place of intellectual terms, is not less anthropomorphic, and forsakes the higher for the lower: Personality as much transcending impersonal mechanical conceptions as Humanity transcends the crystal or the seaweed. It is possible that there may be a mode of being as greatly transcending Intelligence and Will as these exceed mechanical motion, but our minds are utterly incompetent to form even an approach to conception of such a Being, and we are not responsible to any Being, whoever and whatever he may be, of whom we cannot know anything. We are to think of God as transcending all thought, yet dwelling in our thought; as without parts and passions, yet as manifested in our every limb, and abiding in all our affections. We are to worship this God, not only with the silent, secret, mysterious homage of the inner man; but also with those external, decorous, reverential observances, which, giving outward and visible form to the acts of the spirit, constitute true worship. To plead as an excuse for failing in this due homage, by body and soul, that the Wonderful Being whom we all acknowledge, whom our knowledge lights us to, and our emotions lead us to, must not be thought of as a Person, but rather be reduced to a vacuity—a sort of aureity without the gold, thought without mind, principle without person, so that by means of this incomprehensible nothing we attain to something higher than Personality and Intelligence-may, indeed, assert a transcendental difference, but eliminates everything essential from worship, and takes even the possibility of reasonableness from piety. Those who insist that God is eternally and infinitely so far above us that all intellectual and emotional exercise on the high theme is but an insult to Godhead, are in danger of losing that soundness of mind by which alone right judgment is formed; for it is impossible continually to seek that from which they are ever thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of either knowing or finding; and, ceasing to exercise themselves in these high efforts, they become incapable of making them. Nor is that all: a transcendental Being, infinitely above intelligence and emotion, is a pure negation, and all argument concerning Him is based on the Unknown yet Known. 39 delusion that nothing can be more rationally realized than something; but to regard the Unseen Reality as the absence of everything we can imagine as real, whether bad or good, is unnatural, irrational, unbecoming. Unnatural, because human instinct universally yearns after a future life and knowledge of God. Irrational, for we are able to understand well enough many things about God; and that the Divine Being is eternal, unchangeable, immaterial, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, is a far more reasonable belief than the gratuitous assumption that He is unlike everything that all the manifestations of Him would lead us to expect. Unbecoming, for it divests Deity of all that appeals either to intellect or emotion; and degrades Him to an eternal energy, an inscrutable power, neither to be loved nor feared. To say -"The Ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived by us, because He is in every respect greater than can be conceived;" and then to tell us "Matter, motion, force, are better symbols of the Unknown Reality than are our highest conceptions of supreme will, goodness, wisdom," is not to forsake personality for something higher, but to give a dreary beetle-view of God. Deity is something more than the universe. He cannot be identified with Nature, and yet He is no absentee God, sitting idle and outside His world, but dwells in it as His star-domed city; without Him not a sparrow falls to the ground, while through every star and grass-blade, but mostly through man's soul, beams the glory of His presence. Of course, it can be objected that, however sublime our idea of a Personal God and Creator, we can do no more than assign to Him exalted human attributes. If the objector means that by Person we understand an infinitely intelligent, thinking Being; and that by Creator we mean that this Person is everywhere present, pervading the material universe indeed, but distinct from it and superior to it; if he says that we look into nature for physical signals of an everliving will, and read the universe as an autobiography of an Infinite Spirit, repeating Himself in miniature within our spirit; this represents our views with sufficient clearness. Personality is not used in any sense of limitation, but as the mysterious aspect of the Dynamis, the omnipresent Energy, to whose eternal decrees we submit, and on whose constancy we implicitly rely. We decline to call Him Power, or Matter, or Motion. The Name of the great "I Am" has ever been in essence incomprehensible; but we say "God is Spirit," and we are kept from assigning human or material attributes to Him by the unsolvable mystery being formulated as a Trinity in unity. When we think of matter, space, energy, time; that matter is solid, or fluid, or gaseous; that space is of three dimensions; that energy displays itself as force in attraction, in repulsion, in motion, and in another trinity as life, as intelligence, as emotion; that time is past, present, future; these shapings of thought, formulated in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which are for ever striving after higher and purer ideality, sufficiently guard us against imputing the feebleness of man to God. REVELATION OF THE GODHEAD. 