Lux Mundi

II The Christian Doctrine of God

Aubrey Moore

I. The object of this essay is not to discuss the so-called ‘proofs’ of the existence of God, but to shew what the Christian doctrine of God is, and how it has grown to be what it is, out of the antagonisms of earlier days; and then to ask—What fuller realization of God’s revelation of Himself is He giving us through the contradictions and struggles of to-day? If it is true that ‘the only ultimate test of reality is persistence, and the only measure of validity among our primitive beliefs the success with which they resist all efforts to change them59,’ it is of first importance to discover what it is which, through all the struggles of past history, the religious nature of man has persistently clung to. Much which was once dear to the religious consciousness, and which seemed at the time to be an integral part of the religious idea, has been given up. A former age abandoned it with regret, and looked forward with gloomy foreboding. A later age looks back with thankfulness, and recognises ‘the good Hand of our God’ leading us to truer knowledge of Himself.

It would be idle to deny, after all due allowance has been made for the natural tendency to believe that the present is the critical moment, not only for us, but for the world at large, that the crisis of the present day is a very real one, and that the religious view of God is feeling the effects of the change, which is modifying our views of the world and man. When such a fundamental idea is challenged, men are naturally tempted to adopt one of two equally onesided attitudes, to commit themselves either to a policy of unintelligent protest, or to a policy of unconditional surrender. And if the one is needlessly despairing, the other is unwarrantably sanguine. The one asks,—‘How much must I give up, of what religion has always been to me, that a little of the old may survive amidst the new?’ The other asks,—‘How little of the old need I keep, so as not to interfere with the ready acceptance of the new?’ The one view is pessimist, the other optimist. Both have their representatives in our day, and each party is profoundly conscious of the danger to which the other is exposed. The advocates of the one view, finding themselves ‘in a place where two seas meet,’ think it safer to ‘run the ship aground’; those of the other ‘seeing they cannot bear up against the wind’ prefer to ‘let her drive.’ But if the spirit of the one is merely protestant, the spirit of the other is certainly not catholic.

In contrast with these one-sided views, we propose to approach the question in the full conviction that the revelation of God in Christ is both true and complete, and yet that every new truth which flows in from the side of science, or metaphysics, or the experience of social and political life, is designed in God’s providence to make that revelation real, by bringing out its hidden truths. It is in this sense that the Christian revelation of God claims to be both final and progressive; final, for Christians know but one Christ and do not ‘look for another’; progressive, because Christianity claims each new truth as enriching our knowledge of God, and bringing out into greater clearness and distinctness some half-understood fragment of its own teaching. There are, no doubt, always to be found Christians, who are ready to treat new knowledge as the Caliph Omar treated the books in the library of Alexandria,—‘they agree with the Koran and are unnecessary, or they disagree with it and must be destroyed.’ But an intelligent Christian will not ask, ‘Does this new truth agree with or contradict the letter of the Bible?’ but ‘How does it interpret and help us to understand the Bible?’ And so with regard to all truth, whether it comes from the side of science, or history, or criticism, he adopts neither the method of protest nor the method of surrender, but the method of assimilation. In the face of new discoveries, the only question he is anxious to answer is this,—‘What old truth will they explain, or enlighten, or make real to us? What is this new world of life and interest which is awaiting its consecration? “Truth is an ever-flowing river, into which streams flow in from many sides60.” What is this new stream which is about to empty itself, as all knowledge must, into the great flood of Divine truth, “that the earth may be filled with the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea”?’

Such a hopeful attitude does not, indeed, imply that the assimilation of the new truths will go on as a matter of course. The Christian knows that the acceptance of truth is a moral, as well as an intellectual, matter, and in the moral world there is no place for laisser faire. He expects to be called upon to struggle; he expects that the struggle will need his utmost effort, moral and intellectual. His work is both to keep and to claim; to hold fast the faith ‘once for all delivered to the saints,’ and yet to see in every fragment of truth a real revelation of the mind and will of God. He has no cut and dried answer to objections; he does not boast that he has no difficulties. But he does claim to look out upon the difficulties of his day, not only fearlessly, but with hope and trust. He knows that Christianity must triumph in the end, but he does not expect all difficulties to be removed in a moment. And he is strong enough, if need be, to wait.

II. Whether anyone is really guilty of what Hume calls the ‘multiplied indiscretion and imprudence’ of dogmatic atheism, whether positivism can rightly be so classed, whether agnosticism is not atheism to all intents and purposes, are questions which fortunately lie outside the scope of the present enquiry. As for polytheism it has ceased to exist in the civilised world. Every theist is, by a rational necessity, a monotheist. But we find ourselves, in the present day, face to face with two different views of God, which though they constantly, perhaps generally, overlap, and even sometimes coincide, yet imply different points of view, and by a process of abstraction can be held apart and contrasted with one another. Many devout Christians are philosophers and men of science; many men of science and philosophers are devout Christians. But the God of religion is not the God of science and philosophy. Ideally, everyone will allow that the religious idea of God, and the scientific and philosophical idea of God must be identical, but in actual fact it is not so, and in the earlier stages of the development of both, there is a real antagonism. To accept this antagonism as absolute is, by a necessary consequence, to compel one to give way to the other. We cannot long hold two contradictory truths. We find ourselves compelled to choose. We may have Religion or Philosophy, but not both.

Very few, however, are prepared to go this length. It is much more usual to get rid of the antagonism by adopting one of two alternative methods.

(1) Of these the first is a suggested division of territory, in which religion is allotted to faith, and philosophy and science to reason. Such an expedient, though not uncommonly, and perhaps even wisely, adopted by individuals, who refuse to give up either of two truths because they cannot harmonize them, becomes ridiculous when seriously proposed as a solution of the difficulty. Moreover the proposed division of territory is unfair to start with. ‘Give us the Knowable, and you shall have the rest, which is far the larger half,’ sounds like a liberal offer made by science to religion, till we remember that every advance in knowledge transfers something from the side of the unknown to the side of the known, in violation of the original agreement. Mr. Herbert Spencer calls this division of territory a ‘reconciliation61.’ But if anything in the world could make religion hate and fear science and oppose the advance of knowledge, it is to find itself compelled to sit still and watch the slow but sure filching away of its territory by an alien power. We say nothing here of the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer’s division ignores the truth that knowledge of correlatives must be of the same kind62, and that if knowledge has to do with one and faith with the other, either faith must be a sort of knowledge, or knowledge a sort of faith. We merely notice the unfairness of a division which assumes rationality for science, and leaves irrationality to religion.

Curiously enough, however, there are many devout people, who would be horrified at the thought that they had borrowed from Agnosticism, and who have nevertheless made a similar division of territory. They are the people who stake all upon what reason cannot do. They have no interest in the progress of knowledge. The present gaps in science are their stronghold, and they naturally resist every forward step in knowledge as long as they can, because each new discovery limits the area in which alone, according to their imperfect view, faith can live. Every triumph of science on this theory, as on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, becomes a loss, not a gain, to religion. The very existence of God is bound up with that part of His work in nature which we cannot understand, and, as a consequence, we reach the paradox that the more we know of His working, the less proof we have that He exists. Modern apologetic literature abounds in this kind of argument. It is the devout form of the worship of the unknowable. Yet it is no wonder that people who take refuge in gaps find themselves awkwardly placed when the gaps begin to close.

(2) The other alternative is even more commonly adopted, for it fits in well with the vagueness and want of precision in language, which is at a premium in dealing with religious questions. This consists in frittering away the meaning of definite terms till they are available for anything, or adopting a neutral term which, by a little management and stretching, will include opposites. This is the method of indefinite inclusion. The strength of the former alternative lay in the appearance of sharp scientific delimitation of territory: the strength of the latter in its unlimited comprehensiveness. A term is gradually stripped of the associations which make it what it is, it is ‘defecated to a pure transparency,’ and then it is ready for use. The term ‘God’ is made merely ‘a synonym for nature63’; religion becomes ‘habitual and permanent admiration64,’ or ‘devout submission of the heart and will to the laws of nature65’; enthusiasm does duty for worship, and the antagonism between religion and anything else disappears.

Now so far as this represents, negatively, a reaction against intolerance and narrowness, and positively a desire for unity, there is not a word to be said against it. Its tone and temper may be both Christian and Catholic. But the method is a radically false one. It is not a real, but only an abstract, unity which can be reached by thinking away of differences. As Dr. Martineau says, in his excellent criticism of this method, ‘You vainly propose an cirenicon by corruption of a word.’ ‘The disputes between science and faith can no more be closed by inventing “religions of culture” than the boundary quarrels of nations by setting up neutral provinces in the air66.’ ‘A God that is merely nature, a Theism without God; a Religion forfeited only by the “nil admirari” can never reconcile the secular and the devout, the Pagan and the Christian mind67.’ As well might we attempt to reconcile the partizans of the gold and silver shields by assuring them that in reality the shields were silver gilt.

We are left, then, face to face with the opposition between the religious and the philosophic or scientific view of God. The counter-charges of superstition and anthropomorphism on the one side, and of pantheism and rationalism on the other, serve to bring out the antithesis of the two views. No division of territory is possible. There may be many sciences, each with its defined range of subject-matter; but there can be only one God. And both religion and philosophy demand that He shall fill the whole region of thought and feeling. Nor can any confusion or extension of terms help us to a reconciliation, or blind us long to the true issue. The conflict is too real and too keenly felt to admit of any patched-up peace. The idea of God, which is to claim alike the allegiance of religion and philosophy, must not be the result of compromise, but must really and fully satisfy the demands of both.

III. What then are these demands considered in abstraction from one another? We are at once met by the difficulty of defining religion. But if we cannot define religion, or trace it back to its hidden source, we can at least discover its characteristics, as we know it after it has emerged from the obscurity of prehistoric times, and before any conscious attempt has been made to reconcile religion and philosophy, or find a middle term between them.

Now traditional definitions of religion, given as it were from within, and constructed with no view of opposition to, or reconciliation with, philosophy, are agreed in representing religion as a relation between man and the object or objects of his worship, and this implies, not only the inferiority of the worshipper to that which he worships, but also something of likeness between the related terms, since, as even Strauss allows, in our inmost nature we feel a kinship between ourselves and that on which we depend68. It is quite indifferent which of the rival etymologies of the word ‘religion’ we adopt69. S. Augustine70, following Lactantius, speaks of religion as ‘the bond which binds us to One Omnipotent God.’ S. Thomas71 adopts almost unchanged the definition given by Cicero: it is ‘that virtue which has to do with the worship of a higher nature known as the Divine.’ It is not too much to say that, for the modern religious world, religion implies at least the practical belief in a real and conscious relation between the inner life of man and an unseen Being. And whatever of mystery there may be about that unseen Being, it would seem as if a real relationship demands so much of likeness in the related terms, as is implied in personality.

