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 THE PHILOSOPHIC BASIS OF THEISM. 
 
 An examination of the Personality of Man, to ascer- 
 tain his capacity to know and serve God, and the 
 validity of the principle underlying the defence of 
 Theism, i vol. cloth, 8vo $3- 
 
THE 
 
 SELF-REVELATION OF GOD 
 
 BT 
 
 SAMUEL HARRIS, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 ii 
 
 PROFESSOR OP SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 
 IN YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 V1BSITY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1891 
 

 Copyright, 1886, 
 BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Houghton & Company. 
 
To 
 THE STUDENTS 
 
 WHO IN SUCCESSIVE CLASSES HAVE BEEN 
 UNDER MY INSTRUCTION IN 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY IN BOWDOIN COLLEGE 
 
 AND IN 
 
 BANGOR AND YALE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOLS, 
 
 IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Design and plan 1-11 
 
 PART I. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS AS THE OBJECT OP 
 
 RELIGIOUS FAITH AND SERVICE 13-149 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 RELIGION. 
 
 DEFINITION. 1. Christianity and the ethnic religions. 2. Religion the 
 response of man's spirit to the presence of the true God. 3. The idea 
 of God at first obscure and defective. 4. Two essential elements of 
 the idea of a divinity. 5. Progressive development of the idea. 6. No 
 religion without a divinity. Proposed substitutes. 7. Religion man- 
 ifested in all man's spiritual powers. 8. Ethnic religions degenerated 15-29 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 I. Explanations. Definition of experience. In what sense consciousness 
 
 is used 30-36 
 
 II. The elements of the idea of God given in intuition and so brought within 
 
 the consciousness. Objections answered 36-38 
 
 III. Consciousness of God in its deeper meaning. 1. Reasonable and ante- 
 cedently probable. 2. Implied in the idea of religion and essential to 
 its reality. 3. In fact assumed in all religions. 4. Involved in man's 
 moral consciousness. 5. And in his scientific consciousness. The idea 
 and belief presupposed in the proofs of God's existence 38-47 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 GOD KNOWN BY REVELATION. 
 
 What revelation is. Essential to man's knowledge of any being. Revelation 
 of man's physical environment. Revelation of man in his personality. 
 Revelation of God. What God reveals is himself 48-58 
 
vi CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 GOD KNOWN THROUGH REVELATION BY THE ACTION OF 
 MAN'S MIND RECEIVING AND UNDERSTANDING IT. 
 
 I. Necessary to the irapartation of knowledge by any revelation. Three 
 factors in the knowledge of God. 2. Action of thought defining 
 ' the idea, verifying the belief, purifying and enlarging the knowledge 
 of God. Mistakes. Objection. 3. Knowledge of God through reve- 
 lation progressive. 4. Inferences as to the Biblical revelation. 5. 
 The consciousness of God in the background of self-consciousness. 
 Pantheistic error 59-73 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION AND TO 
 KNOW HIM THROUGH IT. 
 
 1. The capacity assumed in all religions. 2. Implied in the reality of human 
 knowledge and the true conception of man's powers of knowing. 
 Rational realism, the true theory of knowledge. God not known by 
 unaided reason. The reason sense. 3. Possible on account of man's 
 likeness to God. True line of demarkation between the supernatural 
 and the natural. 4. Knowledge of God rooted in every part of man's 
 constitution as personal. 5. Not a special faith-faculty, 6. Objec- 
 tion that the absolute cannot present itself in the consciousness of a 
 finite being. 7, Belief and knowledge. 8. Theology concnete, not 
 abstract . . 74-102 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED TO BE AWAKENED. 
 
 1. Either because not yet developed, or because neglected or perverted. 
 2. The capacity to know God exists in the deepest spiritual insen- 
 sibility. 3. God gives the influence of his Spirit to awaken men 
 from spiritual insensibility. 4. Growth of knowledge after the 
 awakening. Acquisition, assimilation, organization of knowledge 
 into life. 5. The Christian doctrine of the witness of the Spirit . 103-120 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 SYNTHESIS OF THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL 
 IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Necessity of the synthesis seen in the errors resulting from isolation. 1. 
 Isolation of the experiential issues in mysticism. Quietism ; fanati- 
 cism. 2. Isolation of the rational issues in dogmatism and ration- 
 alism. Exemplified in the history of Protestantism. 3. Isolation 
 of historical revelation issues in mere archaeology and criticism. 
 Or, in an opposite direction, the Bible isolated from thought. 4. 
 Necessity of the synthesis of the three. 5. Historical revelation the 
 medium of it. Christ the centre of religious life and theological 
 thought. 6. To attain this synthesis the problem of all theological 
 thinking. Objections to theology. 7. Historical fact that religious 
 
CONTENTS. vii 
 
 experience and theological thought have been the working out of 
 this synthesis. Three stages in the progress of theological thought. 
 8. Key to the current movement of theological thought .... 121-149 
 
 PART II. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE AS THE ABSOLUTE BEING .... 151-229 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 
 
 Unity of the so-called arguments. Defects in their common treatment. 
 Definition of absolute Being. That it exists a necessary principle 
 of reason. Objections answered. Denial of the absolute Being in- 
 volves universal skepticism. Its existence an implicit postulate of 
 physical science. Historical persistence of the idea and belief. Con- 
 currence of agnostics, pantheists, materialists and deists. The true 
 significance of the a priori or ontological argument. The absolute 
 Being revealed in the universe 153-165 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 
 Definition of atheism. Classification of non-theistie theories 166-170 
 
 I. Denial of all knowledge of the existence of absolute Being. Repre- 
 sented by Comte's positivism. Rejects attempts to construct a 
 theory of the universe as unnecessary and illegitimate. Implies the 
 impossibility of knowledge. Rejected by physical science. Rational 
 necessity of finding a theory of the universe 170-171 
 
 II. Spencerian agnosticism. Is partial, not complete agnosticism. Arises 
 from attempting to define what the absolute Being is from the 
 a priori idea,; this gives only negatives ; the absolute Being known 
 as revealrd in the universe. Assumes a false a priori idea. Rests 
 on a false application of the maxim that definition limits. Issues 
 logically in complete agnosticism. Agnostics inconsistent with 
 themselves. Cosmic theism. Mr. Spencer might more consistently 
 be a theist. The theistic position 172-182 
 
 III. Pantheism. 1. Definition. 2. Rests on no reasonable grounds. 3. 
 
 Involves contradictions. 4. Inadequate to solve the necessary prob- 
 lems of reason. 5. Incompatible with free will, moral responsibility 
 and religion. 6. Various forms, its essential principles the same in 
 all. 7. Calls attention to neglected aspects of truth 182-201 
 
 IV. Materialism. Definition. Not monism. Does not give the real abso- 
 
 lute Being. Rests on subjective materialism. Cannot account for 
 the facts of personality. Nor for physical phenomena. Its contra- 
 dictions 201-206 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 
 
 Four forms of belief in a divinity. Two objections. The question stated. 
 Alleged impossibility of identifying the absolute Being of philosophy 
 with the personal God whom we worship. 1. The alleged impos- 
 sibility arises from the falsity of the philosophy. 2. From false 
 ideas of theism. 3. From false ideas of personality. 4. Knowledge 
 of the absolute Being positive but incomplete. 5. The absolute 
 Being is the All- conditioning. 6. Atheism not in agreement with 
 itself; in each form has some agreement with theism. 7. Truths 
 misconceived in pantheism and set forth in theism 207-229 
 
 PART III. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE AS PERSONAL SPIRIT THROUGH THE 
 CONSTITUTION AND COURSE OF NATURE AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 AND HISTORY OF MAN 231-440 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE AS THE POWER FROM WHICH 
 IT ORIGINATES AND ON WHICH IT DEPENDS. 
 
 The cosmolouical argument. The absolute Being is the First Cause, tran- 
 scending the universe. Shown from the essential finiteness and 
 conditionedness of the universe. Objections. Intimations of the 
 personality of the absolute 233-250 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 GOD REVEALED AS PERSONAL SPIRIT IN THE CONSTITUTION 
 AND COURSE OF NATURE. 
 
 The Physico-theological argument. Nature and scope of the evidence. 
 
 Preliminary objections. Principle on which the argument rests . . 251-256 
 
 I. Nature is symbolic. Physical objects known in intellectual equiv- 
 alents. Their objective ideality. Theism the only explanation. 
 Nature comprehended in science. No science if nature did not re- 
 veal universal reason like man's. Physical science in harmony with 
 theism. Symbolism of nature recognized in human language and 
 action. All physical objects in the unity of a system 256-266 
 
 II. Nature orderly under law 267-272 
 
 III. Nature realizes ideals. Internal and external ends. 1. Evidence in 
 particular objects and arrangements. In structures. In processes. 
 In selection. In the cooperation of many agencies. 2. Evidence 
 in the progressive realization of a plan in the cosmos as a whole. 
 Teleology of evolution. 3. Evidence in the beautiful and sublime 
 in nature 272-281 
 
CONTENTS. ix 
 
 IV. Nature subserves uses. 1. Subservience of particular agents and 
 processes to the uses of sentient and rational beings. 2. Nature as 
 a whole subservient to the spiritual system 281-287 
 
 V. Unity of nature and the supernatural in one all-comprehending 
 
 system 287-292 
 
 VI. The Inference 292-294 
 
 VII. Objections against the evidence. Arising from isolating a single 
 fact. Alleging imperfection in the object adduced as evidence. 
 From the existence of physical evil 294-316 
 
 VIII. Objections against the validity of the inference. That order and 
 law prove the absence of will. That the inference from final causes 
 is not scientific. That it presupposes a knowledge of the divine 
 purposes. That the evidence is annulled by discovering the effi- 
 cient cause. That we have had no experience in world-building. 
 Fortuitous concurrence of atoms. Supposition that the universe is 
 grounded in reason or spirit, but unconscious and impersonal . . 316-340 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 GOD REVEALED AS PERSONAL SPIRIT IN THE CONSTITUTION 
 AND HISTORY OF MAN. 
 
 I. In the existence of personal beings 341-345 
 
 II. In the constitutional religiousness of man. 1. Religion with belief 
 in a divinity generic, spontaneous, powerful, persistent. 2. There- 
 fore constitutional in man. Objections. 3. Inference that God 
 exists 345-365 
 
 III. In the constitution of man as shown by its analysis. 1. In man's 
 
 intellectual constitution. 2. In man's moral constitution as having 
 free will. 3. In his susceptibility to rational or spiritual motives 
 and emotions. 4. Belief in God rooted in every part of man's con- 
 stitution as personal. 5. Religion and belief in a divinity antecedent 
 to and independent of science 365-402 
 
 IV. God revealed in the practical power of faith in him. 1. Necessary 
 
 to religion. 2. Practical influence in every sphere. 3. Objection 
 that these blessings may be realized without a God. Hellenistic 
 culture 402-423 
 
 V. God revealed in the course of human history. 1. In the history 
 of man's religions. 2. Atheism disastrous. 3. Influence of reli- 
 gion in the progress of civilization. 4. The only true philosophy of 
 history 423-433 
 
 VI. Anthropomorphism. The objection stated and answered 433-440 
 
X CONTENTS. 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST AS THE REDEEMER OF MAN FROM SIN . . 441-552 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD'S REVELATION OF HIM- 
 SELF IN REDEMPTION THROUGH CHRIST. 
 
 I. It is historical. II. Involves the miraculous. III. The redemptive 
 action constitutes the revelation. IV. The Christian revelation is 
 historical and prophetic. V. Through a human medium in its re- 
 ception and communication and is progressive. VI. The Bible. 
 VII. The redemptive action continued in the Holy Spirit. VIIL 
 Christianity ideal as well as historical 443-473 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 MIRACLES. 
 
 I. Definition. II. Possibility. III. Epochal in the spiritual system and 
 in the physical. IV. Miracles and law. V. What the impossibility 
 of miracles implies 474-504 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION OF GOD IN 
 NATURE, MAN AND CHRIST. 
 
 I. In nature and man 505-515 
 
 II. In nature, man and Christ. 1. Christ's coming an epoch in the reve- 
 lation, central in human history. 2. Brings the divine into the 
 human as an abiding power of illumination, renovation and recon- 
 ciliation. 3. Takes up and vitalizes all truth in the religion of 
 Israel ; in the ethnic religions ; in modern substitutes for a divinity ; 
 in philosophy. 4. Reveals the worth of man and the significance of 
 human life. 5. Christianity the absolute and universal religion . . 515-532 
 
 III. Unity of law in the spiritual and the physical systems 532-546 
 
 IV. Objections. 1. Christianity cannot take up the varied knowledge and 
 
 activities of the present time. 2. Christianity unreasonable in view 
 
 of the vastness of the universe 546-552 
 
" The one true and deepest theme of the world's and man's history, to which all others 
 are subordinate, is the conflict of faith and unbelief. All epochs in which faith, under 
 whatever form, prevails, are brilliant, heo "t-elevating, and fruitful for contemporaries 
 and for after times. On the contrary all epochs in which unbelief, under whatever forms, 
 maintains its sorry triumph, even though for a moment they should shine with a sham 
 splendor, vanish from the view of posterity, because no one chooses to trouble himself to 
 know that which is unfruitful." 
 
