said of expiation or of the satisfaction of divine justice in order to forgiveness. The atonement will be treated as a method which God adopts for recon ciling man to himself by a special exhibition of his mercy, and by furnishing special motives to men to repent and forsake their sins. The first theory, built on the conception of retributive justice as the funda mental attribute of God, speaks constantly of Christ as enduring the penalty of human sin and thereby appeasing the wrath of God. Its great words are — expiation, satisfaction, penal suffering, etc. The second view, proceeding from the perpetual willingness of God to forgive sin, speaks of the vicarious love and sym pathy of Christ, and of God as winning mankind to himself through this consummate revelation of his eter nal goodness. I have briefly sketched these two conceptions of the redeeming work of Christ in order to show how the 160 DOCTRINE AND LIFE idea of God necessarily colors and moulds our notions of atonement. This fact will illustrate the assertion which was made in an earlier chapter, that nothing is so important in all Christian thinking as a correct conception of the character of God. In its application to our present subject the idea of God which is cher ished