It is here that we reach the point at which we are able to distinguish between the religious and the philosophical ideas of God. It is not that religion and philosophy necessarily contradict or exclude one another, but that they approach the problem with different interests. Religion demands a personal object, be that object one or many. It is committed to the belief in a moral relationship between God and man. Philosophy demands unity, whether personal or impersonal. For philosophy is nothing if it does not completely unify knowledge. And it seems as if each finds lacking in the other that which it values most and thinks of first. The only hope, then, of reconciliation is in the idea of God as personal, and yet one. So long as religion retains a trace of polytheism or dualism, philosophy can have nothing to say to it. So long as philosophy has no room for a personal God, religion must exclude philosophy. The whole issue of the controversy lies here. If the belief in a personal God is to be called anthropomorphism, religion is hopelessly anthropomorphic. With the disappearance of anthropomorphism in this sense, as Professor Fiske rightly sees72, religion disappears. But we cannot escape anthropomorphism, though our anthropomorphism may be crude or critical73. We do not read our full selves into the lower world, because we are higher than it; we do not transfer to God all that belongs to our own self-consciousness, because we know that He is infinitely greater than we are. But we should be wrong not to interpret Him by the highest category within our reach, and think of Him as self-conscious life. Christianity refuses to call this anthropomorphism, though it stands or falls with the belief that, in his personality, man is in the image of God. An anthropomorphic view of God for a Christian means heathenism or heresy: a theomorphic view of man is of the essence of his faith74.

The religious idea of God may, of course, become philosophical without ceasing to be religious. If there is to be a religion for man as a rational being it must become so. But there is a point beyond which, in its desire to include philosophy, religion cannot go. It cannot afford to give up its primary assumption of a moral relationship between God and man. When that point is surrendered or obscured the old religious terms become increasingly inapplicable, and we find ourselves falling back more and more on their supposed philosophical equivalents, the ‘Infinite’ or the ‘Absolute,’ or the Universal Substance, or the Eternal Consciousness, or the First Cause, or the Omnipresent Energy. But these terms, which metaphysicians rightly claim, have no meaning for the religious consciousness, while, in metaphysics proper ‘God’ is as much a borrowed term as ‘sin’ is in non-religious ethics. Moral evil is ‘sin’ only to those who believe in God; and the infinite is only ‘God’ to those in whom it suggests a superhuman personality with whom they are in conscious relation. Even when religion and philosophy both agree to speak of God as ‘the Infinite,’ for the one it is an adjective, for the other a substantive. The moment we abandon the idea of God as personal, religion becomes merged in philosophy, and all that properly constitutes religion disappears. God may exist for us still as the keystone in the arch of knowledge, but He is no longer, except as a metaphor, ‘our Father, which is in heaven.’

IV. Religion then, properly and strictly, and apart from extensions of the term made in the interests of a reconciliation, assumes a moral relationship, the relationship of personal beings, as existing between man and the Object of his worship. When this ceases, religion ceases: when this begins, religion begins. But of the beginnings of religion we know nothing. Prehistoric history is the monopoly of those who have a theory to defend. But we may take it as proven that it is at least as true that man is a religious, as that he is a rational, animal. ‘Look out for a people,’ says Hume, ‘entirely destitute of religion. If you find them at all, be assured that they are but few degrees removed from brutes75.’ Hume’s statement is confirmed by the fact that those who would prove that there is no innate consciousness of Deity are driven to appeal to the case of deaf mutes and degraded savages76. Whether monotheism was a discovery or a recovery, whether it rose on the ruins of polytheism, or whether polytheism is a corruption of a purer faith, is a question we need not attempt to settle. Nor need we decide the priority of claim to the title of religion as between nature-worship, or ancestor-worship, or ghost-worship. The farther we go back in history the more obviously true is the charge of anthropomorphism so commonly brought against religion. The natural tendency to treat the object of religion as personal, exists long before any attempt is made to define the conditions or meaning of personality, and includes much which is afterwards abandoned. For religion in its earliest stages is instinctive, not reasoned. It is ‘naively objective.’ It is little careful to clear up its idea of the nature and character of its God. It is still less anxious to prove His existence. It is only when conscience grows strong, and dares to challenge the religion which had been instinctively accepted, that men learn to see that God not only is, but must be, the expression of the highest known morality. It is only when the light of conscious reason is turned back upon religious ideas, that polytheism becomes not merely untrue, but impossible and inconceivable. What religion starts with is not any theory of the world, but an unreasoned belief in a Being or beings, however conceived of, who shall be in a greater or less degree like the worshipper, but raised above him by the addition of power, if not omnipotence; greatness, if not infinity; wisdom, if not omniscience.

But, while implying from the first something of a moral relationship between man and the object of his worship, religion does not always conceive of that Object as necessarily holy or perfectly wise. There are religions which are both immoral and childish. They have in them no principle of growth, and therefore they are the opponents alike of moral and intellectual progress. Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum is the reflexion of Christian apologists, as well as of the Roman poet, on the religions of heathenism. Hence, it is argued, ‘Religion is the enemy of morals and of science. Away with it. It is a mere matter of feeling, which cannot and ought not to stand before the imperious challenge of conscience and reason.’ Such a view has both truth and falsehood in it. The religious idea of God must be able to justify itself to our moral and to our rational nature, on pain of ceasing to exist. But religion cannot be thus shut up to one part of our nature, nor can one part of our nature be set against the rest. There is, as Herbert Spencer is fond of pointing out77, a kind of idolatry of reason in the present day. Reason has exposed many superstitions only to become itself the final object of superstition. Men forget that, after all, reasoning is only ‘re-coordinating states of consciousness already coordinated in certain simpler ways,’ and that that which is unreasoned is not always irrational. Rationality in man is not shut up in one air-tight compartment. ‘There is no feeling or volition which does not contain in it an element of knowledge78.’ This is the truth which Hegel has seized when he speaks of religion as ‘reason talking naively.’ You can no more shut up faith to the compartment of feeling than reason to the compartment of the intellect. Religion claims the whole man, and true religion is that which can make good its claim.

The natural history of religion, then, is the history of the process by which that which has its secret birthplace behind all the distinctions of modern psychology, establishes its claim on man, absorbing into itself all that is best and truest in his moral and intellectual being, as conscience and reason successively emerge into conscious activity: while, from another point of view, it is the progressive purification of the religious idea of God till He is revealed as, what He is to a thinking Christian of to-day, the Object of reverent worship, the moral ideal, the truth of nature and of man.

Such an end is not attained in a moment. It is the result of a process with which we are familiar elsewhere, viz. evolution by antagonism. The true has to be separated from the false. Immoral and irrational conceptions of God have to be thrown aside. It is only after what looks like an internecine struggle between religion and morality that man learns the truth about the character of God, and only after a conflict with philosophy and science, which seems to threaten the very life of religion, that he learns what can be known of the Divine Nature. For among religions, too, there is a struggle for existence, in which the fittest survive. And the test of fitness is the power to assimilate and promote moral and intellectual truth, and so to satisfy the whole man. An ideally perfect religion is not ‘morality touched by emotion,’ but a worship which reflects itself in the highest known morality, and is interpreted and justified to itself by reason. It is this process, as we know it in history, that we proceed to examine.

V. The statement that religion, even in its most elementary forms, takes for granted some relationship of likeness between the worshipper and the Object or objects of his worship, by no means implies that all religion associates the highest morality with its idea of God. On the contrary, we know that not only are there immoral religions, but that immorality sometimes lingers on in religion long after it is condemned elsewhere, and that a people will permit as a religious duty what, according to their thinking, nothing but religion would justify. We cannot, then, at all accurately gauge the moral condition of a people by the received teaching about its gods, for morality is often far in advance of religion, and the character which in a god or goddess is protected by a religious halo is looked upon as hateful or impure in man or woman. The sense of dependence, which, though it does not constitute the whole, is yet an essential element in the religious consciousness, the awe which, in a low state of development, shews itself in a grovelling fear of the invisible beings, makes it impossible for the worshipper to judge his god by the standard he applies to his fellow man. The god may be lustful, but his lusts must be respected; he is strong and vengeful and must by all means be kept in a good temper, cajoled, or outwitted, or bribed, or humoured. His commands must be obeyed, without question or resistance. But by and bye the moral nature learns its strength, and begins to assert its independent right to speak. Morality outgrows religion. The relations between religion and morals become more strained. Some heretic dares to say that the Gods are immoral; that they are men ‘writ large,’ and bad men too. Their claim to reverence is challenged. There is a moral awakening. Soon the old religion is treated with scorn and contempt, and either a new religion takes its place, coming in as it were on the crest of the wave of moral reformation, or the old religion is purified and becomes the foster-mother of the new morality, giving to it a divine sanction, and receiving from it in turn new strength and vitality. Or failing these, men abandon religion in the supposed interest of morals. A religion with mysteries may be tolerated, but a religion once seen to be immoral is at an end. For a time ethics, with a background of metaphysics or politics, prevails, but gradually it tends to drift into a mere prudentialism, while a merely mystical philosophy tries in vain to satisfy those deeper instincts which reach out to the unseen.

In the history of Greek thought the collision came in the days of Xenophanes. Long before what is sometimes called the era of conscious morality, Greece had outgrown its traditional religion. Greek philosophy at its birth was mythology rationalized, and the beginning of independent morality in Greece shewed itself in a criticism of the religious teaching of Homer and Hesiod. The scathing satire of Xenophanes reminds us at times of the way in which Isaiah speaks of the idolatry of his day. It is not only wrong, it is capable of a reductio ad absurdum. Anthropomorphism, immorality, childish folly—these are the charges which Xenophanes brings against the worship of Magna Graecia. Anaxagoras had already been banished for suggesting that the god Helios was a mass of molten iron, but Xenophanes turns into open ridicule the religion of his day.

‘Homer and Hesiod,’ he says, ‘ascribe to the gods all that among men is held shameful and blameworthy, theft, adultery, and deceit79.’

‘One God there is mightiest among gods and men, who neither in form nor thought is like to men. Yet mortals think the gods are born and have shape and voice and raiment like themselves. Surely if lions and cows had hands, and could grave with their hands and do as men do, they too would make gods like themselves, horses would have horse-like gods, and cows gods with horns and hoofs80.’

When the age of moral philosophy begins, amidst the unsettlement of the sophistic period, the same protest is taken up by Plato. In Xenophanes the protest of the reason and the conscience went together. In Plato the criticism of the received theology is more distinctly a moral criticism. God cannot lie or deceive. He cannot be the cause of evil. He is good, and only the source of good. He is true in word and deed. If not, we cannot reverence Him. It cannot be true that the gods give way to violent emotions, still less to sensuality and envy and strife81. ‘For God cannot be unrighteous, He must be perfectly righteous, and none is like Him save the most righteous among men82.’

Here we have a collision between an immoral religious conception of God and a morality which is becoming conscious of its own strength. And what was the result? Religion in Greece received its death blow. It had no real recuperative power. It could not absorb and claim the new morality. Homer and Hesiod, the ‘Bible’ of the Athenian, were too profoundly immoral. A Kephalus might go back in silent protest to his sacrifice, but the youth of Athens turned from religion to morality. When we pass from Plato to Aristotle, the last trace of religion in morals has disappeared. Theology has become Metaphysics, and has no place in the world of practical life. The religious element has disappeared from philosophy, and is only revived in the mysticism of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. In metaphysics and science we owe everything to the Greeks; in religion, as distinguished from theology, we owe nothing.