 GOETHE : Israel in the Wilderness, in Notes to the West-Ottlichet Divan. 
 
OF THE *^5 
 
 'tflTIVBRSITT] 
 
 SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 IT may seem needless to add another to the many treatises on 
 what we have been accustomed to call Natural Theology and the 
 Evidences of. Christianity. Certainly there is no need of. a mere 
 repetition of the familiar arguments. But God in Christ recon- 
 ciling the world unto himself presents himself anew to the peo- 
 ple of every generation to be received or rejected as their re- 
 deemer from sin, and his kingdom of righteousness and good-will * 
 to be sought or refused as the progressive and only realization of 
 the true wellbeing of man. And while the reasons for believing 
 in God and seeking first his kingdom are always in essence the 
 same, the apprehension of them by men of successive generations 
 must vary in accordance with the progress of knowledge and civ- 
 ilization and the changing condition, opinions and development 
 of man. Hence in every generation the claims of God in Christ 
 to the faith and service of men must be examined anew. The 
 old truths, more precious than rubies, will never change, but 
 they must have a new setting in the knowledge and life of the 
 time. 
 
 In our day scientific discoveries and industrial inventions have 
 enlarged our knowledge of the universe and of the application of 
 its material and forces to the service of man. And since the uni- 
 verse itself is the manifestation or revelation of the ever present 
 God, this enlargement of knowledge presents new evidence of 
 his existence and new revelations of what he is. Also the 
 progress of knowledge as to the physical, political and social 
 wellbeing of man presents new tests and confirmations of the 
 reality of God's revelation of himself in human affairs and pre- 
 eminently in Christ, and of the necessity of his redemption of 
 men from sin and of the progressive realization of his kingdom 
 
2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of righteousness and good-will on earth to the renovation and 
 the true progress and wellbeing of man. Philosophical thought, 
 .also, is finding a broader and firmer basis for theistic belief. 
 
 On the other hand, the intense energy and wide range of hu- 
 man thought, its great discoveries, the great increase of knowl- 
 edge and its wide diffusion, bring us to new points of view, open 
 new ranges of investigation, and so necessarily raise new ques- 
 tions, difficulties and objections as to the existence of God and 
 the reality of his revelation of himself in the universe and espe- 
 cially in Christ. These are forced on us from the spheres of 
 physical science, of social and political economy, and of philoso- 
 phy. For example, while the Kantian philosophy in one line of 
 its development has been helpful to theism, in another line it 
 has issued in a diversified progeny of phenomenalism, agnosti- 
 cism and pantheism. 
 
 Thus the thinking of the present day on God and his revela- 
 tion of himself to man, on the part both of skeptics and believers, 
 has an earnestness, vigor and depth, a breadth of range and a 
 general prevalence never before surpassed. Butler's Analogy, 
 Paley's Natural Theology and Evidences of Christianity, the 
 Bridgewater Treatises, and similar defenses of Christian Theism 
 in the last and the. earlier parts of the present century are not 
 now sufficient. The evidence which they present is as valid as 
 ever ; but they fail to present the new evidence and to meet the 
 new questions and objections now urged on our attention ; their 
 method is open to criticism ; and some of the principles which 
 they assume are now the very points in question. 
 
 Hence there is imperative need of a reexamination and restate- 
 ment of the evidence of the reality of God's revelation of himself 
 as the one personal God, and of his preeminent revelation of him- 
 self in Christ as the Redeemer of men, reconciling the world 
 unto himself as recorded in the Bible. 
 
 Such reexamination is also necessary in order to discriminate 
 between false and true ways of meeting the difficulties and ob- 
 jections of the time, and to prevent fleeing, as if in desperation, 
 to defenses of Christianity which only betray it. For example, 
 some theologians are looking to a modified Hegelianism with an 
 inevitable trend toward pantheistic thought, to stay the progress 
 of skepticism. But in thus defending Christianity they are in 
 danger of sacrificing nofc only Christianity, but with it the per. 
 sonality of man and the personality of God. 
 
 In Part I. I consider the origin of the knowledge of God. It 
 
INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 begins as a spontaneous belief in the religious experience or con- 
 
 "O 
 
 sciousness. 
 
 Any statement of the evidence of Christian theism which is to 
 meet the thinking of this age must take and hold the position 
 that man's knowledge of God begins in experience. It exists in 
 his implicit consciousness as a spontaneous feeling and belief be- 
 fore he has defined it in thought or asked for evidence of its truth. 
 All knowledge originates in experience. Thought discovers no 
 new element of reality. It can only apprehend, define and in- 
 tegrate the realities already presented, from within or without, 
 in intuition. Until the presentation of some reality in experi- 
 ence thought is impossible, because there is nothing to think 
 about. We know, indeed, in rational intuition the self-evident 
 principles of reason which are regulative of all thought and ac- 
 tion. But the mind acts in these rational intuitions presenting 
 these principles in consciousness only on some occasion in experi- 
 ence which calls forth thought. " Pure thought," developing 
 knowledge a priori without the presentation of any reality in 
 experience, is impossible. In this there is now a general concur- 
 rence of all schools of thought. At the present day any satis- 
 factory statement of the evidence of Christian theism must con- 
 form to this principle. Man cannot find God by mere dint of 
 thinking without knowing him in experience, any more than he 
 can find the outward world in that way. " Pure thought " can- 
 not attain even the idea of God in this way, any more than a 
 man who has never seen can acquire the idea of color. By thus 
 thinking he will find nothing but his own thoughts. 
 
 The next position to be taken is that man's knowledge of God 
 in experience presupposes God's revelation of himself to man. 
 All objects known in experience reveal themselves by some ac- 
 tion on the man in which they present themselves in his con- 
 sciousness. Man has knowledge even of himself only when he is 
 in some way active and therein reveals himself to himself in his 
 own consciousness. In like manner man's knowledge of God in 
 experience presupposes God's revelation of himself to man. By 
 some action or influence, mediate or immediate, on the man, God 
 has presented himself in his consciousness and thus revealed him- 
 self to him. The initiative in man's knowledge of God must be 
 taken by God. Man can never come to the knowledge of God 
 and to communion with him unless God has already made ad- 
 vances to the man. Man can know God only in some revelation 
 which God makes of himself to man. The great truth of Chris- 
 
4 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tianity is that it is not man who must first seek God, but it is 
 God who first seeks man. And this accords with a philosophical 
 truth underlying the possibility of man's knowledge of God. 
 
 Next, as to what God reveals, the position to be taken is that 
 God primarily reveals himself rather than doctrines concerning 
 himself. The doctrines are the product of man's intellectual ap- 
 prehension of God in the true significance of his revelation of 
 himself. But what man is to know is God himself. So the 
 heavenly bodies do not reveal astronomy, they reveal themselves 
 and their movements. It is man's study of them as thus revealed 
 which produces the astronomy. What man knows in the astron- 
 omy is the heavenly bodies themselves and the laws of their ac- 
 tion. The current of modern thought is setting powerfully away 
 from the abstract to the concrete, from words and abstract no- 
 tions to facts and things, from the formulas of thought to the 
 realities which they signify. Our thought of God must set in 
 the same direction. The question is not, Do we know truth, doc- 
 trines, moral precepts ? but, Do we know God and what do we 
 know of him ? It is not, Can we prove the truth of Christian- 
 ity as a system of thought ? but, Do we know God in Christ re- 
 deeming the world from sin and establishing his kingdom of 
 righteousness and good-will to be sought first as the realization 
 of man's true wellbeing ? 
 
 As to the method of revelation, the right defense of Christian 
 theism must show, further, that God reveals himself primarily in 
 historical action by what he does. By his action and influence 
 on the individual he reveals himself in the consciousness. He 
 acts in the courses of nature and of human history in providen- 
 tial action, in moral government, in redemption, in the advance- 
 ment of his kingdom of righteousness and good-will, and thus re- 
 veals himself to men. God's revelation of himself recorded in 
 the Bible is mainly through historical action. His prophetic rev- 
 elations of truth and precept, of warning, promise and predic- 
 tion, are occasioned by events occurring or impending, and are 
 incidental and subordinate to the course of his historical action. 
 
 Hence we recognize in man a spiritual capacity through which 
 he is receptive of the revelation of God, and can know him 
 when revealed ; a spiritual eye by which he can see the divine 
 light if it shines on him ; spiritual susceptibilities through which 
 he is sensitive to the divine influence when it touches him. 
 
 Another position to be held is that if God reveals himself t<? 
 man, man must receive the revelation and apprehend, interpret 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 and verify it in his own thought. So the outward world reveals 
 itself to man through his sensorium, but he must apprehend, in- 
 terpret and verify his spontaneous beliefs in thought. This is 
 what man has been doing in all ages ; it is what science has been 
 doing, with slow and laborious progress, ever since scientific 
 thought began. This is equally essential in attaining the knowl- 
 edge of God. It is especially imperative in a scientific and skep- 
 tical age. To try to screen our religions belief from the tests of 
 reason and the scrutiny of rational thought would be to ad- 
 mit the impossibility of defending it to intelligence as reason- 
 able, and to abandon religion to mysticism and fanaticism. 
 
 The three factors in the knowledge of God are divine revela- 
 tion, religious experience and rational thought. 
 
 The next step, therefore, must be to ascertain whether God 
 has made other revelations of himself by which we may verify 
 the spontaneous belief arising in religious experience or con- 
 sciousness, and correct and enlarge the idea of God obtained 
 from that belief by thought. This is done in the three remain- 
 ing Parts. God has made revelation of himself in the universe, 
 both in nature and in man ; he reveals himself also in Christ. 
 By these the reality of God's revelation of himself in the con- 
 sciousness of the individual is tested and verified, and his knowl- 
 edge of God is enlarged. The same God whom he has found 
 revealed in his own religious experience, he now finds revealed 
 in the universe as the absolute Being ; revealed in the constitu- 
 tion and course of nature, and in the constitution and history 
 of man, as the personal God, the universal and absolute reason 
 energizing in them ; and revealed in Christ as the Redeemer of 
 men from sin. 
 
 In pursuing this investigation, in Part II. it is shown that an 
 absolute or unconditioned Being exists, and is manifested in the 
 universe. This proposition is a first principle of reason and a 
 necessary law of thought. English and American theologians 
 have commonly passed this by, sometimes as merely fruitless 
 metaphysics. But it is necessary to the true idea of God, who is 
 not God if he is not the absolute Being ; and it is necessary to 
 show the true basis of the evidences following, and to hold them 
 to their true significance and point. In recognizing the absolute 
 the theist has thus far in agreement with him the Spencerian 
 agnostics, and the monists, pantheistic and materialistic. Only 
 the few, whose theory of knowledge involves universal skepti- 
 cism, deny it. In fact, this postulation of the existence of the 
 
6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 absolute Being as a primitive principle of reason is the truth 
 sought in vain in the a priori or ontological argument in its vari- 
 ous forms. 
 
 In Part III. the inquiry will be, first, what the absolute Being 
 is revealed to be in the constitution and course of nature. In 
 the so-called cosmological argument we find that the absolute Be- 
 ing is the first Cause or Power on which the universe depends 
 and which manifests itself in it. Mr. Spencer agrees with us up 
 to this point. Then, looking at the constitution and course of 
 nature, we find evidence of a directing mind. This is commonly 
 called the teleological argument or the argument from final 
 causes. But it is much broader. We find in nature manifesta- 
 tions of each of the four fundamental ideas of reason, the True, 
 the Right, the Perfect and the Good. Nature is symbolic of 
 rational thought, ordered under law, progressive towards ideals, 
 and subservient to uses and productive of good. Thus in God 
 we find the unity of nature and the supernatural without any 
 break in the law of continuity. It has been claimed that evolu- 
 tion, if proved true, would annul this whole line of evidence. But 
 it will be shown that the evolution of the Cosmos as a whole 
 reveals truth or thought, is ordered under law, is progressive 
 through successive epochs toward the realization of higher and 
 higher orders of being, and is subservient to their uses ; and in- 
 dicates the unity and continuity of the progressive development 
 of the universe. If it impairs any supposed evidence of the direc- 
 tion of mind in details (though I do not see that it does so), it 
 restores more in showing the evidence of intelligent direction in 
 the progressive development of the Cosmos as a whole, through 
 all ages and by the concerted action of innumerable molecules 
 and forces, from the primitive homogeneous stuff. Then, sec- 
 ondly, from the constitution and history of man, it will be shown 
 that the belief in God has its roots in man's reason, his will, his 
 susceptibility to motives and emotions, in every part of his con- 
 stitution as a rational personal being; that its truth is essential 
 to the right understanding of his history, and to the discovery of 
 any worthy end for which he exists. 
 