1. If we say that the universe is the autobiography of an infinite Spirit, then Nature is a revelation of that Supernatural, whom we adore as the eternal, life-giving Principle (Ps. xix. 1; Rom. i. 20): "a power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, of which all phenomena, as presented in consciousness, are manifestations, but which we can only know through these manifestations." 1 Here is a formula legitimately obtained by the employment of scientific methods, the last result of a subjective analysis on the one hand, and of an objective analysis on the other hand. We will put it to use-Unity of science being the reflection of the unity of the Reason and Intelligence pervading Nature, our own reason and intelligence, being part of Nature, are also a reflection. Mind is the thinker and investigator, a seer concerning the presence of the living God in the world, a twofold presence: external, in the phenomena of Nature; internal, by the consciousness which takes knowledge of phenomena. 2. These phenomena divide themselves into good and evil. There is a soul of goodness in things evil, and a heart of truth in things false; a taint of evil within the good, and a grain of 1 "Cosmic Philosophy,” vol. ii. p. 415: James Fiske. Consciousness of Good and Evil. 4I falsity in our apprehension of apparent truth. Our consciousness and actual experience show that this good and this evil germinate out of something apart from ourselves. No man's luck, so to speak, is pulled by only one string; nor do events happen simply because they are bad or good, "else all eggs would be addled or none at all." 3. The fact, thus arrived at, as to good and evil, is the result not of one, but of all concrete experience; is an induction from universal consciousness, and ranks in certainty with the postulates of exact science; is the common foundation of those religious ideas concerning God, Good, Evil, Creation, which are almost, if not quite, universal: Ideas different, yet allied; neither accidental nor factitious; not superficial but deep-seated; not evolved, nor slowly accumulated and organised, but, however degraded or distorted or magnified, striking deep roots into our nature. They affect men's interpretations of the simplest mechanical accidents, the most complicated events in the histories of nations, the diverse habits of thought, the different orders of minds, the good or ill tone of feeling, and the daily conduct of life. To suppose that they are groundless, so shakes the foundations of human intelligence that nothing can be relied on. That doctrines of good and evil are priestly inventions; that in every society, past and present, savage and refined, certain members of the community combined to delude the rest in one and the same way; is not tenable: nor does any artificial origin account for the natural facts. These facts are the ground of intelligent consciousness as to good and evil, the foundation of the moral sentiment which responds to them—not the creations of that sentiment, and that sentiment is as normal as is any other faculty. 4. View this more accurately: Religion, everywhere present, together with science organising facts into the mass of human experience, are the weft and the warp of history. Both have their near and visible side, the Natural; the remote and eternal, the Supernatural. Each holds a truth, the needful complement of the other; and when our mind is capable of realising due conceptions of both, discoveries will be on a grander scale. "As the history of every age witnesses, there is an undeniable religious need that clings to human Nature, a need of recognising a something above Nature, and of fellowship with the same, which only asserts itself the more forcibly the longer it is repressed. The predominance of that worldly bent of mind which will acknowledge nothing above Nature, does but call forth in the end a stronger reaction of the longing after the supernatural; the prevalence of an all-denying unbelief invariably excites a more intense desire to be able to believe." If this were discoverable only in an individual, or belonged only to one age or one race of men, it might be ascribed to imagination, or be the result of a peculiar mental tendency, but it is found in all. There is something in man that is not wholly satisfied with the objects of the senses; but recognises, or believes that it recognises, another world of spiritual beings with whom, for good or evil, he is related. This consciousness has been a source of wealth to all language and literature. "It cannot be explained by the hypothesis of a received tradition handed down from earlier races or imaginary superior beings, but is to be attributed to God's Spirit working in man." When the vividness and intensity of the intellectual emotions, whether for good or evil, surpassed the ordinary and extraordinary limits, men believed that they pierced to the spiritual realities on which the original consciousness is itself based. Hence, our consciousness of the supernatural seems a fundamental verity; and the origin must be sought higher in the stream of time than the goings forth of the rivulets of mythology, sought in man's essential nature, in the original impulse to godlike and in the perversion to devil-like productions. 5. Now enter that branch of operation called miraculous. It is not essentially more marvellous than the growth of tree from seed, for "an inscrutable Power is manifested to us through all phenomena;" therefore, everything natural is supernatural in origin; but we do well to consider an objection. "Miracles, or the intervention of the Deity in human affairs, are, to the scientific thinker, à priori so improbable, that no 1 "Neander's Church History," vol. i. p. 15. |