From the Greeks we turn to the Jews, to whom alone, among the nations of the pre-Christian age, we of the modern world trace back our religious lineage. We speak of the religion of the Old Testament as ‘revealed’ in contrast with all other pre-Christian religions. Is that distinction tenable? If so, what does it mean, and what justifies us in making it? It is clear that the answer must be sought in what the Old Testament revelation is, rather than in the process by which the Jews became the appointed depositaries of it. For whatever were the prehistoric elements out of which the religion of Israel came, whether Assyrian or Accadian or Indo-German or Egyptian, and whatever were the steps by which Israel was led83 to that doctrine of God which constituted its mission and its message to the world, as we look back from the point of view of Christianity we see that the religion of Israel stands to the teaching of Christ in a relation in which no Pagan religion stands84. The Law and the Prophets were for all the world ‘a sacred school of the knowledge of God, and the ordering of the soul85.’ If it is true that the Bible only records the later and more important stages in a process which began in prehistoric times amidst the various forms of polytheistic worship, even if it could be shewn that the history, as we have it, has been subjected to successive revisions, that its laws have been codified, its ritual elaborated, its symbolism interpreted, it would still remain true that the religion of Israel, which begins where its history begins, and of which, indeed, its history is little more than the vehicle, is bound up with the assertion of Monotheism. The central fact of its revelation is this, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord.’ The central utterance of its law is, ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but Me.’ The unity of God, that truth which other religions were feeling after and tending towards, stands out clearly and distinctly as the characteristic of the religion of Israel, and is fearlessly claimed as an inheritance from the patriarchal age.

And not less remarkable than the assertion of the unity of God is the assumption that this One God is a God of Righteousness. He is ‘a God of truth and without iniquity; just and right is He.’ Here, again, it was not that the religion of Israel asserted what other religions denied, but that Israel proclaimed clearly and with increasing certainty a truth which the highest contemporary religions were struggling to express. In the religion of Israel the pre-Christian world rose to articulate religious utterance. Its highest and truest intuitions found a voice. Israel had yet much to learn and much to unlearn as to what true morality is. It had anthropomorphisms of thought and language to get rid of. It had to rise in Psalmist and Prophet to moral heights unknown to the patriarchal age. But the remarkable thing is that the claim is made. Morality is claimed for God: God is declared to be irrevocably on the side of what man knows as righteousness. And this truth is proclaimed not as a discovery but as a revelation from God Himself. It was this, not less than the proclamation of monotheism, which made the teaching of the Old Testament what it was. It consciously transformed the natural law of ‘might is right’ into the moral truth that ‘right is might.’

And the consequences of this new departure in the religious history of man were far-reaching. It made the difference between the religion of Israel and all other religions a difference not merely of degree but of kind. The worship of the Lord and the worship of the heathen gods becomes not only a conflict between the true and the false in religion, but between the moral and the immoral in practice. More than this, it changes the mere emotional feeling of awe and dependence on invisible powers into trust and confidence. If God is irrevocably on the side of right, the nation or the individual, that is struggling for the right, is fighting on the side of God. It was this which made the great Hebrew leaders, and the Psalmists after them, take it for granted that their cause was the cause of God, and that the Lord of Hosts was with them. Even the wars of extermination were the expression in act of the utter antagonism between good and evil, the cause of God and that of His enemies. And when Saul spared Agag it was from no excess of charity, no glimpse of a higher morality; it was an act of moral weakness. Finally, this claim of morality for God precluded the possibility of such a collision as took place in the history of the Greeks. The progressive development of morals in the Old Testament, and the gradual unfolding of a perfect character86 was also for Israel a progressive revelation of the character of God. Step by step the religious idea advanced with moral progress. And, as they advance, the contrast with other religions becomes more marked. ‘It was the final distinction between Polytheism and the religion of Israel that the former emphasized power, the latter the moral element to which it subordinated and conjoined power87.’ And this moral conception of God was constantly kept before the people. If they lapse into idolatry and adopt heathen practices and heathen ideas of God, the prophets are ready with the warning that God is the God of Israel, only because Israel is a chosen people to bear His name and His truth before the world; and if they are false to their mission, they will be rejected. If, again, the sacrificial system loses its moral significance as the recognition of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of the sinner, and the forward-pointing look towards the great moral fact of the Atonement, and becomes merely ritual, and perfunctory, and formal, the prophets dare to denounce even the divinely ordered sacrifices as things which God hates.

Yet it was not that, in the religion of Israel, morality was made the essential thing, a nucleus of morals, as it were, with a halo of religious emotion round it. It was that the religious and the moral consciousness are brought together in a real unity. To love the Lord is to hate evil. God is One who gives His blessing to the righteous, while the ungodly and him that delighteth in wickedness doth His soul abhor. He, then, who would ascend into the hill of the Lord and stand in His holy place, must have clean hands, and a pure heart, and a lowly mind. The Lord God is holy. He has no pleasure in wickedness, neither shall any evil dwell with Him. Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat. The sacrifice that He loves is the sacrifice of righteousness. He is to be worshipped in the beauty of holiness. What He requires of man is that he shall do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with his God.

All this, which comes out no doubt with increasing clearness in the Psalms and Prophets, is already implicit in that earlier claim made by the religion of Israel, that the true God is on the side of righteousness, and that to be false to righteousness is to be a traitor to God. In this union of religion and morality neither is sacrificed to the other. Each gains from its union with the other. The religious idea of God, and the religious emotions which gather round it, are progressively purified with the growth of moral ideas; and morality receives new life and strength when the moral law is seen to be the unfolding of the character of a Righteous God, and moral evil is known as ‘sin’ against a Personal Being. The earnest moral protest which in Greece was directed against the national religion, is found in the Old Testament making common cause with the national religion against the immoral beliefs of heathenism. Hence the Jew was not called upon, as the Greek was, to choose between his religion and his conscience. He never felt the strain which men feel in the present day, when a high and pure morality seems ranged against religious faith. For the Jew every advance in moral insight purified, while it justified, that idea of God, which he believed had come down to him from the ‘Father of the Faithful.’ His hope of immortality, his faith in the ultimate triumph of the God of Israel, were alike based upon the conviction that God is a God of justice and mercy, and that the Righteous One could not fail His people, or suffer His holy One to see corruption. Even though with the growth of morality, and the fuller unfolding of the character of God, there came, like a shadow cast by light, the deepening consciousness of sin as the barrier between man and God, the Jew refused to believe that the separation was for ever. Sin was a disease which needed healing, a bondage which called for a deliverer, a state of indebtedness from which man could not free himself. But Israel believed in and looked forward to, with confidence and hope, the Redeemer who should come to Zion and save His people from their sins.

The final revelation of Christianity came outwardly as a continuation and development of the religion of Israel, and claimed to be the fulfilment of Israel’s hope. It was a ‘republication’ of the highest truth about God which had been realized hitherto. For it came ‘not to destroy but to fulfil.’ God is still the Eternally One, the Eternally Righteous. Not sacrifice but holiness, not external ‘works’ but inward ‘faith,’ not the deeds of the law, but the righteousness which is of God—this is what He requires. He is still the God of Israel. But Israel according to the flesh had ceased to be the Israel of God, and the children of faithful Abraham, in whom, according to the ancient promise, all the families of the earth should be blessed, are to be gathered from east and west and north and south, from circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, and recognised as one family under the one Father. If Christianity had been this and this only, Christ might have claimed to be a great prophet, breaking the silence of 400 years, restoring the ancient faith, and truly interpreting and carrying forward the spirit of the ancient revelation. But He claimed to be more than this. He claimed, as the Son of God, to be not only the true, but the only, Revealer of the Father. For ‘no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him.’ What fresh characteristics, then, has this new revelation to add to the Old Testament teaching about God? He is still One, the only God. He is perfect Righteousness, yet, as even the older religion knew, a God of loving-kindness and tender mercy, ‘Who wills not the death of the sinner.’ But more than all this, He is now revealed to man as Infinite Love, the One Father of humanity, Whose only begotten Son is Incarnate and ‘made man that we may be made God.’ Not one jot or tittle of the old revelation of God, as a God of Righteousness, is lost or cancelled. The moral teaching is stern and uncompromising as ever. God’s love, which is Himself, is not the invertebrate amiability, or weak good-naturedness, to which some would reduce it. ‘The highest righteousness of the Old Testament is raised to the completeness of the Sermon on the Mount88.’ The New Testament,’ it has been said, ‘with all its glad tidings of mercy, is a severe book89.’ For the goodness and the severity of God are, as it were, the convex and the concave in His moral nature. But what seized upon the imagination of mankind as the distinctive revelation of Christianity was the infinite love and tenderness and compassion of this Righteous God for sinful man. It was this which shone out in the character of Christ, He was Very God, with a Divine hatred of evil, yet living as man among men, revealing the true idea of God, and not only realizing in His human life the moral ideal of man, but by taking human nature into Himself setting loose a power of moral regeneration, of which the world had never dreamed.

The advance which the Gospel of Christ makes upon the Old Testament revelation consists then, not only in the new truth it teaches as to the character of God, but in the new relation which it establishes between God and man. So soon as men learn the Old Testament truth that God is eternally on the side of righteousness, the awe and cringing fear, which lies behind heathen religions, and justifies us in calling them superstitions, gives place to trustful confidence, which deepens into faith, and gathers round it those affections and desires for union with God which find expression in the book of Psalms. The saints of the Old Testament could ‘rest in the Lord’ and wait for the vindication of His Righteousness in human life; they could yearn for His presence and hope for the day when they should ‘see the King in His beauty.’ But they were yet separated from Him by the unobliterated fact of sin. Enoch ‘walked with God,’ Abraham was called ‘the friend of God,’ Moses ‘the Lord knew face to face,’ David was ‘a man after God’s own heart,’ Daniel ‘a man greatly beloved.’ But one and all of these fell short, and necessarily fell short, of the closeness of that union which is the Christian’s birthright. In the Gospel, God is revealed as one with man. And this truth changed the whole attitude and atmosphere of worship. There was worship still, for humanity was not merged and lost in Godhead. There is no Christian ring about the statement90 that ‘in Christianity, in the consciousness that he is partaker of the Divine existence, man no longer sustains the relation of Dependence but of Love.’ Rather the antithesis between dependence and freedom is destroyed. As perfect love casts out fear, yet leaves reverence, so the consciousness of union with God, as distinct from absorption in Him, while it destroys the last remnant of what is servile and degrading in religious emotion, and gives man freedom, yet gives the freedom of loving dependence upon God. And by this gift it sets free new affections and appeals to new motives. It was the assured consciousness of union with God which gave the first Christians their power in the great moral struggles of their day. Their moral ideal with its loftiness, its purity, its perfect truthfulness, would by its very perfectness have paralyzed effort, had they not believed that they were one with Him Who had not only proclaimed but realized it, that they could do all things through Christ which strengthened them. And the horror of sin, which was a characteristic note of Christian ethics, was due to the same fact. Unrighteousness, not only as under the Old Testament, ranged a man on the side of the enemies of God, but according to its degree tended to break the supernatural bond which through the Incarnation united men with God. Impurity, which meant so little for the civilized world of the first Christian centuries, was for the Christian not defilement only, but sacrilege, for his body was God’s temple. The love of the world was enmity against God, yet the neglect of social duties, and of all that is now summed up in the ‘service of man,’ was for the Christian ipso facto the declaring himself outside the love of God, just as, conversely, the love of the brethren was the proof that he had ‘passed from death unto life.’