 In Part IV. the revelation of God in Christ will be considered, 
 but not with the design of examining the evidences of Christian- 
 ity in detail. I shall attempt only to ascertain and define the 
 essential idea of Christianity, of the revelation of God in Christ 
 and of the miraculous, and to find a reasonable basis for the 
 possibility of miracles without interrupting the continuity of na- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 ture in its true sense. And, in conclusion, I shall show the 
 unity and continuity of God's revelation of himself in nature 
 and in the supernatural from the beginning of motion in the 
 homogeneous stuff through the successive epochs of the physical 
 evolution till rational man appears ; and then in the progressive 
 education and development of man in the moral system until 
 the great epoch in the progress of the moral system when God 
 in Christ appears reconciling the world to himself, elevating men 
 in a new birth by the Spirit into a higher and spiritual human- 
 ity, which is Christ's kingdom of righteousness and peace on 
 earth. 
 
 In prosecuting our investigations along these lines, if we would 
 take up all the thought of this age pertaining to the subject, we 
 must take up not only its doubts and difficulties, but also its 
 highest attainments in the conception of God. If we would go 
 anywhere we must start from where we are. So in every science 
 investigation must start from the highest attainments already 
 made. It will hardly be denied that this highest is the Chris- 
 tian conception of God, the absolute Spirit, perfect in all power, 
 wisdom and love, and ever acting among men to reconcile the 
 world to himself. He is the absolute Power; not, as the Epi- 
 cureans taught, apart from the universe, but immanent and ac- 
 tive in it ; " my father worketh hitherto ; " " he is not far from 
 each one of us ; for in him we live and move and have our be- 
 ing." He is the absolute Reason ; not, as the Stoics believed, 
 an impersonal, unconscious reason, 1 but reason alive and ener- 
 gizing ; in God as the absolute Reason, all truth and law, all 
 ideals of perfection and good, are eternal and archetypal, and 
 he is ever revealing himself by the progressive realization of 
 them in the universe. He is immanent in the universe ; not 
 the same with it, as the pantheists teach, but transcending it, 
 while ever active in it, realizing in it the thoughts of perfect 
 wisdom in the action of perfect love. He is in the universe; 
 not merely in the physical system evolving in necessity under 
 blind force, but also in the spiritual system of personal free 
 agents under moral law, redeeming them from sin, educating 
 
 1 I commonly use the word reason not to denote merely the power of rea- 
 soning by which the finite mind by virtue of its rationality passes by inference 
 from the known to the knowledge of what had been unknown, but to denote 
 the mind or spirit itself considered as capable of the rational intuition of prim- 
 itive and universal principles. This implies in a finite mind the power, as its 
 finiteness involves the necessity, of reasoning. In God, the absolute Rea- 
 son, all knowledge is archetypal and eternal. 
 
8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 them to righteousness and good-will, and in the midst of the 
 world progressively establishing the kingdom of heaven. The 
 physical system is the form or medium in and through which 
 the spiritual manifests itself. The question to be answered in 
 this volume is, "Do we find in our own consciousness, do we 
 find in the universe, in the constitution and course of nature, 
 or in the constitution and history of man, do we find in Jesus 
 Christ and the growth of the kingdom of God on earth, evi- 
 dence that such a God is revealing himself therein to man ? " 
 
 While we begin with the highest conception of God, \ve know 
 that his revelation of himself to man must be progressive and 
 can never be completed, because it is the revelation of the abso- 
 lute and infinite God in the finite and to finite beings. It is a 
 common assumption in the objections of skepticism that the ab- 
 solute Reason can reveal itself only in a perfected and completed 
 universe ; that any imperfection in the medium through which 
 the revelation is made proves imperfection in the God revealed. 
 This overlooks the fact that the distinction of the absolute or 
 unconditioned and the finite, like that of the true and the absurd 
 or of the right and the wrong, is fundamental in the reason, and 
 no power, not even the almighty, can annul it. If God reveals 
 himself it must be through the medium of the finite and to 
 finite beings. The revelation must be commensurate with the 
 medium through which it is made and with the development of 
 the minds to whom it is made. Hence both the revelation itself 
 and man's apprehension of the God revealed must be progressive 
 and, at any point of time, incomplete. Hence, while it is the 
 true God who reveals himself, man's apprehension of God at 
 different stages of his own development may be not only incom- 
 plete, but marred by gross misconceptions. 
 
 Such is the question before us in this volume and the general 
 course of thought in answering it. I have not attempted to fol- 
 low out all these lines of evidence in their details. To do this 
 would be impossible in a single volume ; for there is nothing in 
 the universe but what has some significance in its bearing on the 
 knowledge of God. I have aimed rather to indicate the posi- 
 tions to be taken, the lines in which the evidence is found, and 
 the way in which it is to be presented in its relations to the 
 thought and life of the present age. 
 
 The wide-spread skepticism of the day, so far as it has an in- 
 tellectual basis, rests on errors of principle or fact, or on erro- 
 neous applications of truth and fact, in empirical or philosophical 
 
INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 science. Hence it involves the profoundest questions both of 
 philosophical and of physical, anthropological and sociological 
 science. But while its roots are deep in questions and researches 
 necessarily confined to the few, its ramifications of misapprehen- 
 sion, doubt and disbelief penetrate the thinking of the many. 
 Few study the philosophy of Kant. Yet the pantheism which 
 has paralyzed evangelical life and thought in Germany sprang 
 from it. Buddhism, arising from analogous philosophical errors, 
 has sway over hundreds of millions. Few study the philosophy 
 of Sir W. Hamilton. Yet to it Spencer appeals in support of the 
 .} gnosticism which now confronts the Christian church in its work 
 in India and Japan, and is discussed in the workshops as really 
 as in the schools of Christian countries. Few have opportunity 
 to master the investigations of physical science. Yet its laws of 
 evolution, of the correlation and conservation of force, of the 
 uniformity and continuity of nature, are misapplied in popular 
 lectures and literature to disprove the existence of any divine 
 and even of any supernatural being. This skepticism must be 
 killed in its deep roots if it is to die in its branches and leaves. 
 In defending theism it must never be forgotten that belief in a 
 divinity wells up spontaneously, like the belief in the outward 
 world, and is as well-founded ; and that in bringing men to faith 
 in God, we must depend first of all on the power of God's Spirit 
 awakening their spiritual susceptibilities to the consciousness of 
 their need of God and to the experience of his presence and suf- 
 ficient grace. Belief in God without scientific investigation and 
 proof is reasonable, as is also belief in the sun, moon and stars, 
 in fire, air, earth and water, without scientific knowledge of 
 them. But when theism encounters the assaults of skepticism 
 it cannot defend itself merely by appealing to the spontaneous 
 religious belief. It cannot shrink from fairly meeting the pro- 
 found questions and difficulties which skepticism thrusts on it. 
 When intellectually apprehended theism must meet these ques- 
 tions, because it is itself the true theory of the universe, and sets 
 it forth in the unity of a thoroughly rational system grounded in 
 the absolute and perfect Reason and expressing or manifesting 
 its eternal and archetypal intelligence. It must be able to con- 
 vince the intellect not less than to touch the heart. To cease 
 to maintain this is to abandon the whole ground to agnosticism 
 and skepticism. It is suicidal in the defense of theism to sneer 
 at all investigation of its fundamental bases and of the errors 
 of skepticism respecting them, as metaphysics confined to the 
 
10. THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 closets of philosophers and theologians, and of no concern to or- 
 dinary thinkers or to the interests of religion. 
 
 These deeper principles and facts in philosophy and in phys- 
 ical, anthropological, and sociological science, a right understand- 
 ing and application of which underlie an intelligent and reason- 
 able knowledge of God, I have considered in The Philosophical 
 Basis of Theism. In the present volume we are concerned with 
 the application of the principles there established, in examining 
 the reality of God's revelation of himself in the experience or 
 consciousness of men, and the verification of the same by his 
 further revelation of himself in the constitution and ongoing of 
 the universe, and in Christ. To avoid repetition reference will 
 be made, as occasion may require, to the former volume. 
 
 The conclusion reached is not merely that Christian theism 
 may find a tolerated, but inferior and precarious standing in the 
 presence of empirical and philosophical science and advancing civ- 
 ilization. It is that the existence of God, the Absolute Reason, 
 the ultimate ground of the universe and revealing himself in it, is 
 the necessary presupposition of all scientific knowledge ; that it 
 is the necessary basis of all ethical philosophy which recognizes an 
 immutable and universal moral law, of all sesthetical philosophy 
 which recognizes any rational and universal standard of perfec- 
 tion and beauty, and of all teleological philosophy which discrim- 
 inates among the ends of human action, the objects of pursuit and 
 the sources of enjoyment, and determines in the light of reason 
 and by its unchangeable standard what is worthy of man as a 
 rational being, what is the true good which has worth in itself 
 and under all changing conditions is unchanged and everlasting ; 
 that the revelation of God in Christ redeeming man from sin 
 and establishing and advancing his kingdom of righteousness and 
 good-will gives the only complete and satisfactory philosophy of 
 human history ; that in it alone is given the knowledge of the 
 true goal of human progress and the true realization of the well- 
 being of mankind in God's kingdom of righteousness and good- 
 will on earth, and the motive, light and quickening energy effec- 
 tive for its progressive realization ; and that the progress of 
 Christ's kingdom takes into harmony with and subservience to 
 itself the advancing knowledge of every age, meets its questions, 
 its difficulties and objections, and finds in the ever enlarging 
 knowledge of the universe an ever enlarging revelation of God. 
 And thus we find a true significance in the words of Clement of 
 
INTRODUCTION. 11 
 
 Alexandria : " Philosophers are children, unless they have been 
 made men by Christ.'' l 
 
 This volume is the result of the investigation and discussion of 
 this subject in my instruction of successive classes of theological 
 students for many years. In these studies we have endeavored 
 to avail ourselves of all the new light from the investigations and 
 discoveries of our time, and to meet fairly its questions and dif- 
 ficulties. We have endeavored to find the harmony of its empir- 
 ical and philosophical science with Christian theism, to compre- 
 hend its discoveries not only in the unity of scientific systems, but 
 in the broader unity of the conception of the universe as the pro- 
 gressive revelation of God. I do not offer the book to the public 
 with any thought that it is a complete presentation of the reasons 
 for believing the existence of God, the reality of his revelation 
 of himself, and the harmony of Christian theism with empirical 
 and philosophical science, but only in the hope that it may con- 
 tribute something to this result ; that it may help to expose 
 the fallacy of the objections of skepticism, to confirm the faith 
 and enlarge the knowledge of believers, and to help candid in- 
 quirers who in perplexity and doubt are seeking God if haply 
 they may feel after him and find him ; though he is not far from 
 every one of us. If it is little that it contributes, yet our Lord 
 pronounces his blessing on the servant who is faithful in that 
 which is little, and rebukes the servant who hid the talent in- 
 trusted to him by his Lord because it was but one. 
 1 Stromata, bk. i. chap. xi. 
 
PART I. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS AS 
 THE OBJECT OF RELIGIOUS FAITH AND SERVICE. 
 
 "Here have we in brief the ground-thought of all philosophy of religion. It sets forth 
 the religion in its absolute truth, while it recognizes in it the progressive steps and changing 
 forms through which the spirit elevates itself to the true freedom in God which in its 
 essence it demands." Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, p. 137. 
 
 "It is after all not our human conception of God nor the manner in which we worship 
 him, but the consckmsness that there is a God and that we depend on his guidance and 
 prorvidence, that constitutes the essence of religion; and herein every worshiper of Divinity 
 is alike, no matter as to the form of worship. Have we not all one Father? Has not one 
 God created us? " Hebrew Journal. 
 
 " The religious man does not desire communion with his own thoughts, but real cetn- 
 munion with God. . . . The religious impulse longs for contact with God, and not simply 
 with doctrines or past history." Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. i. pp. 122, 
 109, translation. 
 
 " God is essentially spirit. Religion is a relation of spirit to spirit. This relation of 
 spirit to spirit lies at the ground of religion." "He who has not broadened his heart 
 beyond the impulses of the finite, who has not attained the exaltation of himself in the 
 aspiration for the eternal in the presentiment or feeling of it, and has not seen into the 
 pure atmosphere of the spirit, let him not touch the matter here to be handled." Hegel, 
 Philosophic der Religion, vol. i. pp. 98 and 6. 
 
 "Where shall we find the principle which includes the whole spirit of a society? In the 
 arts, the literature, the philosophical systems, the civil institutions? Without doubt, if in 
 every people there were not an element more profound than all that, more intimate, more 
 inseparable from the very idea of the social life. And this genius eternally present, of 
 which the very substance of the peoples forms itself, what can it be if it is not religion, 
 since from it issue, as so many necessary consequences, political institutions, the arts, po- 
 etry, philosophy, and, up to a certain point, even the course of events. Do not imagine 
 that you understand a people if you have not pushed your inquiry up to their gods. . . . 
 If you know the religious doctrine of a society, you know truly for what and how it lives ; 
 you possess its secret ; it cannot put you off with any illusion either by its laughter or its 
 tears ; you read not only the thoughts on its face, but those which are formed and inscribed 
 by God himself in the depths of its spirit." Quinet, Le Genie des Rdiyions, p. 12. 
 
 'Religion is for our consciousness that region in which all riddles of the world are 
 solved, all conflicts of thought are explained and harmonized, all pains and sorrows are 
 stilled, the region of eternal truth, eternal rest, eternal peace. That by which man is 
 man, is thought; more exactly in the concrete it is spirit. From him as spirit issue all the 
 manifold creations of science, art, political iustkuiions. But all these manifold creations 
 
14 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 and all farther complications of human relations, activities, enjoyments, all which has 
 worth for man, in which he seeks his happiness and glory, find their ultimate centre in 
 religion, in the thought, the consciousness, the feeling of God. God is the beginning of all 
 and the end of all; as all issues from him so all goes back to him; thus he is the centre 
 that quickens, animates and inspires all. In religion man sets himself in relation with 
 this centre, in which all his other relations come together ; and therewith he exalts himself 
 to the highest grade of consciousness and into the region which, free from all other attrac- 
 tion, is the purely satisfying, the unrestricted, free, and an end for itself ... As feeling 
 this relation to God is the free enjoyment which we call blessedness; as activity it is nothing 
 else but to manifest the glory of God and to reveal his lordship; and for the man, it is no 
 more to live for himself, his own interest and vain-glory, but for the absolute end. All 
 peoples know that the religious consciousness is that in which they possess truth, and they 
 have regarded religion always as their dignity and as the Sunday of their lives. What- 
 ever awakens doubt and anguish, all cumber and care, all limited interests of the finite we 
 leave behind on the sandbank of the temporal; as from the highest peak of a mountain, 
 far removed from all definite view of the earth, we look restfully over all boundaries, so 
 with the spiritual eye the man, lifted from the hard reality of life, looks on it only as a 
 view, whose lights and shadows and division?, softened to eternal repose, are in this region 
 mirrored in the beams of the spiritual sun." Hegel, Philosophic der Religion, vol. i. 
 Einleitung, pp. 3-5. 
 

 CHAPTER I. 
 RELIGION. 
 
 RELIGION is man's consciousness of relation to a superhuman 
 and supernatural power, which we may call a divinity; and mani- 
 fests itself in spontaneous belief and feeling, and in voluntary 
 action designed to be a service acceptable to the divinity. It is 
 man's inward life and outward action responsive to his relation 
 to a divinity. It is in reality the conscious response of the hu- 
 man spirit to the presence and action of God, who is ever present 
 and ever active. 1 
 
 1. Christianity is the absolute or universal religion, but it is 
 not the only religion. 
 
 It is a common opinion among Christian people that religion 
 is properly ascribed only to those who are devoutly living lives of 
 Christian faith and love. But this is not accordant with the ac- 
 cepted usage of the word, which applies this name to all the re- 
 ligions of the world, whether polytheistic or monotheistic, whether 
 pagan or Christian. The life of faith and love is doubtless es- 
 sential to acceptance with God, but not to the definition of re- 
 ligion. 
 
 Christianity, as the absolute religion, does not deny that there 
 are other religions. On the contrary, it takes up into itself all 
 which is true and right in the ethnic religions. It is in antago- 
 nism to them only so far as they are erroneous in belief, practice 
 or spirit. It is the goal toward which they are blindly groping, 
 the redemption of which they obscurely feel the need and for 
 which they dimly hope. It would bring them to an end, as the 
 sun brings the light of the stars to an end, not by quenching it, 
 but by absorbing it in the light which fills the firmament. 
 
 If this is not so, then outside of Christianity and antecedent to 
 
 1 " A religion is the belief in a superhuman being or beings, whose actions 
 are seen in the works of creation, and in such relations toward this being or 
 beings as prompt the believer to acts of propitiation and worship, and to the 
 regulation of conduct." Professor Wm. D. Whitney, Princeton Review, May, 
 1881, p. 438. 
 
16 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 it there is and has been no religion in the world. Then there 
 would be no evidence that religion is constitutional in man and 
 characteristic of humanity always and everywhere. Then re- 
 ligion begins on earth suddenly, after mankind had existed ages 
 without it ; and in a magical way without any vital organic con- 
 nection with human history and growth. Then it is something 
 which comes down on man from without, but has no root in hu- 
 manity and no living growth in human history. 
 
 2. The religiousness of man is the response of his spirit to the 
 presence of the true God, ever active and revealing himself in the 
 constitution and ongoing of nature, and in the constitution and 
 history of man. Man is religions because he lives in the pres- 
 ence and amid the activities of God, and is constituted so as to 
 receive the divine influence, and to become aware of his presence 
 through it. The lowest savage lives in the presence and amid 
 the activities of the everywhere energizing God. He becomes 
 aware of his presence through his spiritual sensibility, as he be- 
 comes aware of the trees and the sun through his physical sensi- 
 bility. In the religions of the world we see man's universal con- 
 sciousness that he lives in the presence of this mysterious reality 
 and is dependent on it. In every stage of human progress, in 
 every type of human life, man comes in sight of the superhuman 
 and the supernatural. 
 
 3. The idea which in thought the man forms of the divinity 
 of whose presence he becomes conscious is at first obscure, defec- 
 tive, and usually erroneous. It is long before the true idea is at- 
 tained. His knowledge of God in this respect is analogous to 
 his knowledge of the external world. Man has always lived in 
 the presence of the sun, moon and stars, and of the earth, and 
 has been acted on by their never ceasing energies. He is aware 
 of their presence and has some right ideas of them. But he 
 thinks of the sky as a blue dome dotted with shining spots, of 
 the earth as flat and motionless, and of the sun and stars as mov- 
 ing over it. His ideas of nature are as erroneous as his ideas of 
 God, and his progress towards right ideas as slow. But what- 
 ever his errors of thought, it was the real sun and stars and earth 
 which were always acting on him and revealing themselves. So 
 it was the true God who was always revealing himself by his 
 presence and action, and of whom man has always shown him- 
 self conscious, however erroneous his early ideas of him and 
 however slow his progress to the knowledge of him as the one 
 true God. 
 
RELIGION. 17 
 
 4. In all religions the object of religious belief, feeling and 
 service is a supernatural l and superhuman being. God is the 
 Absolute Spirit. These two words denote the two essential ideas 
 of the Deity. In God's universal presence and action he reveals 
 himself as the Infinite or Absolute Spirit. In the spontaneous 
 religiousness of man, which is the response of the soul to the 
 presence of God, we should expect to find traces at least of im- 
 pressions made in his consciousness by each of these aspects of 
 the Deity. These words would not exist in the language of a 
 rude people, and the ideas which they express would not be de- 
 fined and formulated in thought. But there would be some dim 
 and undefined feeling of the infinite, thought of probably, if at 
 all, as the superhuman ; and some feeling or sense of divinity as 
 spirit or supernatural. In their religion would be spontaneous 
 feelings and beliefs responsive to both the infinite and the spirit- 
 ual in God. And this we find to be the fact. 
 
 The sense of the infinite appears in wonder and awe and fear 
 before the transcendent powers of nature. The world confronts 
 the man at every turn with beings and energies beyond and 
 above his comprehension, and beyond and above his power. He 
 lives in the presence of the infinite, which reveals itself on every 
 side in the inaccessible sky, in the great and silent forests, in the 
 ocean, in the impassable rivers, in the dawning light morning by 
 morning, in thunder, lightning and storm, in the springing of 
 plants from the seed, the coming forth of grass, leaves and 
 flowers in the spring, and in all the mystery of birth and life. 
 Thus everywhere and always confronted and awed by what tran- 
 scends both his comprehension and his strength, he feels himself 
 hemmed in, limited, dependent, in the grasp of these resistless 
 and incomprehensible powers. His divinity is always superhu- 
 man. 
 
 On the other hand, he knows in himself thought, feeling and 
 will ; from his own voluntary action he gets his first knowledge 
 of power or causal efficiency. He naturally ascribes the effects 
 which he witnesses around him to a thinking, voluntary power 
 like himself. This tendency is discovered now among the lower 
 tribes of savages. One who saw a watch for the first time sup- 
 posed it to be alive, and when it had run down and stopped, he 
 said it was asleep. A missionary to a savage people sent a boy 
 with fruits to another missionary's family in the neighborhood, 
 
 1 Every spirit, every personal being endowed with intuitive reason and free 
 will, is supernatural, that is, above nature. 
 
18 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 with a letter specifying the number. The boy had learned that 
 a letter communicated information. Therefore in a retired spot 
 on the way he hid the letter under a stone and ate some of the 
 fruits. He then took out the letter and delivered it with the re- 
 mainder. When asked for what was missing, he was astonished, 
 and wondered how the letter hidden under a stone could have 
 known what he was doing. So the savage regards the tran- 
 scendent and incomprehensible powers, before which he is awed, 
 as intelligent like himself. In the sense of his dependence he 
 cries to them for help, and considers by what offerings or service 
 he can avert their displeasure and gain their favor. 1 
 
 Some consciousness of the divinity as a personal being or spirit 
 is inseparable from religion, because religion implies in its essence 
 communion with the divinity in service rendered with the expec- 
 tation of favors returned. Rothe says : " The religious self-con- 
 sciousness is immediate consciousness of relation to God as a 
 reciprocal fellowship, a communion with God ; but this is possible 
 only with a personal God. Only if God is an I, can he be to us a 
 Thou, as he always is to the religious, even at the lowest grade 
 of religion ; for at this grade it is essentially praying." 2 
 
 Thus the spontaneous religiousness of man is not the sense of 
 the infinite alone nor the sense of the spiritual alone. The divin- 
 ity is not solely a transcendent and incomprehensible power man- 
 ifesting itself everywhere ; nor is it solely a spirit-like man (a 
 ghost, a dead ancestor reappearing). It combines both. The 
 primitive and spontaneous religion is the response in human con- 
 sciousness, however dim and incomplete, to the presence and ac- 
 tion of God, the absolute Reason, the eternal Spirit, of whose 
 archetypal thought the universe is the expression, and who is im- 
 manent in the universe and ever revealing himself through it. 
 
 5. In the progress of man, the form in which he conceives 
 the divinity in thought changes, being gradually cleared, cor- 
 rected and filled out ; but, because he is always confronted with 
 the infinite and the spiritual or supernatural, these essential ele- 
 ments always appear. 
 
 At first the horizon which separates the finite from the infinite 
 or absolute, what man comprehends and controls from what tran- 
 scends his knowledge and his power, is close at hand. In a 
 primitive animism he believes that everything unfamiliar, that 
 acts, is alive, and that any object may be the abode or shrine of a 
 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 555-557. 
 
 2 Zur Dogmatik, i. p. 25. 
 
RELIGION. 19 
 
 divinity. As he advances in knowledge and culture the horizon 
 recedes ; the area of the intelligible and familiar enlarges. Still 
 in the greater powers of nature he is awed in the presence of 
 the infinite and sees the action of a mind. He worships greater 
 gods, who are the ruling energies respectively in the sun, the 
 moon, the air, the sea and other greater powers of nature. Also 
 he deifies the man who has exerted powers greater than he 
 knows in his own experience for the deliverance of men from 
 evils or the bestowment of signal good. 
 