Thus in primitive Christianity the religious and the moral consciousness were at one, as in the Old Testament, but both are now raised to their highest level. Free scope is given for the development of both, and the satisfaction of the demands of both, in Christian life and Christian worship. Side by side they fought and triumphed over heathenism, taking up and assimilating all that was best and truest in non-Christian ethics. And though Christians were long in learning what manner of spirit they were of, it seemed as if a real conflict between religion and morals, within the area of Christianity, was impossible.

And yet again and again, in the history of Christianity, such a conflict has come about. Every moral reformation within the Church was a protest of the conscience against unworthy views of God; every new Order that was founded was a nursery of moral reformation. Yet every protest against formalism and unreality in religion, every attack on ecclesiasticism and ‘priestcraft’ in the Church, or on worldliness and laxity in professing Christians, owed its strength to the reassertion of the truth, that in the Christian idea religion and morals are inseparably united. The moral reformer always claimed Christianity on his side, when attacking the Christianity of his day. This was conspicuously so in the great moral upheaval of the sixteenth century. In actual fact, religion and morality had separated. And the nearer one got to the centre of Western Christendom, the more open and unabashed the neglect of morality was. In Italy of the fifteenth century renaissance we see, in strange confusion, ‘all that we love in art, and all that we loathe in man91.’ It seemed as if, as in the old riddle, a swarm of bees had settled in the dead lion’s carcass, and there was sweetness instead of strength, corruption where once was life. When the new century opened, Borgia was the supreme Bishop of the West, and the strength of the protest of Christianity against immorality may be gathered from the list of prices to be paid to the pardoner. The devout retired from the contest into the severer discipline of the monastic life, and hoped against hope for the days of a Papa angelicus, who never came. Yet when the strained relations of religion and morals resulted in a revolution, it never occurred to those, who had a moral reformation at heart, to say that religion was outgrown, and morality must henceforth take its place. They appealed from the Christianity of the sixteenth century to the Christianity of Christ. Even of those who, in their fear of popery, broke away farthest from the Christian idea of God, all, if we except the Anabaptists, claimed the Bible on their side. It was a genuine moral revolt against a religion which had come to tolerate immorality. The hatred of ‘ecclesiasticism’ and ‘sacerdotalism’ was not at first a rejection of the Church and the Priesthood, but a protest against anything which, under the sacred name of religion, becomes a cover for unreality, or makes sin a thing easy to be atoned for. The Reformation was a moral protest, and its results were seen within as well as outside the Roman communion. The Council of Trent was a reforming Council; the Jesuits were the children of the Reformation; and Roman Christianity in the strength of its own moral revival, even in the moment of defeat, became again ‘a conquering power92.’

On the other hand, those whose first impulse was a protest in favour of a moral religion and a belief in a God who hates iniquity, have bequeathed to the world a legacy of immorality, of which they never dreamt, and of which we, in the present day, are feeling the full effects. Lutheranism starts with the belief that God is love: Calvinism with the conception of God as power. With the former, the desire, at all costs, to guard the belief in the freedom of God’s grace, led to a morbid fear of righteousness, as if it were somehow a rival to faith. With the latter, a one-sided view of the power of God gradually obscured the fact that righteousness and justice eternally condition its exercise. If the one was, as history shews us, in constant danger of Antinomian developments, the other struck at the root of morality by making God Himself unjust. Forensic fictions of substitution, immoral theories of the Atonement, ‘the rending asunder of the Trinity’ and the opposing of the Divine Persons, like parties in a lawsuit93, were the natural corollaries of a theory which taught that God was above morality and man beneath it.

How deeply these false views of God have influenced English religious thought is shewn by the fact that every attack on the moral, as distinguished from the intellectual position of Christianity, is demonstrably an attack on that which is not Christianity, but a mediaeval or modern perversion of it. J. S. Mill’s well-known words94, ‘I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures,’ was a noble assertion of ‘immutable morality’ against a religion, which alas! he mistook for Christianity. The conscience of to-day,—and it is a real gain that it should be so,—refuses to believe that the imprimatur of religion can be given to that which is not good, or that God would put us to moral confusion. It would rather give up religion altogether than accept one which will not endorse and advance our highest moral ideas.

But men do not always stop to make the necessary distinctions. On the one side they see a traditional view of religion which they cannot harmonise with the highest morality; on the other, they see a morality, which, though it has grown up under the shadow and shelter of religion, seems strong enough to stand alone. And their first thought is ‘Away with religion. We have outgrown it. Henceforward we will have morals unencumbered by religion.’ What would be the effect on the morals of a nation of thus renouncing the religious sanction it is not safe to predict. In individuals certainly it sometimes has disastrous results. But there is one thing which those who talk about the ‘secularization of morals95’ seldom take into account, and that is the effect on what, in contrast to morals, they call religion. The religious consciousness always refuses to be treated as defunct, and the religious emotions, if they no longer find their object in a God of Righteousness, and are no longer controlled by morality, will not be satisfied with the worship of the Unknowable or of idealized humanity, but will avenge themselves, as they have done again and again, in superstition96.

And the attempt to do without religion in morals is as unphilosophical as it is dangerous. It is parallel to what, in the region of morality proper, we all recognise as a false asceticism. It is the attempt to crush out, rather than to purify. When men realize the danger of giving the rein to the animal passions, there are always to be found moralists who will treat these passions as in themselves evil, and advocate the suppression of them. And only after an antinomian revolt against that false teaching do men realize that morality is not the destruction, but the purification and regulation of the passions. So with religion and the religious emotions. The function of morality is to purify the religious idea of God, and religion and morality are strong and true in proportion as each uses the help of the other. But neither can treat the other as subordinate. God is more than what Kant makes Him, the ultimate justification of morality: morality is more than what some religious people would have it, obedience to the positive commands of even God Himself. In experience we find them separate and even opposed: ideally they are one, united not confused. Separated, religion tends to become superstitious, morality to degenerate into a mere prudentialism, or at least an expanded utilitarianism. United, religion gives to right that absolute character which makes it defiant of consequences; morality safeguards the idea of God from aught that is unworthy of the worship of moral beings.

As the result of all the conflicts which have raged round the idea of God so far as morals are concerned, one truth has burned itself into the consciousness of both the apologists and opponents of religion, a truth as old indeed as the religion of Israel, but only slowly realized in the course of ages, the truth, namely, that the religious idea of God must claim and justify itself to the highest known morality, and no amount of authority, ecclesiastical or civil, will make men worship an immoral God. And already that truth has thrown back its light upon questions of Old Testament morality. We no longer say, ‘It is in the Bible, approved or allowed by God, and therefore it must be right.’ It was this view which, in every age, has given its protection to religious wars and intolerance and persecution. But we look back and see in the perspective of history how God in every age takes man as he is that He may make him what he is not. We see in the Old Testament not only the revelation of the Righteousness of God, but the record of the way in which, in spite of waywardness and disobedience, He raised His people to the knowledge of the truth.

VI. But the religious idea of God in our day, as in former ages, is challenged not only by conscience, but by the speculative reason. And there is a close parallelism between the two conflicts. When religion and morals are opposed, men naturally say, ‘Give us morals; away with religion.’ And the answer is—True religion is moral; that which is not moral is not true; and morality without religion will not only leave the religious consciousness unsatisfied, but fall short of its own true perfection. So when religion and philosophy are opposed, men say once more, ‘Give us reason; away with religion.’ And the answer again is—True religion is rational: if it excludes reason, it is self-condemned. And reason without religion fails of its object, since, if philosophy can find no place for religion, it cannot explain man.

But here again nothing is gained by confusing the issue, or denying the actual fact of the collision. We may say with Lacordaire, ‘God is the proper name of truth, as truth is the abstract name of God.’ But it is not a matter of indifference from which point we start, whether with religion we approach God first as a moral Being, or with philosophy seek for Him as the truth of man and nature. The motto of Oxford University, Dominus Illuminatio mea, altogether changes its meaning if we read it Illuminatio Dominus meus. As Réville says, ‘A religion may become philosophical, but no philosophy has ever founded a religion possessing real historical power97.’ And it is a fact patent to the observation of all, that it is easier to make religion philosophical than to make philosophy in any real sense religious. The reason of this is obvious. Religion is not only first in the field, it covers the whole ground before either morals or science have attained their full development, or even emerged into conscious life. But when we speak of philosophy, we have reached a stage in which the reason has already separated itself from, and set itself over against, the religious consciousness, and must either absorb religion into itself, in which case religion ceases to be religion, or must leave religion outside, though it may borrow and appropriate religious terms. If, then, the idea of God is to appeal to both the religious consciousness and the speculative reason it must be by claiming philosophy for religion, not by claiming religion for philosophy. It is from within, not from without, that religion must be defended.

In Greece the traditional polytheism was challenged, as we have seen, at once on the side both of morals and metaphysics. To Xenophanes, indeed, the unity of God is even more essential than His morality, and the attack on anthropomorphism is as much an attack upon the number of the gods of Hesiod as upon the immoral character attributed to them. In the unity, however, which Xenophanes contends for, the religious idea of God is so attenuated, that we hardly know whether the One God is a person, or an abstraction. Indeed, it is hard to see how a champion of Eleaticism could consistently have held the personality of God, as we understand it, without falling under his own charge of anthropomorphism. In Plato the same difficulty appears, only complicated or relieved by the fact that while from the moral side he talks like a theist, from the metaphysical his teaching is pantheistic. Is the ‘Idea of Good’ personal? Is it a God we can love and worship, or only a God we can talk about? Is the vision of Er a concession to popular views, or the vehicle of moral and religious truth? The question is hardly more easy to decide with regard to Aristotle. The religious atmosphere, which lingers on in Plato, has disappeared. What of the religious belief? Did Aristotle in any intelligible sense hold the personality of God? Great names are ranged on both sides of the mediaeval controversy. Who shall decide? But whether or no anything of religion survived in philosophy, it was not strong enough to withstand the attack of the moral and the speculative reason, still less to claim these as its own. It is not on the side of religion, but of speculation, that we are debtors to the Greeks.

Among the Jews, on the other hand, speculation seems hardly to have existed. Religion was satisfied to make good her claim to the region of morals. God was One, and He was Righteous, but the mystery which enveloped His nature the Old Testament does not attempt to fathom. ‘Clouds and darkness are round about Him,’ yet out of the thick darkness comes the clear unfaltering truth that ‘Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.’ Jewish religion and Greek speculation had little contact, and less kinship, till the best days of both were passed. But in the days of the dispersion we get the beginning of the mingling of those streams which were only united under the higher unity of Christianity. ‘With the Jews of the East,’ it has been said, ‘rested the future of Judaism: with them of the West, in a sense, that of the world. The one represented old Israel, groping back into the darkness of the past; the other young Israel, stretching forth its hands to where the dawn of a new day was about to break98.’ The Septuagint translation threw open to the Greek world the sacred books of Israel. The Apocrypha, with all its glorification of Judaism, was both an apology and an eirenicon99. It seemed as if in Wisdom personified might be found a middle term between the religion of Israel and the philosophy of Greece, and the life of righteousness might be identified with the life of true wisdom. The Jews of Alexandria were thus willing to find a strain of truth in Greek philosophy, and Alexandrian Greeks were found ready ‘to spiritualize their sensuous divinities100.’ But the result was a compromise, in which the distinctive elements of each were not harmonized but lost. There was no fusion as yet of Jewish and Greek thought, only each was learning to understand the other, and unconsciously preparing for the higher synthesis of Christianity.