 In his ruder condition what becomes familiar and explicable 
 ceases to awaken religious sentiments ; and in what is extraordi- 
 nary and anomalous he continues to see the divine. But as he 
 advances further and comes to recognize the uniformity of nature, 
 the fixedness of its laws and the beauty of the cosmos, he begins 
 to see the infinite and the presence of reason in these, and thus 
 attains a nobler idea of the infinite Spirit revealing himself in the 
 universe. Nor does any progress in science remove the religious 
 consciousness of God, or the intellectual necessity of recognizing 
 the absolute Spirit. In explaining the solar system and all the 
 interaction of masses of matter science recognizes gravitation. 
 But whether it is regarded as a force inherent in matter or as 
 communicated through an intervening medium, the explanations 
 issue in the unexplainable. Science announces the law of the cor- 
 relation and conservation of force, and begins to think it has un- 
 veiled the secret of the universe ; it identifies molar motion with 
 molecular, it explains light by the vibrations of an all-pervading 
 ether ; but as it unfolds the explanation it finds itself inextric- 
 ably involved in difficulties, and even confronted with seeming 
 contradictions and impossibilities. It- resorts to atoms and mole- 
 cules only to find that they cannot be ultimate, but as " manu- 
 factured articles " carry the thought to a power behind them- 
 selves. 1 The universe, seen in the clearest light of science, con- 
 tinues to reveal through and behind itself the absolute Spirit 
 that transcends our comprehension and that continually reveals 
 itself in the universe as the power, energizing in it, that sustains 
 and directs it. Man has always found the supernatural as the 
 necessary background of the natural. Hartmann says: "Very 
 little thought is required to satisfy one's self that the natural, all 
 and everywhere, rests on the supernatural and terminates in it. 
 Every atom of nature still preaches its supernatural origin and 
 hsirtg, and every force of the mechanical process terminates in 
 : - Philosophical Basis or Theism, pp 41 6-4 25 > 
 
20 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 interior emotion, which appoints to the will its ends." : The 
 progress of science does not set the supernatural aside, but re- 
 veals more clearly its reality and grandeur; reveals it as the 
 absolute Reason, encompassing not nature only, but the whole 
 contents of human knowledge, and giving it unity, consistency 
 and reality. Not only has science failed to remove this all-en- 
 compassing supernatural, but it has shown it to be the most cer- 
 tain and fundamental of realities ; so that if we cease to know 
 the absolute Reason, we cease to know anything. 
 
 Religion existed before empirical science, before philosophy 
 and theology. The feelings and services in which it has mani- 
 fested itself have been various ; but they all disclose the essential 
 characteristics of religion. The terrors of Shamanism prompting 
 its votaries to avert the malign influence of evil spirits, the rap- 
 ture of Edwards contemplating the mystery of the Trinity, the 
 self-sacrificing love of Paul suffering the loss of all things and 
 rejoicing in the sacrifice that he may bring to men the glad tid- 
 ings of God's grace revealed in Christ, all the multiform motives 
 and emotions of the religions of men, agree in revealing a con- 
 sciousness of relation to a superhuman and supernatural being. 
 
 This conception of religion, necessary from the theistic point 
 of view, is also sustained by the facts ascertained by anthropolo- 
 gists in their investigations of the religions of the world. 2 
 
 6. Conversely, no state of consciousness, in whatever beliefs, 
 feelings or services manifested, is religion, if void of all indica- 
 tions of impressions received from the Infinite and the Super- 
 natural. 
 
 Man's constitutional religiousness cannot of itself give him a 
 religion. There must be a divinity as the object of the constitu- 
 tional religiousness or there can be no religion. Man's constitu- 
 tional susceptibility to impressions of sense could give him no 
 knowledge of sensible objects nor of himself as sensitive, if there 
 were no outward world to act on his sensorium and thus reveal 
 itself to him and reveal his own sensitive capacity to himself. 
 So man's susceptibility to -religions impressions could give him 
 no knowledge of a divinity nor of his own religious susceptibility, 
 
 1 Die Religion des Geistes, part B, p. 118, Hitchcock's Trans. 
 
 2 " Certain it is that the oldest religions must have contained the germs of 
 all the later growth and, though perhaps more thoroughly naturalistic than the 
 most naturalistic we now know, must have shown some faint traces at least of 
 awakening moral feeling. . . . The gods are no mere names. They are not 
 the natural phenomena themselves, but spirits, lords, ruling them." Pro 
 f. P. Tielo, Religions, in Encyc. Brit., vol. xx. 367, 366. 
 
KELIGION. 21 
 
 if there were no divinity to act on his religious susceptibility, and 
 reveal himself through it and therein reveal to the man his 
 own constitutional susceptibility to religion. God is the infinite 
 Spirit. If, by the presence and action of God everywhere, man's 
 religious susceptibility is awakened at once to the consciousness 
 of a divinity and of his own religiousness, this consciousness 
 must disclose more or less clear impressions both of the infinitude 
 and the spirituality of the divinity. Without these there can be 
 no religion. 
 
 Man's constitutional religiousness anc^ the necessity of finding 
 an object for it are now very generally admitted ; and various 
 objects other than a personal divinity have been proposed to 
 satisfy it. For it is now contended that there may be religion 
 in its full and proper significance without any consciousness of a 
 divinity as its object. 
 
 Agnosticism tells us of " worship mostly of the silent sort at 
 the altar of the Unknowable." 1 Mr. Spencer recognizes the ex- 
 istence of absolute Power as a necessary postulate in all scientific 
 knowledge, and also as the object of religion. This belief in the 
 existence of the Absolute, as constitutional in man, must persist 
 through all human evolution. Accordingly he says : " No one 
 need expect that the religious consciousness will die away or will 
 change the lines of its evolution. Its specialities of form, once 
 strongly marked and becoming less distinct during past mental 
 progress, will continue to fade ; but the substance of the con- 
 sciousness will persist." 2 He recognizes, however, the absolute 
 only. This is but one of the elements essential in the idea of 
 God, and therefore cannot satisfy either the religious conscious- 
 ness or the demands of reason. Religion supposes communica- 
 tion of some sort between the worshiper and the divinity. Mr. 
 Spencer argues with much insistence that because science can 
 never remove mystery from the universe, therefore religion will 
 always persist. But religion cannot subsist on the mere mystery 
 of an unknowable Absolute. 3 
 
 1 Huxley, Lay Sermons, pp. 19, 20. 
 
 2 The Study of Sociology, chap. xii. p. 311. 
 
 8 Mr. Spencer, in the Principles of Sociology (part i. chaps, xiii.-xxv. pp. 
 185-440), maintains that religion and the idea of a divinity have their origin 
 in the worship of ancestors, this having been preceded by a belief in ghosts. 
 This seems to contradict his doctrine that the object of worship is the un- 
 knowable absolute. It is untenable also because the idea of a divinity cannot 
 have originated in a belief in ghosts ; man must have had an idea of the spirit 
 in the body before he could believe in its survival after death. Thus Mr. 
 
22 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 On the other hand, the followers of Comte, who worship hu- 
 manity, isolate the personal or spiritual element in the idea of 
 God, and make it the object of the religious consciousness to the 
 exclusion of the absolute or superhuman. This cannot satisfy 
 either the needs of religion or the demands of reason. It does 
 not carry the thought or the heart beyond finite nature and 
 man to an absolute Spirit as the object of trust and service. In 
 fact, it presents no being whatever as the object of worship, not 
 any one man nor the human race itself. Its object of worship is 
 a mere abstraction in the worshiper's own mind of the nobler 
 qualities of humanity disclosed in the whole course of human his- 
 tory. It can satisfy the heart of the worshiper only as he una- 
 wares hypostasizes this abstraction of all which is true, right, per- 
 fect and good in man, in the conception of an all-transcending 
 Spirit perfect in power, wisdom and love, and thus ignorantly 
 worships the true God. 
 
 Since man is constituted with religious needs and susceptibil- 
 ities there is no reason to fear that religion will cease to be a 
 power in human history ; nor that its object will fade out either 
 into the formless unknowable or into an abstraction of qualities 
 without a being. The object of the religion which is to survive 
 through all changes will be, in some more or less adequate form 
 of conception, the absolute Reason or Spirit revealing himself in 
 the consciousness of men. 
 
 Matthew Arnold would identify religion with morality : " Re- 
 Spencer's own theory with logical necessity carries us back to the fact that 
 man's idea of a spirit originated in his knowledge of himself as a power of in- 
 visible thought, volition and energy. This is a simple and natural explana- 
 tion, accordant with common sense, sustained by the observation of facts, com- 
 pletely satisfactory as an explanation of the idea. To account for its origin it 
 is needless to resort to man's shadow or his dreams. Hence the movements 
 in nature which he sees about him he attributes to a mind or spirit like his 
 own. Mr. Spencer himself seems to imply as much, when, in defending his 
 theory, he says : " The necessity we are under to think of the external energy 
 in terms of internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic 
 aspect to the universe." (Nineteenth Cent., Jan. 1885, p. 10.) There are 
 insuperable difficulties in carrying out this ghost-theory of the origin of relig- 
 ion in its details. For example, in explaining on this theory the worship of 
 the sun and moon, of mountains, trees and animals, Mr. Spencer says that the 
 names of these objects were sometimes given to men, or that a great chief 
 might be figuratively called a mountain ; and that after death the person might 
 be confounded with the object whose name he had borne. The whole argu- 
 ment is a striking example of special pleading under the powerful bias of a 
 preconceived and favorite theory. 
 
RELIGION. 23 
 
 ligion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling ; the pas- 
 sage from morality to religion is made when to morality is ap- 
 plied emotion." l 
 
 But morality without religious faith, however heightened and 
 enkindled, is not religion and cannot meet the religious needs of 
 the soul. It is not every feeling which lifts morality into re- 
 ligion, bat only those which spring from the consciousness of a 
 divinity. This is implied in Kant's definition : " Religion is the 
 recognition of all our duties as divine commands." 2 Man's con- 
 sciousness of his relation to God penetrates with its influence 
 every sphere of life and action. As he comes to know the divin- 
 ity clearly as the eternal Spirit, the absolute Reason, he sees that 
 all truth and law are eternal in him, that all men are in a moral 
 system in their common relation to him, and that the law itself 
 is the law of universal love. In the consciousness of his depen- 
 dence on God as a creature he sees that the only life which can 
 accord with the reality of his own condition, the only life which 
 can accord with truth and law and be an acceptable service to 
 God, must be the life of faith or trust in the God on whom he 
 absolutely depends, putting forth its energies in acts of universal 
 love. Thus by religion morality is lifted into the service of God; 
 it is made of absolute and universal obligation ; it is brought into 
 unity under the all-comprehending law of love ; it is lifted above 
 " the categoric imperative," vitalized and made spontaneous by 
 love ; it is inspired and made strong in service by God's gracious- 
 ness to man and man's faith in God. Thus man rises above the 
 life of morality into the spiritual life of fellowship with God, 
 transfiguring the morality by faith and love into a divine service, 
 and transfiguring the man into the moral likeness of God, who is 
 love. 
 
 When morality lacks the consciousness of a divinity, not only 
 is it not religion, it is not even morality in its true development ; 
 it is not obedience to the command of conscience in its true sig- 
 nificance ; it is but the dry, hard rock awaiting the divine touch 
 which shall make it flow with the water of life. Morality with- 
 out religion ignores man's real condition as a creature dependent 
 on God, and the life of faith in him which it requires. It leaves 
 man with nothing above himself on which he can lay hold to lift 
 himself from the fleshly and natural to the spiritual and divine. 
 It implies no need of such divine power, but leads man directly 
 
 1 Literature and Dogma, chap. i. pp. 20, 21. 
 
 2 Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vurnunft, iv. 1. 
 
24 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 to a life of self-sufficiency. Man recognizes his own autonomy 
 and finds the law which he obeys to be no higher than himself ; 
 thus it takes from duty all absolute obligation and all universal 
 application. Knowing no moral system under the law and gov- 
 ernment of God, morality has no philosophical basis for the law 
 of love, nor for the worth of man, the sacredness of his rights 
 and the equality of men in their relations to God, the common 
 Father and Lord of all, nor for the unity of the spiritual life as 
 in all its aspects and actions the manifestation of faith and love. 
 It is not lifted above the sense of duty and the imperative com- 
 mand of the law to the unity, the spontaneity, the enthusiasm of 
 the life of love ; it is rather a piecemeal and perfunctory doing 
 of many duties, a living by rules. As such it is but a defective 
 apprehension of the significance of the moral law, and a partial 
 and incomplete obedience to its requirements. With some sim- 
 ilar conception of morality as grounded in self-sufficiency, and as 
 not competent to realize the inspiration, depth and fulness of the 
 spiritual life, Wordsworth wrote in A Poet's Epitaph : 
 
 " A moralist perchance appears, 
 Led, Heaven knows how, to this poor sod; 
 And be has neither eyes ndr ears, 
 Himself his world and his own God; 
 
 " One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling 
 Nor form nor feeling, great nor small ; 
 A reasoning, self-sufficient thing, 
 An intellectual All in All." 
 
 Considering, therefore, both the distinctness of religion and 
 morality, and their necessary union and cooperation in realizing 
 the spiritual life, it is evident that morality cannot be identified 
 with religion nor substituted for it ; and that they who do not 
 believe in God cannot find in morality an object for religion 
 which may be a substitute for God, or which can satisfy man's 
 religious consciousness and realize his right spiritual develop- 
 ment. 
 
 A religion which has not yet recognized the Divinity as a moral 
 law-giver and judge, and therefore has not yet penetrated moral- 
 ity and vitalized it into spiritual life, remains itself a germ not 
 yet developed in its normal growth ; a staminate plant which 
 has not yet found the pistillate blossom on which to drop its 
 fertilizing pollen, although it is growing on the same tree. And 
 morality, if not quickened by religion into spiritual life, is but a 
 pistillate plant susceptible of fertilization and awaiting it from 
 abovo. 
 
RELIGION. 25 
 
 D. F. Strauss suggests, in The Old Faith and the New, that 
 we may still have a religion in revering the Cosmos itself, a sug- 
 gestion in which he pathetically utters the yearning of his soul, 
 bereaved of its God by false philosophy, for a divine object of 
 trust and worship. But the Cosmos cannot satisfy the needs of 
 religion. The object of religious faith and service is not hu- 
 manity ; it is the mysterious reality behind humanity, on which 
 humanity itself depends. It is not the Cosmos, but the uncondi- 
 tioned reality behind the Cosmos on which the Cosmos itself de- 
 pends. The universe does* not pass beyond nor rise above the 
 finite. Man feels his dependence on it, ground under material 
 masses and blind and aimless forces. The very design and ne- 
 cessity of religion is to free man from dependence merely and 
 helplessly on unintelligent necessity, on physical and resistless 
 forces, or on fate, by leading him to see his dependence on abso- 
 lute and perfect Reason, on absolute power guided by wisdom and 
 love. Schleiermacher's conception of religion as primarily the 
 sense of dependence is inadequate. Religion is distinguished not 
 by the sense of dependence, but by the object on which we con- 
 sciously depend ; by the sense of dependence on a being superhu- 
 man and supernatural, a being whose power transcends and con- 
 trols all power, on the absolute Spirit whose intelligence pierces 
 and illuminates all reality and all possibility, and in whom wis- 
 dom and love guide and regulate almighty power. We find the 
 ultimate ground of the universe in the absolute Reason, directing 
 all power in wisdom and love ; and the right religious life is the 
 life of conscious dependence on this God, and of willing trust and 
 service. Nothing is rightly called religion which shows no trace 
 of the soul's response to the presence of the absolute Spirit. 
 
 Mr. J. R. Seeley, in Natural Religion, advances the opinion 
 that enthusiastic devotion to tlie study of a science is a religion, 
 and may satisfy the constitutional religiousness of man. The 
 same may be said of enthusiastic devotion to art or literature, or 
 to the abolition of slavery, to temperance, or any other philan- 
 thropic movement. But evidently in none of these do we find 
 any distinctive peculiarity of religion. The subordination of life 
 to a ruling idea, thus bringing it into unity and quickening en- 
 thusiastic self-devotion to an object, is not distinctive of religion ; 
 for a man may be thus controlled by the greed of gain ; he may 
 thus devote himself enthusiastically to any object, good or bad. 
 There is probably no propensity natural to man which may not 
 become his master-passion, flaming up and enveloping his whole 
 
26 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 being. It is not enthusiastic self-devotion which is the distinc- 
 
 o 
 
 tive peculiarity of religion, but it is the fact that the object of 
 the devotion is a divinity, a being at once superhuman and super- 
 natural. With him, though beyond the finite, man comes into 
 communication because he himself in his own rational and free 
 personality participates in the supernatural ; and to him man's 
 thought and heart go out as the supreme object of trust and ser- 
 vice. If there is no divinity there is no religion. Then man's 
 constitutional susceptibility to religion is without a real object ; 
 his religiousness is a miserable illusion, a falsity in the very con- 
 stitution of his being. 
 
 When agnostics, positivists and materialists affirm the reality 
 of religion, they are using the word excluding its distinctive 
 meaning ; they are sheltering their systems under the shadow of 
 a great and venerable name after stripping the name of all that 
 makes it great and venerable. Herein they give their testimony 
 that religion has its roots in the constitution of man and is indis- 
 pensable to his wellbeing ; at the same time they reveal the in- 
 sufficiency of their systems either to take up and express the fun- 
 damental facts or to realize the highest ends of humanity. 
 
 In ancient times, in the childhood and ignorance of the race, 
 man was reaching out to the supernatural, "stretching out his 
 hands unto God ; " religions were growing and myths forming. 
 He worshiped the great powers of nature, the great heroes who 
 had once lived on earth, as seeing in and through them the su- 
 pernatural and superhuman that he sought transitory repre- 
 sentations of the divinity, to give place, with advancing culture, 
 to the God more clearly and truly known. But here in these 
 modern times come artificers of religions who call on us to go 
 back from the light and maturity of our civilization, and worship 
 these abandoned divinities of ancient times, this rubbish of de- 
 cayed religions. They call on us to worship them, not as sup- 
 posed divinities, but in the full knowledge that they are no gods; 
 not yearning for clearer knowledge of the supernatural, with 
 hands stretdhed out unto God, but in the full conviction that 
 there is no divinity, and for the express purpose of proving that 
 man's religiousness may be satisfied without a God, and so of 
 giving consistency to speculative unbelief. And for this, man in 
 his highest enlightenment is expected to be satisfied to worship 
 humanity, or the material universe, or even his own science and 
 art. In the burning midsummer brightness of modern civilization, 
 these seeds from the mummies of ancient religions will not take 
 
RELIGION. 27 
 
 root and grow. And if they should, they could not satisfy the 
 needs of religion now. But in fact these religions are manufac- 
 tured to order, and are not, like the ancient religions, spontaneous 
 and luxuriant growths. Theism is now the living religion into 
 which, among us, the religions of the past have grown. Nothing 
 in our civilization can satisfy the religious needs of men but the 
 consciousness of relation to the absolute Spirit, the supreme and 
 universal Reason, in whom wisdom and love are perfect and 
 eternal, from whom all power issues, and by whom it is directed, 
 in accordance with rational principles and laws, to the progres- 
 sive realization of rational ideals and ends. 
 
 7. Religion is manifested in the action of all man's spiritual 
 powers. The much debated question whether religion belongs 
 to the intellect, the feelings or the will, is set aside by the fact 
 that it manifests itself in them all. 1 Religion manifests itself in 
 the intellect in spontaneous beliefs ; in the feelings in religious 
 motives and emotions; and in the will in voluntary acts designed 
 to be acceptable to the divinity. 
 
 If a person believes in the existence of a divinity, but hates 
 him, and refuses all homage, worship and obedience, he cannot 
 be said to be religious ; he reveals the capacity for religion, but 
 certainly not religion. If a person believes in God while the be- 
 lief is inoperative and he remains indifferent to him and renders 
 him no service, he cannot be properly said to have a religion. 
 Religion includes belief, feeling and voluntary service. 
 
 The services, however widely different, agree as service to a 
 divinity, supposed to be acceptable to him and designed to se- 
 cure his favor. This characterizes the rudest offering of food, 
 drink and sweet odors, which the divinity is supposed in some 
 invisible way to partake of and enjoy ; it characterizes propi- 
 tiatory sacrifices, penance and self-torment, and all religions 
 services up to the Christian's secret communion with God in 
 prayer, and his life of fidelity to duty and of self-sacrificing love. 
 " An old Samoyede woman, who was asked by Castren whether 
 she ever said her prayers, replied : Every morning I step out 
 of my tent and bow before the sun and say, When thou risest, 
 I too rise from my bed. And every evening I say, When thou 
 
 1 For an account and criticism of this discussion in Germany, see Voigt's 
 Fundamental Dogmatik, pp. 55-76. In connection with it is a very full dis- 
 mission of the different proposed etymologies of tlfe Latin word religio. But 
 if the true etymology were ascertained, it would be of little account in ex- 
 plaining what religion is. 
 
28 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 sinkest down, I too sink down to rest. That was her prayer t 
 perhaps the whole of her religious service. A poor prayer it 
 may seem to us, but not to her; for it made that old woman 
 look twice, at least, each day away from earth and up to heaven ; 
 it implied that her life was bound up in a larger and a higher 
 life; it encircled the daily routine of her earthly existence with 
 something of a divine halo. She herself was evidently proud 
 of it, for she added, with a touch of self -righteousness, There 
 are wild people who do not say their morning and evening 
 prayers." l Tertullian alludes in a most touching manner to 
 the offering of children to Saturn : " When, indeed, their own 
 parents offered of themselves, and willingly paid their vow, and 
 fondled the infants lest they should be slain weeping." 2 Yet if 
 the parents had been asked why they did this they might have 
 answered, " We ought to give our most precious things to the 
 gods ; " a principle which the religion of universal love recog- 
 nizes, while inspiring horror at the misapprehension and misap- 
 plication of it. 
 
 The voluntary rendering of service implies religious belief 
 and feeling. In these also, under all differences, a real agree- 
 ment may be traced. Fetichism, which is animism, finds mind 
 or the supernatural in everything. Polytheism recognizes the 
 divine in everything by multiplying its gods, till every subdi- 
 vision and ramification of physical processes, of organic growth, 
 of the personal, domestic, social and political life of man, and 
 of moral feeling, action and character is supposed to be superin- 
 tended by its peculiar divinity. In monotheism, in which all 
 limitations of time and space drop off from the Deity, God is 
 again found pervading the universe by his energy and revealing 
 himself in all the forms and processes of nature and in the life 
 and history of man. Dr. Dorner remarks that the oriental relig- 
 ions set out from the divine, and attempt to bring God down 
 to the human, issuing often in Pantheism; but the western relig- 
 ions set out from the finite and attempt to lift man up to God, 
 issuing in the deification of heroes. " But both seek the same 
 end, the unity of the divine and the human." " In the broader 
 sense, the whole history of ancient religion in general may be 
 called a prophecy of the consummation of religion, that is, of 
 the unity of God and the man." 3 
 
 1 F. Max Miiller, Science of Religion, Lecture III. 
 
 2 Apology, $ 9 ; Oxford Trans., vol. i. p. 21. 
 
 8 Doctrine of the Person of Christ, vol. i. Introduction. Christl. Glaubensl, 
 vol. i. PP- 697, 698, 705. 
 
KELIGION. 29 
 
 8. The ethnic religions, as historically known to us, are often 
 in a state of degeneracy in which their original spiritual elements 
 are partially obscured. The earlier Vedas disclose a religion su- 
 perior in its ideas of God and his service to the later religions of 
 India. The same is true of the earlier Zoroastrian religion of 
 Persia. In China are ceremonies which seem to be survivals of 
 ancient beliefs and services more distinctively religious than Con- 
 fucius inculcates ; these indicate an ancient religion superior to 
 any now prevalent among that people. Even in savage tribes it 
 is not uncommon to find traditions of a divinity and religious ser- 
 vices that have passed away ; the divinity is sometimes said to 
 be dead. 1 And these traditions disclose a religion superior to 
 that of recent times. In the time of the Roman emperors the 
 purer and healthier religion, which was so powerful in the Re- 
 public, had degenerated. Of the results of this degeneracy Paul 
 presents an appalling picture in the beginning of his Epistle to 
 the Romans. The people, in the never-dying consciousness of 
 religious needs, were already seeking other religions, especially 
 the religions of the East, which offered a mediating priesthood 
 and propitiation for sin. 2 Christianity, with Paul, accounts for 
 this degeneracy as a consequence of man's sin, wilfully turning 
 away from the purer knowledge and service of God : " Even as 
 they refused to have God in their knowledge." But, however 
 explained, it is a fact which must be taken into account in esti- 
 mating the historical evidence of man's constitutional religious- 
 ness, and of its essential unity as the response of the human spirit 
 to the presence of the superhuman and the supernatural, in its 
 progressive development to the knowledge and service of the true 
 God. And analogous appearances of degeneration are facts which 
 must be taken into account in any theory of the evolution of or- 
 ganic life. 
 
 1 F. Max Miiller, Origin and Growth of Religion, pp. 15, 16. 
 
 2 See Uhlhorn's Conflict of Heathenism and Christianity, Dr. Smyth's 
 Trans., bk. i. chap. ii. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 GOD is known in experience or consciousness. 
 