Whether we think of Christ as the ‘Son of Man,’ or as the Revealer of God, Christianity is bound to transcend national distinctions, and to claim not only the whole of humanity, but the whole of man, his reason, no less than his heart and will. And this Christ did in a special way. He not only speaks of Himself as ‘the Truth,’ and as having come ‘to bear witness to the Truth,’ but the very complement (if we may say so) of His revelation of the Father was the sending ‘the Spirit of Truth,’ who should teach His disciples all things. This possession of ‘truth’ is always spoken of by Christ as a future thing, implicit indeed in Himself, Who is the Truth, but only to be explicitly declared and brought to remembrance when the Spirit of Truth should come. He was to guide them ‘into all truth.’ ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ It was inevitable, then, that the question should arise,—Will this religion, which has broken through the narrowness of Judaism, and yet by its belief in a God of righteousness and love combated and triumphed over heathen immorality, have the power to assimilate and absorb the philosophy of Greece? The great crisis in the world’s history, as we see it, looking back from the security of eighteen centuries, was this:—Will Christianity, with all its moral triumphs, become a tributary to Greek philosophy, as represented by the Schools of Alexandria, or will it claim and transform the rational, as it has transformed the moral, progress of humanity? The answer of Christianity is unhesitating. Christianity is truth, and there is only one truth. Christianity is wisdom, and there is only one wisdom; for the wisdom of the world is not wisdom but folly. And at once the rival claim is made. Why not a division of territory? Knowledge for the philosopher; faith for the Christian. The Gnostics taught, as a modern philosopher teaches, that religion is ‘reason talking naively,’ and that, good as it is for ordinary people, the Gnostic can afford to do without it. Every one knows the answer of the Apostles to the insidious suggestions of Gnosticism. To S. Peter it is ‘a damnable heresy, even denying the Lord who bought us101.’ To S. Paul it is the ‘science falsely so called102’ the ‘knowledge which puffs up103;’ the ‘wisdom of this world104.’ To S. John, Cerinthus was ‘the enemy of the truth105.’ To S. Polycarp, Marcion is ‘the firstborn of Satan.’ It never occurred to the Apostles, or the Apologists after them, to retreat into the fastnesses of a reasonless faith. For with them faith was implicit knowledge, and the only knowledge that was true.

It was the collision of Christianity with Greek thought which gave rise to Christian theology in the strict sense of the term. Its necessity was the claiming of Greek as well as Jew; its justification was the belief in the presence of the Spirit of truth; its impulse the desire ‘to know the things which are freely given to us by God106.’ The first Christians were not theologians. They were ‘unlearned and ignorant men.’ When Christ preached, the common people heard Him gladly, the publicans and the harlots believed Him, the poor found in His teaching ‘good news,’ and a few fishermen devoted their lives to Him. But the Scribes and Pharisees stood aloof; and the rationalistic Sadducees asked Him captious questions; and the Herodians, the Erastians of the day, tried to involve Him with the secular power. It was only when challenged by an earnest, but non-religious philosophy, that reason came forward, in the strength of the Spirit of truth, to interpret to itself and to the world the revelation of Christ. Religion and theology in different ways have to do with the knowledge of God and of spiritual truth. They have the same object, God, but their aims and their methods are different. Religion knows God; theology is concerned with the idea of God. Religion sees; theology thinks. Religion begins and ends in an almost instinctive attitude of worship; theology rationalizes and defines the characteristics of the Object of worship. As reason seeks to interpret feeling, so theology interprets religion. It makes explicit what is implicit in religion. ‘As the intellect is cultivated and expanded, it cannot refrain from the attempt to analyse the vision which influences the heart, and the object in which it centres; nor does it stop till it has, in some sort, succeeded in expressing in words, what has all along been a principle both of the affections and of practical obedience107.’ It takes the facts which the religious consciousness has seized, seeks to bring them into distinctness before the mental vision, to connect them with one another in a coherent system, and find in them the explanation and unity of all that is. Christian theology grows naturally out of the Christian religion. But religion is a divine life; theology a divine science.

This explains the fact that though both religion and theology have to do with the knowledge of God, and ideally work in perfect harmony, yet they are often found opposed. Theology is always in danger of becoming unreal. What is an interpretation for one age becomes ‘a tongue not understanded’ in the next. Hence when a revival of religious life comes, it frequently shews itself in an attack on the received theology. Theology is no longer regarded as the scientific expression of the very truths which religion values; it is conceived of as the antithesis of religion, and reformers dream of a new theology which shall be for them what, though they know it not, the old theology was to their predecessors, the handmaid and guardian of religious truth. When Martin Luther said that ’an old woman who reads her Bible in the chimney corner knows more about God than the great doctors of theology,’ he was emphasising the severance which, in his day, had come, to exist between a religious life and theological orthodoxy. And when in his Table Talk he says, ‘A Jurist may be a rogue, but a theologian must be a man of piety,’ he touches a real truth. A hundred years later, amid the confusions and unrealities of the seventeenth century, John Smith108, the Cambridge Platonist, said the same: ‘They are not always the best skilled in divinity,’ he says, ‘that are most studied in those pandects into which it is sometimes digested.’ ‘Were I to define divinity, I should rather call it a divine life than a divine science.’ Technically, no doubt, he was wrong, for theology is a science and not a life, but, like Luther, he was vindicating the truth that it is possible for quite simple people to know God, though they have no knowledge of theology, and that theology, when it becomes speculative and abstract, ceases to be theology. A theologian, as Mazzini says of an artist, ‘must be a high-priest or a charlatan.’

But the world dislikes a high-priest, and good people dislike a charlatan. And the consequence is that theology, ancient or modern, is attacked from two very different points of view, by those who look upon it as the antithesis of ‘the simple Gospel,’ and by those who approach it from the side of speculative thought. Theology claims to be a divine science. Religious people attack it because it is a science; philosophers because it claims to be divine. To the former, religion expressed in rational terms ceases to be religion; to the latter, that science is no science which claims for itself unique conditions. Yet S. Paul seems to recognise both the necessity and the uniqueness of theology when he says to the Greeks of Corinth, ‘We received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given us by God.’

It is the relation of Christian theology to philosophy and science with which we are specially concerned. But it is impossible to pass by the objection to theology which comes as it were ab intra from the side of religion. For if it is valid, then Christianity may as well give up at once any idea of being the religion of man. Yet people say, ‘Why have a theology? Human reason cannot search out “the deep things of God;” it will only put new difficulties in a brother’s way; why not rest content with the words of Holy Scripture, with simple truths like “God is love,” and simple duties like “Love one another,” and leave theology alone?’ Now without denying what George Eliot calls ‘the right of the individual to general haziness,’ or asserting that every Christian must be a theologian, we may surely say that Christianity is bound to have a theology. And even individual Christians, if they ever grow into the manhood of reason, must have a theology, or cease to be religious. The protest against theology from the side of religion looks modest and charitable enough till we remember that religious haziness is generally, if not always, the outcome of moral laziness; that it implies the neglect of a duty and the neglect of a gift;—the duty of realizing to the reason the revelation of Christ, and the gift of the Spirit of Truth to enable us to do it. More than this, the protest against theology in the interests of religion is irrational and suicidal. To tell a thinking man that he need not interpret to his reason what religion tells him of God, is like saying to him, ‘Be religious if you will, but you need not let your religion influence your conduct.’ If Christianity had been content to be a moral religion, if it had abandoned its claim to rationality and had left Greek speculation alone, it must have accepted either the Gnostic division of territory, or recognised an internecine conflict between religion and philosophy. And it did neither; but, under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, Christian theology arose and claimed the reason of the ancient world.

Thus as the religion of the Old Testament claims morality for God, so Christianity goes further and claims to hold the key to the intellectual problems of the world. So far as the nature of God is concerned, Christianity met the intellectual difficulties of the first centuries by the Doctrine of the Trinity.

From time to time people make the discovery that the doctrine of the Trinity is older than Christianity. If the discoverer is a Christian apologist, he usually explains that God has given anticipatory revelations to men of old, and points out how they fall short of the revelation of Christianity. If he is an opponent of Christianity, he triumphantly claims to have unmasked the doctrine and tracked it down to a purely natural origin. ‘People think,’ says Hegel, ‘that by pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have ipso facto banished it from Christianity109.’ Men have found the doctrine, or something like it, not only in the Old Testament but in Plato and Neo-Platonism, and among the Ophite Gnostics, in the Chinese Tao-Té-Ching and the ‘Three Holy Ones’ of Bouddhism, in the Tri-mûrti of Hinduism and elsewhere. Why not? Revelation never advances for itself the claim which its apologists sometimes make for it, the claim to be something absolutely new. A truth revealed by God is never a truth out of relation with previous thought. He leads men to feel their moral and intellectual needs before He satisfies either. There was a preparation for Hebrew monotheism, as there was a preparation for the Gospel of Christ. There was an intellectual preparation for the doctrine of the Trinity, as there was a moral preparation for the doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is distinguished from the avatars of Hinduism, and the incarnations of Thibetan Lamaism, by its regenerative moral force, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is no less distinguished from the pseudo-trinities of Neo-Platonism and its modern developments by the fact that for eighteen centuries it has been the safeguard of a pure Monotheism against everything which menaces the life of religion.

But Christian theology is not ‘a philosophy without assumptions.’ It does not attempt to prove sola ratione the doctrine of the Trinity, but to shew how that which reason demands is met and satisfied by the Christian doctrine of God. Starting with the inheritance of faith, the belief in the Divinity of Christ, and trusting in the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, it throws itself boldly into the rational problem, fights its way through every form of Unitarianism, and interprets its faith to itself and to the world at large in the doctrine of the Triune God. Its charter is the formula of Baptism, where the ‘treasures of immediate faith are gathered up into a sentence, though not yet formulated into a doctrine110.’

To the Greek mind two things had become clear before Christianity came into the world, and it would be easy to trace the steps by which the conclusions were reached. First, Reason, as relation-giving, seeks for unity in the manifoldness of which it is conscious, and will be satisfied with nothing less. But Eleaticism had convincingly proved that an abstract unity can explain nothing. Quite apart from questions of religion and morals, the Eleatic unity was metaphysically a failure. Plato had seen this, and yet the ‘dead hand’ of Eleaticism rested on Platonism, and the dialogue Parmenides shewed how powerless the Doctrine of Ideas was to evade the difficulty. Thus the Greeks more than 2000 years ago had realized, what is nowadays proclaimed, as if it were a new discovery, that an absolute unit is unthinkable, because, as Plato puts it in the Philebus, the union of the one and the many is ’an everlasting quality in thought itself which never grows old in us.’ The Greeks, like the Jews, had thus had their ‘schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.’ They had not solved, but they had felt, the rational difficulty; as the Jews had felt, but had not overcome, except through the Messianic hope, the separation of man from God. But as the Trinitarian doctrine took shape, Christian teachers realized how the Christian, as opposed to the Jewish, idea of God, not only held the truth of the Divine Unity as against all polytheistic religions, but claimed reason on its side against all Unitarian theories. They did not, however, argue that it was true because it satisfied reason, but that it satisfied reason because it was true.