 I. Some preliminary explanations are necessary to clear the 
 meaning of this proposition. 
 
 We are said to know in experience whatever is known in pre- 
 sentative intuition ; it may be either the mind itself in its sev- 
 eral acts and states or some reality which is not self. What- 
 ever reality has come under our immediate observation is said 
 to be known in experience. In other words, we know in ex- 
 perience whatever is or has been presented in consciousness. 
 What is known in experience may be also said to be known in 
 consciousness. 
 
 Consciousness as thus used includes the primitive or intuitive 
 knowledge both of the subject and the object. 
 
 Consciousness as used in the earlier Scotch philosophy, and 
 commonly in Great Britain and America, means the mind's im- 
 mediate knowledge of its own mental states and acts, or at most, 
 the mind's knowledge of itself in those states and acts. In this 
 narrower meaning of the word it is not correct to say that we 
 are conscious of God, or that he is present to our consciousness. 
 
 In German philosophy consciousness is used in a broader 
 sense to denote the intuitive, undiscriminated knowledge of both 
 object and subject, the immediate knowledge in one and the 
 same act of the object known and the subject knowing. Hamil- 
 ton introduced this usage into Great Britain, maintaining, to use 
 his own example, that a man may be conscious of his ink-stand. 
 In popular language consciousness is used with this broadei 
 meaning. We speak of a person absorbed in thought as being 
 unconscious of all which is going on around him ; of a person 
 fainting or rescued from drowning as having lost all conscious- 
 ness. The literary usage is the same. So Tennyson uses it : 
 
 " Slowly and conscious of the raging eye 
 Tha,:; watched him , . . went Leolin : ' 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 31 
 
 and so Dryden : 
 
 " -ZEneas only, conscious to the sign, 
 Presaged the event." 
 
 This commends itself to the reason as the usage which gives 
 exactly the true rendering of the facts. Every act of knowledge 
 is knowledge of an object known, a subject knowing, and the 
 knowledge. There are not here three acts of knowing, but only 
 one. In knowing any object, as in perceiving a tree, the mind 
 with its knowledge is revealed to itself as really as the object is 
 revealed to the mind. The mind's knowledge of the object 
 known and of itself knowing are equally real and certain as 
 knowledge ; they are indissolubly united in one and the same 
 mental act ; if the knowledge of the object is unreal the mind's 
 knowledge of itself is annulled, and if the mind's knowledge of 
 itself and of its knowledge is unreal the knowledge of the ob- 
 ject is annulled. We give the correct rendering of this fact 
 when we give to this complex act one name which designates 
 it in both aspects. And consciousness is the appropriate name, 
 because whether applied to the knowledge of the object or of 
 the subject, the name itself, consciousness, denotes that it is 
 knowledge of one with the other. Hence we describe the fact 
 correctly when we say that the object is presented or revealed 
 to the mind in consciousness, and that the mind is conscious of 
 the object ; or, that in the perception of the object the mind be- 
 comes conscious of itself and its knowledge. Of late, philos- 
 ophy both in Great Britain and America is coming to the use of 
 the word in its wider meaning, as " the light of all our seeing." 
 
 It must be noticed, however, that consciousness as thus defined 
 is the implicit, undiscriminated consciousness. The matter given 
 in it is nebulous and undefined. Intelligence, choice and feel- 
 ing are present but as yet undistinguished. Knowledge is not 
 yet out of the swaddling-clothes of feeling and able to stand 
 alone on its own feet. In the reaction of the thinking mind on 
 the nebulous contents of consciousness, knowledge, feeling and 
 determination are distinguished ; and knowledge itself is discrim- 
 inated as consciousness of an object and self-consciousness. A 
 reason for using the word in this broader sense is that it denotes 
 primitive knowledge in this undiscriminated state, which no 
 other word so appropriately denotes. 
 
 In the proposition that man is conscious of God or that God 
 presents himself in man's consciousness, the word is used in 
 
32 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 its broader meaning. This explanation removes all objections 
 founded on its more restricted meaning. God does not present 
 himself to the distinctive self-consciousness as a being identical 
 with the human spirit ; but he presents himself, as a being dis- 
 tinct from the man, to the primitive consciousness in its broader 
 meaning. Yet the fact that God thus presents himself shows 
 that, though not identical with man, he is like him, in affinity 
 with him and capable of communication with him. As material 
 things, to which man in his body is like, can act on him through 
 the sensorium by which he is in communication with nature, and 
 present themselves in his primitive consciousness, as these things 
 being expressions of the divine thought can be translated into 
 thought again, so God, to whom man as spirit is like, may act on 
 him as spirit, and so present himself in man's consciousness and 
 be apprehended in thought. 
 
 The proposition as thus explained implies that God acts in 
 some way on the human spirit, so that it may be conscious of his 
 presence and action. It implies that as man, being as to his 
 body included in nature, is surrounded by a physical environment 
 which is constantly acting on him and presenting itself in his 
 consciousness, so man as spirit is surrounded by a spiritual en- 
 vironment which is constantly acting on him and presenting it- 
 self in his consciousness. That environment is God, in whom 
 we live and move and have our being, and the moral system of 
 spiritual beings, who depend on his power and are subjects of his 
 law and of his love. Hence our proposition implies the truth 
 of the saying of Kant, which has sometimes been thought ex- 
 travagant, that "we are conscious of forming a part of the intel- 
 ligible world." 
 
 It is not pretended, however, that God presents himself in con- 
 sciousness in the fully rounded and complete idea of him. No 
 object is so presented. Consciousness may be distinguished as 
 implicit, as it lies unapprehended and undefined in thought ; and 
 explicit, after its contents have been thus apprehended and de- 
 fined. In the primitive or implicit consciousness, the objects 
 presented incite and actuate the man while he has not clearly 
 apprehended them nor his own mental state as affected by them ; 
 in the explicit, the contents are the same, but they now lie clear 
 and definite before the mind. In the primitive consciousness is 
 presented all the reality which at any moment is matter or con- 
 tents of immediate knowledge ; the mind reacting on ifc appre- 
 hends, distinguishes and defines the several objects included in 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 33 
 
 this presented reality and notes the relations by which they are 
 in unity with one another. This is true even of man's knowl- 
 edge of himself. It is only as the mind reacts on the contents 
 of the consciousness that the man comes to know himself in 
 his individuality and identity, to bring himself fully into the 
 light of his intelligence, and to know himself in his rationality 
 and freedom, in his personality, in all the attributes of his many- 
 sided being. 
 
 The same is true of man's consciousness of God. Man's spirit- 
 ual environment presents itself in his primitive consciousness as 
 nebulous and undiscriminated matter. It is only by the reaction 
 of the mind upon it in perception and thought that the reality 
 thus presented is traced out and united in the full idea. If God 
 is known in consciousness, it is only in this way that the idea of 
 him is traced out -and brought into the full light of intelligence. 
 This consciousness of God, or, as we otherwise call it, this knowl- 
 edge of God in experience, is what is meant by the religious con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 If the word consciousness is used in this larger sense we shall 
 have the consciousness of sc4f and of reality which is not self ; 
 subject-consciousness and object-consciousness. And the object 
 must be man's environment, physical and spiritual, as it acts on 
 him and so presents itself in consciousness. Man in his connec- 
 tion with the physical world is endowed with a sensoriurn through 
 which it can act on him and present itself in his consciousness. 
 So in his connection with the spiritual system he is endowed with 
 rational and spiritual susceptibilities through which his fellow- 
 men may act on him, and reveal themselves in his consciousness 
 in their rational, free personality ; and God may act on him 
 and reveal himself in his consciousness. 
 
 Whether we use the phrase " religious consciousness " or " God- 
 consciousness " or not, is a question as to the use of words. The 
 real and momentous question at issue is, whether or not we know 
 God in experience ; whether or not we have any immediate con- 
 sciousness of God. 
 
 A recent writer has said that the phrase " Christian conscious- 
 ness " " has served for more than seventy-five years as the rally- 
 ing cry of a definite method of theological inquiry, whose claims 
 of superior merit cannot be conceded, and many of whose fruits 
 are not encouraging to Christian faith." If the word is used in 
 its restricted meaning as the mind's consciousness of its own men- 
 tal states and acts, then the affirmation that outward objects are 
 
34 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 known in consciousness would imply that man knows only his 
 own mental states and acts, and would give phenomenalism or sub- 
 jective idealism as the only true theory of knowledge. The same 
 would be true if we affirm that God is known in consciousness 
 in this restricted meaning. God would then be known merely 
 as a subjective state of our own consciousness without objective 
 reality. The phrase has also been used with a pantheistic mean- 
 ing, Pantheism teaches that God first comes to consciousness in 
 man. If so, man's consciousness of himself would be conscious- 
 ness of God ; for it would be God's consciousness of himself. 
 Man would be identified with God. But no such errors are hid- 
 den in the phrase u consciousness of God," when consciousness 
 is used in its broader application as I have explained it. For 
 this implies the action of God on us, revealing himself in our 
 consciousness in his objective reality, just as we are conscious of 
 outward objects revealing themselves in consciousness by their 
 action on us. Then to say that man is conscious of God is only 
 another way of saying that man knows God immediately in ex- 
 perience. Then the only objection to using the expression would 
 be the danger of confounding it with idealistic and pantheistic 
 meanings which have been attached to it. It is not worth while 
 to contend about a word ; but my opinion is that the intelligent 
 use of the word in its broader application would be advantageous 
 in our philosophy and our theology. 
 
 The phrases "religious consciousness" and "Christian con- 
 sciousness," as thus explained, denote only the participation of 
 the individual in the common religious experience of mankind or 
 the common experience of Christians. The Christian of to-day 
 finds in his own religious experience a response to the experience 
 of Christians of former ages. The Christian Scriptures are the 
 medium of this union ; they express the deepest spiritual life of 
 every Christian age. The fifty-first and the twenty-third Psalms, 
 the Lord's Prayer, and many other Scriptures, ever since they 
 were written, have expressed the spiritual experience of true 
 worshipers of God more exactly and satisfactorily than any 
 words of their own choosing. They are " the golden bowls full 
 of incense " which from age to age have borne " the prayers of 
 the saints " before the throne of God. 1 And the Christian be- 
 liever tests his experience, his beliefs and his interpretations of 
 Scripture by the experience and thinking of all Christian people 
 as disclosed in the hymns and liturgies, the confessions and 
 creeds, the devotional and doctrinal literature, the biographies 
 
 1 Rev. v. 8. 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 35 
 
 and histories, which express the best thought and wisdom, the 
 most devout worship, the truest Christian living of the past. He 
 is thus able to test and broaden his own beliefs and his own in- 
 terpretations of Scripture by the " capitalized experience " of all 
 Christian people. He is not to study God's revelation of him- 
 self isolated in his own individuality. He is " the heir of all the 
 ages," and is to enrich his own private experience and judgment 
 from his inheritance in the accumulated treasures of the religious 
 experience and judgment of mankind. 
 
 Paul recognizes this unity of Christian consciousness in his 
 prayer for the Christians of Ephesus : " That ye, being rooted 
 and grounded in love, may be strong to comprehend with all the 
 saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth, 
 and to know the love of God which passeth knowledge." 1 
 
 It is said that in his own personality every man dwells in a 
 solitude into which no other can penetrate. Yet his constitution 
 as personal is common to him with all rational beings. In it the 
 common and universal principles of reason and laws of thought 
 are regulative ; upon it presses the common environment of the 
 race ; into it penetrate motives and emotions common to all man- 
 kind. He finds in himself lines reaching out and binding him in 
 unity with his fellow-men in every utterance of speech, in every 
 communication of thought, in all literatures and civilizations. 
 The same is true in religion. Influences come in upon man's 
 spirit from the spiritual environment which encompasses all men, 
 from God in whom we live and move and have our being. In 
 knowing God the spiritual life of men is made intelligible to us, 
 and we are brought into unity with them as spiritual and relig- 
 ious beings. This is the common religious consciousness. The 
 same is preeminently true of the Christian religion, in which man 
 comes into the most intimate and joyous communion with God 
 and attains the clearest and fullest knowledge of him. However 
 isolated a Christian may be, alone with God in secret communion 
 with him, yet every one who will, is admitted to the same inti- 
 macy ; and as in this common experience of his graciousness 
 they come nearer to God, they come nearer to one another. Thus 
 each may test, correct and verify the beliefs arising in his own 
 personal Christian experience by the experience of all the Chris- 
 tian ages ; and he rejoices in the fact that " with all the saints " 
 he has knowledge of God's surpassing love. This is the common 
 Christian consciousness. 
 
 And when a Christian teacher, isolating himself from " all the 
 1 Eph. iii. 17, 18. 
 