They started, indeed, not with a metaphysical problem to be solved, but with a historical fact to proclaim, the fact of the Resurrection, and a doctrinal truth to maintain, the Divinity of Him who rose. And starting from that basis of fact revealed in Christ, they found themselves in possession of an answer to difficulties which at first they had not felt, and thus their belief was justified and verified in the speculative region.

The truth for which they contended, which was enshrined in their sacred writings, was that ‘the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.’ But the Fathers do not treat this doctrine merely as a revealed mystery, still less as something which complicates the simple teaching of Monotheism, but as the condition of rationally holding the Unity of God. ‘The Unity which derives the Trinity out of its own self,’ says Tertullian, ‘so far from being destroyed, is actually supported by it111.’ ‘We cannot otherwise think of One God,’ says Hippolytus, ‘but by truly believing in Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost112.’ ‘The supreme and only God,’ says Lactantius, ‘cannot be worshipped except through the Son. He who thinks that he worships the Father only, in that he does not worship the Son also, does not worship the Father113. ‘Without the Son the Father is not,’ says Clement of Alexandria, ‘for in that He is a Father He is the Father of the Son, and the Son is the true teacher about the Father114.’ So Origen argues,—If God had ever existed alone in simple unity and solitary grandeur, apart from some object upon which from all eternity to pour forth His love, He could not have been always God. His love, His Fatherhood, His very omnipotence would have been added in time, and there would then have been a time when He was imperfect. ‘The Fatherhood of God must be coeval with His omnipotence; for it is through the Son that the Father is Almighty115.’ This was the line of argument afterwards developed by S. Athanasius when he contended against the Arians that the Son was the reality or truth116 of the Father, without whom the Father could not exist; and by S. Augustine, when he argues that love implies one who loves and one who is loved, and love to bind them together117. Even one so unphilosophically minded as Irenaeus118, cannot but see in the Christian doctrine of the relation of the Father and the Son, the solution of the difficulty about the infinity of God: ‘Immensus Pater in Filio mensuratus; mensura Patris Filius.’ While philosophy with increasing hopelessness was asking, How can we have a real unity which shall be not a barren and dead unity, but shall include differences? Christianity, with its doctrine of God, was arguing that that which was an unsolved contradiction for non-Christian thought, was a necessary corollary of the Christian Faith119.

The other truth which Greek thought had realized was the immanence of reason in nature and in man. When Anaxagoras first declared that the universe was the work of intelligence, we are told that he seemed ‘like a sober man amongst random talkers.’ But both Plato and Aristotle accuse him of losing the truth which he had gained because he made intelligence appear only on occasions in the world, dragged in, like a stage-god, when naturalistic explanations failed120. The conception of creation out of nothing was of course unknown to Anaxagoras. Intelligence is only the arranger of materials already given in a chaotic condition. With Aristotle too it is reason which makes everything what it is. But the reason is in things, not outside them. Nature is rational from end to end. In spite of failures and mistakes, due to her materials, nature does the best she can and always aims at a good end121. She works like an artist with an ideal in view122. Only there is this marked difference,—Nature has the principle of growth within herself, while the artist is external to his materials123. Here we have a clear and consistent statement of the doctrine of immanent reason as against the Anaxagorean doctrine of a transcendent intelligence. If we translate both into the theological language of our own day, we should call the latter the deistic, the former the pantheistic, view; or, adopting a distinction of supreme importance in the history of science, we might say that we have here, face to face, the mechanical and the organic view of nature. Both were teleological, but to the one, reason was an extra-mundane cause, to the other, an internal principle. It was the contrast between external and inner design, as we know it in Kant and Hegel; between the teleology of Paley and the ‘wider teleology’ of Darwin and Huxley and Fiske; between the transcendent and immanent views of God, when so held as to be mutually exclusive.

It is these two one-sided views which the Christian doctrine of God brings together. Religion demands as the very condition of its existence a God who transcends the universe; philosophy as imperiously requires His immanence in nature. If either Religion denies God’s immanence, or Philosophy denies that He transcends the universe, there is an absolute antagonism between the two, which can only be ended by the abandonment of one or the other. But what we find is that though Philosophy (meaning by that the exercise of the speculative reason in abstraction from morals and religion) the more fully it realizes the immanence of God, the more it tends to deny the transcendence, religion not only has no quarrel with the doctrine of immanence, but the higher the religion the more unreservedly it asserts this immanence as a truth dear to religion itself. The religious equivalent for ‘immanence’ is ‘omnipresence,’ and the omnipresence of God is a corollary of a true monotheism. As long as any remains of dualism exist, there is a region, however small, impervious to the Divine power. But the Old Testament doctrine of creation, by excluding dualism, implies from the first, if it does not teach, the omnipresence of God. For the omnipotence of God underlies the doctrine of creation, and omnipotence involves omnipresence. Hence we find the Psalmists and Prophets ascribing natural processes immediately to God. They know nothing of second causes. The main outlines of natural science, the facts of generation and growth, are familiar enough to them, yet every fact is ascribed immediately to the action of God. He makes the grass to grow upon the mountains; He fashions the child in the womb; He feeds the young ravens; He provides fodder for the cattle; He gives to all their meat in due season; when He lets His breath go forth they are made; when He takes away their breath they die and return to dust.

This doctrine of the omnipresence of God, as conceived by religion, had however yet to be fused with the philosophical doctrine of immanence. And here again the fusion was effected by the Christian doctrine of God, as Trinity in Unity. The earlier Apologists concern themselves first with the vindication of the Divine attributes. God’s separateness from the world as against Greek Pantheism, His omnipresence in it as against a Judaising deism. But the union of God’s transcendence with His immanence, and with it the fusion of the religious with the philosophic idea of God, is only consciously completed by the Doctrine of the Trinity124. The dying words of Plotinus, expressing as they did the problem of his life, are said to have been,—‘I am striving to bring the God which is within into harmony with the God which is in the universe.’ And the unsolved problem of Neo-Platonism, which is also the unsolved problem of non-Christian philosophy in our day, is met by the Christian doctrine of God. All and more than all that philosophy and science can demand, as to the immanence of reason in the universe, and the rational coherence of all its parts, is included in the Christian teaching: nothing which religion requires as to God’s separateness from the world, which He has made, is left unsatisfied. The old familiar Greek term ΛΟΓΟΣ which, from the days of Heracleitus, had meant to the Greek the rational unity and balance of the world, is taken up by S. John, by S. Clement, by S. Athanasius, and given a meaning which those who started from the Philonian position never reached. It is the personal Word, God of God, the Only Begotten of the Father, who is one in the Holy Spirit with the Father. ‘The Word was God.’ ‘By Him all things were made.’ ‘He the All-powerful, All-holy Word of the Father spreads His power over all things everywhere, enlightening things seen and unseen, holding and binding all together in Himself. Nothing is left empty of His presence, but to all things and through all, severally and collectively, He is the giver and sustainer of life.... He, the Wisdom of God, holds the universe like a lute, and keeps all things in earth and air and heaven in tune together. He it is Who binding all with each, and ordering all things by His will and pleasure, produces the perfect unity of nature, and the harmonious reign of law. While He abides unmoved for ever with the Father, He yet moves all things by His own appointment according to the Father’s will125.’ The unity of nature is, thus, no longer the abstract motionless simplicity of Being, which had been so powerless to explain the metaphysical problems of Greece. It is the living Omnipresent Word, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, and the philosophical truth becomes an integral part of that Christian doctrine of God, which, while it safeguarded religion and satisfied reason, had won its first and greatest victories in the field of morals.

VII. The Christian doctrine of God triumphed over heathen morality and heathen speculation neither by unreasoning protest nor by unreal compromise, but by taking up into itself all that was highest and truest in both. Why then is this Christian idea of God challenged in our day? Have we outgrown the Christian idea of God, so that it cannot claim and absorb the new truths of our scientific age? If not, with the lessons of the past in our mind, we may confidently ask,—What fuller unfolding of the revelation of Himself has God in store for us, to be won, as in the past, through struggle and seeming antagonism?

The fact that the Christian Theology is now openly challenged by reason is obvious enough. It almost seems as if, in our intellectual life, we were passing through a transition analogous to that which, in the moral region, issued in the Reformation. Even amongst those who believe that Christian morality is true, there are to be found those who have convinced themselves that we have intellectually outgrown the Christian Faith. ‘The only God,’ we have been told lately126, ‘whom Western Europeans, with a Christian ancestry of a thousand years behind them, can worship, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; or rather, of S. Paul, S. Augustine and S. Bernard, and of the innumerable “blessed saints,” canonized or not, who peopled the ages of Faith. No one wants, no one can care for, an abstract God, an Unknowable, an Absolute, with whom we stand in no human or intelligible relation.’ ‘God, as God,’ says Feuerbach127, ‘the infinite, universal, non-anthropomorphic being of the understanding, has no more significance in religion than a fundamental general principle has for a special science; it is merely the ultimate point of support, as it were, the mathematical point of religion.’ Yet it is assumed that this is all that remains to us, and we are left in the following dilemma,—‘An anthropomorphic God is the only God whom men can worship, and also the God whom modern thought finds it increasingly difficult to believe in128.’

In such a state of things it is natural that men should turn to pantheism as a sort of middle term between religion and philosophy, and even claim, for the unity of the world, the venerable name and associations of God. But the remarkable thing is that in the numberless attempts to attack, or defend, or find a substitute for Theism, the Christian, or Trinitarian, teaching about God rarely appears upon the scene. Devout Christians have come to think of the doctrine of the Trinity, if not exactly as a distinct revelation, yet as a doctrine necessary for holding the divinity of Christ, without sacrificing the unity of God. Ordinary people take it for granted that Trinitarianism is a sort of extra demand made on Christian faith, and that the battle must really be fought out on the Unitarian basis. If Unitarian theism can be defended, it will then be possible to go farther and accept the doctrine of the Trinity. It is natural that when Christians take this ground, those who have ceased to be Christian suppose that, though Christianity is no longer tenable, they may still cling to ‘Theism,’ and even perhaps, under cover of that nebulous term, make an alliance not only with Jews and Mahommedans, but with at least the more religious representatives of pantheism. It is only our languid interest in speculation or a philistine dislike of metaphysics, that makes such an unintelligent view possible. Unitarianism said its last word in the pre-Christian and early Christian period, and it failed, as it fails now, to save religion except at the cost of reason. So far from the doctrine of the Trinity being, in Mr. Gladstone’s unfortunate phrase, ‘the scaffolding of a purer theism,’ non-Christian monotheism was the ‘scaffolding’ through which already the outlines of the future building might be seen. For the modern world, the Christian doctrine of God remains as the only safeguard in reason for a permanent theistic belief129.

It is not difficult to see how it is that this truth is not more generally recognised. The doctrine of the Trinity, by which the Christian idea of God absorbed Greek speculation into itself, had but little point d’appui in the unmetaphysical western world. It bore the imprimatur of the Church; it was easily deducible from the words of Holy Scripture; it was seen to be essential to the holding of the divinity of Christ. But men forgot that the doctrine was ‘addressed to the reason130;’ and so its metaphysical meaning and value were gradually lost sight of. In the days of the mediaeval Papacy, ecclesiastical were more effective than metaphysical weapons, and Scholasticism knew so much about the deepest mysteries of God, that it almost provoked an agnostic reaction, in the interests of reverence and intellectual modesty. With the Reformation came the appeal to the letter of Holy Scripture, and the age of biblical, as contrasted with scientific, theology. The only scientific theology of the Reformation period was the awful and immoral system of John Calvin, rigorously deduced from a one-sided truth.

Then came the age of physical science. The break up of the mediaeval system of thought and life resulted in an atomism, which, if it had been more perfectly consistent with itself, would have been fatal alike to knowledge and society. Translated into science it appeared as mechanism in the Baconian and Cartesian physics: translated into politics it appeared as rampant individualism, though combined by Hobbes with Stuart absolutism. Its theory of knowledge was a crude empiricism; its theology unrelieved deism. God was ‘throned in magnificent inactivity in a remote corner of the universe,’ and a machinery of ‘second causes’ had practically taken His place. It was even doubted, in the deistic age, whether God’s delegation of His power was not so absolute as to make it impossible for Him to ‘interfere’ with the laws of nature. The question of miracles became the burning question of the day, and the very existence of God was staked on His power to interrupt or override the laws of the universe. Meanwhile His immanence in nature, the ‘higher pantheism,’ which is a truth essential to true religion, as it is to true philosophy, fell into the background.

Slowly but surely that theory of the world has been undermined. The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents Him as an occasional Visitor. Science had pushed the deist’s God farther and farther away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by shewing us that we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. He cannot be here and not there. He cannot delegate His power to demigods called ‘second causes131.’ In nature everything must be His work or nothing. We must frankly return to the Christian view of direct Divine agency, the immanence of Divine power in nature from end to end, the belief in a God in Whom not only we, but all things have their being, or we must banish Him altogether. It seems as if, in the providence of God, the mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of thinking the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to a philosophical view of nature. And it comes to us almost like a new truth, which we cannot at once fit it in with the old.

Yet the conviction that the Divine immanence must be for our age, as for the Athanasian age, the meeting point of the religious and philosophic view of God is shewing itself in the most thoughtful minds on both sides. Our modes of thought are becoming increasingly Greek, and the flood, which in our day is surging up against the traditional Christian view of God, is prevailingly pantheistic in tone. The pantheism is not less pronounced because it comes as the last word of a science of nature, for the wall which once separated physics from metaphysics has given way, and positivism, when it is not the paralysis of reason, is but a temporary resting-place, preparatory to a new departure. We are not surprised then, that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds that ‘the infinite and eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation of the universe is none other than the living God,’ and who vindicates the belief in a final cause because he cannot believe that ‘the Sustainer of the universe will put us to permanent intellectual confusion,’ should instinctively feel his kinship with Athanasianism, and vigorously contend against the view that any part of the universe is ‘Godless132.’

Unfortunately, however, the rediscovery of the truth of God’s immanence in nature, coming, as it has done, from the side of a scientific theory, which was violently assailed by the official guardians of the Faith, has resulted for many in the throwing aside of the counter and conditioning truth, which saves religion from pantheism. It seemed as if traditional Christianity were bound up with the view that God is wholly separate from the world and not immanent in it. And Professor Fiske has been misled133 into the belief that S. Augustine is responsible for that false view. It is almost incredible to anyone, who has read any of S. Augustine’s writings, that, according to this view, he has to play the rôle of the unintelligent and unphilosophical deist, who thinks of God as ‘a crudely anthropomorphic Being, far removed from the universe and accessible only through the mediating offices of an organized church134.’ And not only is S. Augustine represented as a deist, but S. Athanasius is made a pantheist, and the supposed conflict between science and religion is, we are told, really the conflict between Athanasian and Augustinian ideas of God135. Yet, as a matter of fact, S. Athanasius and S. Augustine both alike held the truths which deism and pantheism exaggerate into the destruction of religion. If S. Athanasius says, ‘The Word of God is not contained by anything, but Himself contains all things.... He was in everything and was outside all beings, and was at rest in the Father alone136:’ S. Augustine says, ‘The same God is wholly everywhere, contained by no space, bound by no bonds, divisible into no parts, mutable in no part of His being, filling heaven and earth by the presence of His power. Though nothing can exist without Him, yet nothing is what He is137.’

The Christian doctrine of God, in Athanasian days, triumphed where Greek philosophy failed. It accepted the challenge of Greek thought, it recognised the demands of the speculative reason, and found in itself the answer which, before the collision with Hellenism, it unconsciously possessed. It is challenged again by the metaphysics of our day. We may be wrong to speculate at all on the nature of God, but it is not less true now than in the first centuries of Christianity, that, for those who do speculate, a Unitarian, or Arian, or Sabellian theory is as impossible as polytheism. If God is to be Personal, as religion requires, metaphysics demands still a distinction in the Unity which unitarianism is compelled to deny. But, further, the Christian doctrine of God is challenged by the science of nature. Science, imperiously and with increasing confidence, demands a unity in nature which shall be not external but immanent, giving rationality and coherence to all that is, and justifying the belief in the universal reign of law. But this immanence of God in nature unitarian theism cannot give, save at the price of losing itself in pantheism. Deistic it might be, as it was in the last century; deistic it can be no longer, unless it defiantly rejects the truth which science is giving us, and the claims which the scientific reason makes.

It remains then for Christianity to claim the new truth and meet the new demands by a fearless reassertion of its doctrine of God. It has to bring forth out of its treasury things new and old,—the old almost forgotten truth of the immanence of the Word, the belief in God as ‘creation’s secret force,’ illuminated and confirmed as that is by the advance of science, till it comes to us with all the power of a new discovery. Slowly and under the shock of controversy Christianity is recovering its buried truths, and realizing the greatness of its rational heritage. It teaches still that God is the eternally existent One, the Being on Whom we depend, and in Whom we live, the source of all reality and the goal to which creation moves, the Object alike of religion and philosophy, the eternal Energy of the natural world, and the immanent reason of the universe. It teaches that He is the eternally Righteous One, and therefore the Judge of all, irrevocably on the side of right, leading the world by a progressive preparation for the revelation of Himself as Infinite Love in the Incarnation of the Word, stimulating those desires which He alone can satisfy, the yearning of the heart for love, of the moral nature for righteousness, of the speculative reason for truth. When men had wearied themselves in the search for a remedy for that which separates men from God, the revelation is given of Him Who ‘shall save His people from their sins.’ And when reason had wandered long, seeking for that which should be Real and yet One, a God Who should satisfy alike the demands of religion and reason, the doctrine of the Trinity is unfolded. It was the gradual revelation of God answering to the growing needs and capacity of man.

VIII. It follows from the point of view adopted in the foregoing essay that there can be no proofs, in the strict sense of the word, of the existence of God. Reason has for its subject-matter, the problem of essence, not of existence, the question, ‘What is God?’ not ’Is there a God? Proof can only mean verification à posteriori of a truth already held. We approach the problem with an unreasoned consciousness of dependence on a Being or Beings who are to us invisible. This we interpret crudely, or leave uninterpreted. The belief may express itself in ancestor-worship, or nature-worship, or what not. But as our moral and intellectual nature develops, its light is turned back upon this primitive undefined belief. Conscience demands that God shall be moral, and with the belief that He is, there comes confidence and trust, deepening into faith and hope and love: the speculative reason demands that God shall be One, the immanent unity of all that is. And the doctrine of God, which is best able to satisfy each and all of these demands, persists as the permanent truth of religion. But neither conscience nor the speculative reason can demonstrate138 God’s existence. And it is always possible for men to carry their distrust of that which is instinctive so far as to assume that it is always false because they have found that it is not always true. Reason cannot prove existence. The so-called proof, a contingentia (which underlies H. Spencer’s argument for the existence of the Unknowable), is an appeal to that very consciousness of dependence which some people consider a weakness, and a thing to educate themselves out of. The appeal to the consensus gentium can establish only the generality, not the strict universality, of religion. It will always be possible to find exceptions, real or apparent, to the general rule; while as for what is known as the ontological argument, which on principles of reason would justify the instinctive belief, it requires a metaphysical training to understand it or at least to feel its force. There remain, however, the two great arguments from conscience and from nature, which are so frequently discussed in the present day.

With regard to the first, there is no doubt that the belief in God will in any age find its strongest corroboration in the conscience. Even in the mind of a Felix the ideas of ‘righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come’ had a strange and terrifying coherence. There is that much of truth in the statement that religion is founded in ‘fear.’ But the argument from conscience has been weakened by being overstated. Conscience, as we know it, has won, not indeed its existence, but the delicacy of its moral touch, and the strength of its ‘categorical imperative,’ from the assured belief in a real relationship between man and a holy and loving God. When that belief has ceased to exist, conscience still survives, and it is possible and justifiable to appeal to it as a fact which can be explained by religion, but without religion must be explained away. But it is a mistake to suppose that we can take the untrained and undeveloped conscience, and argue direct from it to a righteous God. The lumen naturale, in its lowest development, gives but a faint and flickering gleam. We cannot argue back from it to a God of love, or even a God of righteousness, unless we interpret it in the fuller light of the conscience which has been trained and perfected under the growing influence of the belief. The idea of ‘duty,’ which is so hard to explain on utilitarian grounds, is not to be found, as we know it, in Greek ethics. For it implies a fusion of morals with religion, as we can trace it in the history of Israel, and the teaching of Christian ethics. If it is impossible to explain duty as the result of association between the ideas of public and private advantage, it is no less impossible to make it an independent premise for a conclusion which is presupposed in it.

The argument from nature is closely parallel. It is hard for those, whose lives have been moulded on the belief in God, the Maker of heaven and earth, to understand the inconclusiveness of the argument to those who have abandoned that belief, and start, as it were, from outside. Consequently it has been made to bear more than it can carry. No doubt the evolution which was at first supposed to have destroyed teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than the view which it superseded. And Christianity can take up the new as it did the old, and find in it a confirmation of its own belief. But it is a confirmation not a proof, and taken by itself is incomplete. It is a great gain to have eliminated chance, to find science declaring that there must be a reason for everything, even when it cannot hazard a conjecture as to what the reason is. But apart from the belief of our moral nature, that in the long run everything must make for righteousness, that the world must be moral as well as rational, and that the dramatic tendency in the evolution of the whole would be irrational if it had not a moral goal, the science of nature is powerless to carry us on to a Personal God. But the strength of a rope is greater than the strength of its separate strands. The arguments for the existence of God are, it has been said, ‘sufficient not resistless, convincing not compelling139.’ We can never demonstrate the existence of God either from conscience or from nature. But our belief in Him is attested and confirmed by both.

In this matter, the belief in God stands on the same level with the belief in objective reality. Both have been explained away by philosophers. Neither can be proved but by a circular argument. Both persist in the consciousness of mankind. Both have been purified and rationalized by the growth of knowledge. But the moment reason attempts to start without assumptions, and claims exclusive sovereignty over man, a paralysis of thought results. There have been, before now, philosophers who professed to begin at the beginning, and accept nothing till it was proved, and the result was a pure Pyrrhonism. They could not prove the existence of an external world. They believed it, even if they did not, like Hume, exult in the fact that belief triumphed over demonstration, but there was no sure ground for believing that the world was not a mere cerebral phenomenon, except the curiously rational coherence of its visions. Even Prof. Huxley, in his ultra-sceptical moods, admits this. He says140 that ‘for any demonstration that can be given to the contrary effect, the “collection of perceptions,” which makes up our consciousness, may be an orderly phantasmagoria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background of the abyss of nothingness.’ But no one, least of all a man of science, believes this to be so. He takes reality for granted, and only tries to interpret it aright, i.e. in such a way as to make a rational unity of the facts perceived. Tell a scientific specialist,—‘I am not going to let you beg the question. You must first prove that nature exists, and then I will hear about the science of nature,’ and he will say ‘That is metaphysics,’ which to him is probably a synonym for an intellectual waste of time. ‘Look at nature,’ he will say, ‘what more do you want? If nature had been merely a phantasmagoria there would have been no science of nature. Of course you must make your “act of faith141.” You must believe not only that nature exists, but that it is a cosmos which can be interpreted, if you can only find the key. The proof that nature is interpretable is that we have, at least in part, been able to interpret her. There were people in John Locke’s day who professed to doubt their own existence, and he was content to answer them according to their folly. “If anyone,” he says142, “pretends to be so sceptical as to deny his own existence (for really to doubt of it is manifestly impossible) let him, for me, enjoy his beloved happiness of being nothing, until hunger, or some other pain, convince him to the contrary.”’ We do not call a scientific man unreasonable if he answers thus, though he is justifying his premisses by his conclusion. We know that he that would study nature must believe that it is, and that it is a rational whole which reason can interpret. And ‘he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of such as diligently seek Him.’ We feel our kinship with both before the instinctive consciousness is justified by reason.

And there is a remarkable parallelism in the process of verification. The counterpart of the theological belief in the unity and omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the unity of nature and the reign of law. But that belief, though implicit in the simplest operation of reason143, is not consciously attained till late in the history of science. And even when it is reached, it is not at once grasped in all its wealth and fulness. It is thought of as mere uniformity, a dull mechanical repetition of events, which is powerless to explain or include the rich variety of nature and the phenomena of life and growth. It is to meet this difficulty that J. S. Mill naively assures us that ‘the course of nature is not only uniform, it is also infinitely various144.’ But soon the truth is grasped, that the reign of law is a unity which is higher than mere uniformity, because it is living and not dead, and includes and transcends difference. It is the analogue in science to that higher and fuller view of God in which He is revealed as Trinity in Unity.

But as these parallel processes of verification go on, the truth is forced upon the world that religion and philosophy must either be in internecine conflict, or recognise the oneness of their Object. ‘We and the philosophers,’ says S. Clement, ‘know the same God, but not in the same way145.’ Philosophy and religion have both been enriched by wider knowledge, and as their knowledge has become deeper and fuller, the adjustment of their claims has become more imperatively necessary. Few in our day would willingly abandon either, or deliberately sacrifice one to the other. Many would be ready to assent to the words of a Christian Father; ‘when philosophy and the worship of the gods are so widely separated, that the professors of wisdom cannot bring us near to the gods, and the priests of religion cannot give us wisdom; it is manifest that the one is not true wisdom, and the other is not true religion. Therefore neither is philosophy able to conceive the truth, nor is religion able to justify itself. But where philosophy is joined by an inseparable connection with religion, both must necessarily be true, because in our religion we ought to be wise, that is, to know the true Object and mode of worship, and in our wisdom to worship, that is, to realize in action what we know146.’

It is sometimes argued,—You have let in more than the thin end of the wedge. You admit that ’it is the province of reason to judge of the morality of the Scripture147.’ You profess no antagonism to historical and literary criticism. Under the criticism of reason, Fetichism has given way to Polytheism, Polytheism to Monotheism, even Monotheism has become progressively less anthropomorphic. Why object to the last step in the process, and cling to the belief in a Personal God? Simply because it would make the difference between a religion purified and a religion destroyed. The difference between the 30,000 gods of Hesiod, and the One God of Christianity, is a measurable difference: the difference between a Personal God and an impersonal reason is, so far as religion is concerned, infinite. For the transition from Monotheism to Pantheism is made only by the surrender of religion, though the term ‘theism’ may be used to blur the line of separation, and make the transition easy.

Religion has, before all things, to guard the heritage of truth, the moral revelation of God in Christ, to ‘contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints,’ and to trust to the promised guidance of the Spirit of Truth. And reason interprets religion to itself, and by interpreting verifies and confirms. Religion therefore claims as its own the new light which metaphysics and science are in our day throwing upon the truth of the immanence of God: it protests only against those imperfect, because premature, syntheses, which in the interests of abstract speculation, would destroy religion. It dares to maintain that ‘the Fountain of wisdom and religion alike is God: and if these two streams shall turn aside from Him, both must assuredly run dry.’ For human nature craves to be both religious and rational. And the life which is not both is neither.

Notes

59 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 139, quoting H. Spencer.

60 S. Clem. Alex. Strom. I. v.

61 Cf. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, Pt. I.

62 See this criticism excellently stated in Caird’s Phil. of Religion, pp. 32, etc.

63 Natural Religion, iii. p. 45, quoted by Martineau.

64 Ibid., iv. p. 74.

65 Frederic Harrison’s New Year’s Address, 1884.

66 A Study of Religion, vol. i. pp. 11, 12.

67 Ibid., p. 15.

68 Old Faith and New, § 41.

69 ‘Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati sumus, unde ipsa religio nomen accepit, non ut Cicero interpretatus est, a relegendo,’ Lact. Inst. iv. 28.

70 De verâ religione, sub fin.

71 Sum. Theol. 2. 2. 81. Art. 1.

72 Idea of God, p. 117.

73 See Seth’s Hegelianism and Personality, pp. 223, 224, one or two sentences from which are, almost verbatim, transferred to the text.

74 Justin Martyr (Exhort. ad Graec., ch. xxxiv) explains the anthropomorphisms of polytheism as an inversion of the truth that man is in the image of God.

75 Hume, Essays, II. 425.

76 H. Spencer, Eccl. Inst., p. 1.

77 Psych. vol. ii. §§ 388-391.

78 Caird, Philosophy of Religion, p. 162.

79 Ritter and Preller, Hist. Phil. Graec., 7th ed. § 82.

80 Ibid., § 83.

81 Plat. Rep. 377-385.

82 Theaet. 176 C.

83 H. Spencer, of course, follows Kuenen in assuming a polytheistic origin of Hebrew monotheism. See Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i. 223.

84 It is strange that Mr. Darwin should have failed to see that this was the answer to his difficulty. It appeared to him, he tells us (Autobiography, p. 308), ‘utterly incredible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, &c., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament.’ Incredible, no doubt. But why? For the very reason which makes it ‘incredible’ that man should be evolved directly from a fish, as Anaximander is said to have taught, and not incredible that he should be evolved, as Darwin teaches, from one of the higher vertebrates. The very idea of development, whether in species or religions, implies a law, and order in the development.

85 S. Athan. De Incarn. c. xii.

86 It is needless to say that this section is largely indebted to Dean Church’s Discipline of the Christian Character.

87 Edinb. Rev., Apr. 1888, p. 512.

88 Discipline of the Christian Character, p. 85.

89 Ibid., p. 87.

90 Hegel, Phil. of Hist., p. 247, Eng. Tr.

91 Cont. Rev., Oct. 1878, p. 645.

92 Ranke, Popes, i. 395.

93 Dollinger, The Church and the Churches, p. 239.

94 Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Philosophy, p. 103.

95 H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, pref.

96 See Ihne’s remarks on the separation of morals and religion in Rome at the time of the Punic wars. ‘The religious cravings were not satisfied, and men were carried either to the schools of Greek Philosophy or to the grossest and meanest superstition.’ Hist. of Rome, vol. ii. pp. 477, 478.

97 History of Religions, p. 22.

98 Edersheim, Life and Times, i. p. 17.

99 See Edersheim, i. pp. 31, etc.

100 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 343, Eng. Tr.

101 2 S. Pet. ii. 1.

102 1 Tim. vi. 20.

103 1 Cor. viii. 6.

104 1 Cor. iii. 19.

105 Euseb. iii. 28.

106 1 Cor. ii. 12.

107 Newman’s Arians, ch. ii. § 1.

108 Natural Truth of Christianity, §§ 1, 2.

109 Phil. of Hist., p. 343, Eng. Tr.

110 Dorner. Hist. of Doct. i. pp. 362, etc.

111 Adv. Prax. ch. iii.

112 Cont. Noet. § xiv.

113 Inst. iv. c. 29.

114 Strom. v. 1.

115 De Princ. I. ii. § 10.

116 Adv. Arianos i. § 20.

117 De Trin. viii. 10 and ix. 2.

118 Iren. Adv. Haer. IV. iv. I. 2.

119 Cf. pp. 333-336.

120 Plat. Phaed. 98 B. Arist. Met.

121 p. 455^b17. The references are to the Berlin edition.

122 p. 199^a8, 18: 415^b17: 731^a24.

123 p. 1070^a7, 1033^b8, 753^a3.

124 Dorner, Hist. of Doct. i. p. 366.

125 S. Athan. Contra Gentes, § 42.

126 Morison’s Service of Man, p. 48.

127 Quoted by W. S. Lilly, Nineteenth Century, Aug. 1888, p. 292.

128 Morison, Service of Man, p. 49.

129 It is far from our purpose to undervalue the work of Dr. Martineau. No more earnest and vigorous, and so far as it goes, no truer defence of religion has been published in our day. But his strength lies mainly in his protest against what destroys religion, and in his uncompromising assertion of what religion, as a condition of its existence, demands. He has done little to shew us how these demands can be rationally satisfied, how the personal God, which religion demands, is even an intelligible idea. He wavers between a view which logically developed must result in pantheism, and a view implying a distinction in the Divine nature, which carries him far in the Trinitarian direction. More often he contents himself with leaving the speculative question alone, or storming the rational position by the forces of religion and morals. See A Study of Religion, vol. ii. p. 145 compared with p. 192.

130 Newman’s Arians, p. 84.

131 Cf. Fiske, Idea of God, pp. 103, 104. Martineau, A Study of Religion, ii. 172, 173.

132 Idea of God, cf. § v. and pp. 105-110.

133 Apparently by Prof. Allen’s Continuity of Christian Thought.

134 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 94.

135 Ibid., § vii.

136 De Incarn. c. 17.

137 De Civ. Dei, vii. c. xxx; cf. too De Gen. ad lit. iv. c. 12; Enchir. ad Laur. c. 27.

138 S. Thoa. Aq. Sum. Theol. I. i. Quaest. 2, says that the Existence of God is demonstrable, but he explains that he does not mean strict demonstration, demonstratio apodeictica but demonstratio ab effectibus.

139 The Existence of God. By Rev. R. F. Clarke, S.J., p. 6.

140 Huxley’s Hume, p. 81.

141 ‘The one act of faith in the convert to science, is the confession of the universality of order and of the absolute validity, in all times and under all circumstances, of the law of causation. This confession is an act of faith, because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions is not susceptible of proof.’ Huxley in Darwin’s Life and Letters, vol. ii. p. 200.

142 Essay IV. 10. § 2.

143 Cf. Green’s Works, vol. ii. p. 284.

144 Log. Bk. III. ch. iii. § 2.

145 Strom. vi. 5.

146 Lact. Institt. IV. iii.

147 Butler’s Analogy, Pt. II. ch. iii. p. 183.