36 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 saints," mistakes the candle which he has lighted in the cell of 
 his own individuality for the light of the world, and occupies 
 himself with declaiming against the narrowness, the bigotry, the 
 foolishness, the absurdities which he thinks he finds in the litur- 
 gies, the confessions, the creeds and the theologies of the Chris- 
 tian ages, we seem to hear the voice of inspiration speaking to 
 him out of the ancient time : u Art thou the first man that was 
 born ? Wast thou made before the hills ? " 1 
 
 II. Since we have the idea of God, at least the elements of the 
 idea must have been given in intuition and so brought within the 
 consciousness. This is accordant with the universal law that the 
 mind cannot apprehend in thought what has never been known 
 in intuition and so brought within the consciousness. It is plain 
 therefore at the outset that God is known in consciousness at 
 least in the sense that all the components of the idea are known 
 in intuition, and thus brought within the consciousness ; although 
 the idea itself may have been originated by thought combining 
 elements already known. The earth is a legitimate object of 
 thought ; but it is only the various components of the idea of it 
 which are known in intuition. By combining these in thought 
 the idea of the earth is attained. When a stone or other body 
 is lifted we are conscious of resistance to our effort ; but it is only 
 by thought that the idea of the force of gravity is attained. In 
 the same way the components of the idea of God may have been 
 given in consciousness while the idea itself may be formed from 
 them in thought. 
 
 In our idea of God there are two factors, designated by the 
 two words, absolute Spirit. That absolute or unconditioned be- 
 ing exists is known as a necessary truth in rational intuition. 
 As thus known this truth is present in consciousness like other 
 necessary truths of reason. Being is known in the consciousness 
 of self. But the absoluteness of being, considered only as given 
 a priori, has no positive contents in consciousness ; what it is 
 can be defined only by negations ; it is being that is not con- 
 ditioned in dependence and not limited in time, space or quan- 
 tity. The second component of the idea is spirit. In knowing 
 ourselves as rational, free agents we know the personal, the su- 
 pernatural ; we thus know what spirit is. Having thus knowl- 
 edge of the absolute and of spirit we combine the two in our idea 
 of God, the absolute Spirit. The idea is legitimately formed, 
 for the components of it are known in intuition. 
 
 1 Job xv. 7. 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 37 
 
 Having now this idea of God and knowing that an absolute 
 Being exists, we legitimately inquire whether our idea of him as 
 the absolute Spirit is correct. It is on occasion of our knowl- 
 edge of the universe that the necessary belief arises that an ab- 
 solute Being exists as the ultimate Being or Power on which it 
 depends and which is manifested in it. We reasonably conclude 
 that in the absolute Being are all the potencies necessary to ac- 
 count for the universe and manifested in it. Therefore we search 
 the universe of nature and of man to see if we can find evidence 
 that the absolute Being is God, the eternal Spirit. In nature we 
 may find evidence of power which justifies us in believing him to 
 be absolute Power, as Spencer describes him. In man and the 
 moral and spiritual system, we may find evidence that he is God, 
 the eternal Spirit. And in nature itself we may find what can 
 be accounted for only as the manifestation of Spirit. Such a 
 proof that the absolute Being is the absolute Spirit, the per- 
 sonal God, is entirely legitimate according to the laws of scientific 
 thought. And if the evidence is found, the conclusion is valid. 
 Although the naked idea of absoluteness considered a priori re- 
 mains empty of. positive contents and can be defined in thought 
 only by negation, yet because according to a fundamental law of 
 thought we know the necessary connection of the universe with 
 absolute Being as its ultimate ground, we may find positive con- 
 tents for the idea of the absolute as absolute Spirit by examining 
 what the universe is in its two systems, the physical and the 
 spiritual. 
 
 We can now answer the common objection that the existence 
 of God cannot be proved because the proof must presuppose the 
 idea. This objection is applied in two ways. 
 
 It is sometimes urged that the proof is illegitimate because it 
 presupposes the idea. But this is necessary also in all scientific 
 investigations. If we ask whether God exists, we must know al- 
 ready what we mean by God, and must judge whether the evi- 
 dence establishes the existence of a being corresponding with the 
 idea. Just the same is true if the inquiry is, whether the force 
 of gravity, or a planet between Mercury and the sun, or any other 
 physical power or agent exists. And not only must the investi- 
 gation start with the idea of the object, but the idea must be 
 present through the whole investigation to direct it, and to make 
 a conclusion possible. In seeking the unknown cause or law of 
 known effects it is necessary to begin with creating an hypothe- 
 sis ; that is, with creating an idea of the cause or law. Then the 
 
38 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 inquiry is, whether the real existence of the supposed cause or law 
 is adequate and necessary to account for the facts. When, with 
 the idea of God already in his mind, the theist begins to in- 
 quire whether there is evidence that God exists, he simply con- 
 forms to a law by which all scientific search for the unknown is 
 regulated. Here is an example of unfairness sometimes notice- 
 able in the reasoning of skeptics, urging as an objection against 
 theism what is accepted as legitimate and valid in physical sci- 
 ence. 
 
 In another application of the objection it is urged that there 
 can be no legitimate proof of the existence of God, because he is 
 not known in intuition and thus brought within our conscious- 
 ness. The answer is that all the components of the idea are 
 known in intuition, and the mind legitimately combines them 
 in reflective thought ; and this is all that is required by the law 
 that there is nothing in thought which has not first been given 
 in intuition, either presentative or rational. In this also the 
 theistic argument accords with the methods of physical science. 
 
 From the position now attained we are justified in affirming 
 that God is known in consciousness in the sense that the com- 
 ponents of the idea are thus known, and are in thought legiti- 
 mately combined into the idea of God, the absolute Spirit. If 
 now it can be proved that the hypothesis that such a being 
 exists accounts for all the facts, and that no other hypothesis 
 does adequately account for them, this proof of the existence 
 of God is entirely legitimate according to the laws of scientific 
 thought. 1 
 
 III. The consciousness of God has a deeper meaning than this. 
 Man knows Grod in experience, not merely elements of thought 
 which he builds up into an idea of him. Through his rational 
 intuitions, ideas and sentiments and his spiritual experience he 
 knows him. 
 
 1. This is reasonable and antecedently probable. If God is 
 the absolute Reason in whom the universe is grounded, by whom 
 it is ordered and pervaded, if he is immanent in it and in him 
 we live and move and have our being, if he is Love subordinat- 
 ing and directing all things to the highest spiritual ends, then it 
 is reasonable to believe that God may act on man, may throw 
 rays from the light of the universal reason into his mind, may 
 quicken his spiritual susceptibilities, and so present himself in 
 his consciousness and be known in experience. 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 69, 72-81, 286. 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 39 
 
 But this revelation of the infinite to the finite mind, this rev- 
 elation of God within the limited experience and consciousness 
 of man must be progressive and at every point of time incom- 
 plete. God reveals himself to man. But man's apprehension of 
 God through his experience of the divine manifestation must be 
 commensurate with his own imperfect development and educa- 
 tion, and can advance only according to his capacity to under- 
 stand it and his faithfulness in receiving, interpreting and obey- 
 ing it. So the world has always been acting on man, presenting 
 itself in his consciousness, known in experience. Yet only step 
 by step through all generations has man been progressively ap- 
 prehending what the world thus presented in his consciousness 
 is ; he has discovered something of it through the eye, something 
 through the ear and through the hand, more by reflecting and 
 reasoning on it, a little here and a little there, something to-day 
 and more to-morrow. Much more must man's apprehension of 
 God, as evermore he is presenting himself in human conscious- 
 ness, be partial and progressive. So his revelation through in- 
 spired prophets must needs be u by divers portions and in divers 
 manners;" and even our Lord must say: "I have yet many 
 things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." 
 
 Thus, as through the impressions of sense we perceive our 
 physical environment, so through rational and spiritual princi- 
 ples, sentiments and susceptibilities we perceive our spiritual 
 environment, the universal and all-illuminating Reason, the abso- 
 lute Spirit, and the system of personal and spiritual beings re- 
 lated to him. Man is conscious of God in a manner analogous 
 to that in which he is conscious of the outward world. 
 
 2. A knowledge of God in experience is implied in the idea of 
 religion, and is essential to its reality. The consciousness of God 
 is involved in man's religious consciousness. Religion essentially 
 implies the presence of God with man, God's action and influence 
 on him, and man's knowledge of God through experience of his 
 action and influence. 
 
 The idea of God constructed by combining elements of thought 
 known in experience is a legitimate basis of thought and argu- 
 ment, but not of religion. After it all, God remains apart from 
 us ; he does not come into communion with us, does not reveal 
 himself to us by direct action or influence ; we have no conscious 
 experience of his presence with us. We believe that he exists as 
 Adams and Verrier believed that the planet Neptune existed be- 
 fore it was discovered. We may even construct a system of the- 
 
40 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ology, like the blind Sanderson who had thorough scientific 
 knowledge of the geometric laws of light, though light had never 
 revealed itself in his consciousness and he had never known in 
 experience light or color or visible form. But all this is not 
 enough to make religion possible. God known thus and not oth- 
 erwise could not be the object of religious trust and service. Re- 
 ligion in its essence implies communication with God ; it implies 
 the action of God on us, the conscious experience of his influ- 
 ence, the conscious yielding to or resisting his drawing, con- 
 scious trust and service. For religion he is essentially the God 
 " with whom we have to do." 
 
 A crude illustration is man's knowledge of malarial poison, 
 through his conscious experience of its effects within him. He 
 does not see it ; he cannot lay hold of it, put it in a phial and 
 analyze ifc. But he knows its presence and power by its effects 
 which he miserably feels in his own body every day. The poison 
 acts primarily on the body, and it is in this that its presence, 
 power and peculiar action are experienced. But the action of 
 the Spirit of God is primarily on and in the human spirit. His 
 presence and influence are known in the spiritual experience, in 
 the rousing of the spiritual powers and susceptibilities to action, 
 in the quickening of spiritual life, in the transformation of spirit- 
 ual character, in the growth of spiritual power, purity and bless- 
 edness. The man in whose spirit God thus acts, does not see 
 him ; God does not stand out in his consciousness in definite 
 form ; but the man knows his presence, his power and the nature 
 of his influence by their effects which he experiences. So a ma- 
 terial object, a tree for example, acts on the sensorium and causes 
 sensations ; through these sensations the mind reacting perceives 
 the object. But the sensations are not the tree nor an image of 
 the tree ; and it is only through many sensations and perceptions 
 through the different senses that the tree is fully known. And 
 yet the tree is continually acting on the sensorium, and produc- 
 ing effects through which it presents itself in the consciousness of 
 the percipient. God, who besets us behind and before and lays 
 his hand upon us, acts on our spiritual susceptibilities ; in con- 
 tinual spiritual influences producing varied spiritual effects he 
 reveals himself in our consciousness and we know him. 
 
 If then religion is not a delusion, if its object is real, if its 
 belief and service are demanded by reason, then we have real 
 knowledge of God in the conscious experience of his presence 
 and influence in the soul. 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 41 
 
 3. It is a fact that all religions assume a knowledge in expe- 
 rience of the divinity worshiped. 
 
 Skeptics are wont to say that physical science and all real 
 knowledge rest primarily on experience, but that religious belief 
 rests on abstract or speculative thought, or on the creations of 
 the imagination. The whole history of religions shows that 
 according to the common consciousness of mankind the fact is 
 just the contrary. Men of every religion, in every age, have 
 believed that their knowledge of their divinity rests on expe- 
 rience. 
 
 The teaching of Christianity, that men know God by experi- 
 ence, is distinct and emphatic. In Christian circles, when a man 
 turns to God and begins the new and spiritual life, it is common 
 to describe the change by saying he has experienced religion. A 
 man who in mature manhood had been awakened to the con- 
 sciousness of God and of the unworthiness of his previous ungodly 
 and selfish life, and who was beginning to feel the joy and inspi- 
 ration and uplift of the new life of faith and love, said to me : 
 " It must be the Spirit of God that has wrought this change ; for 
 there was nothing in me that could have wrought it." The dis- 
 tinctive significance of the whole practical life of Christianity, 
 rests on the reality of the Christian's conscious experience of the 
 presence and power of God. In like manner the history of re- 
 demption through Christ, and all the doctrine, precept and prom- 
 ise of the gospel assume the Christian's knowledge of God in ex- 
 perience. Christ and his apostles teach that man, in the action 
 of his own moral nature, knows God and his law, and his own 
 sinfulness against God ; that God reveals himself in the courses 
 of human history, by his action redeeming men from sin ; that 
 God's Spirit conies to men with gracious and heavenly influences 
 to woo and win them from sin ; that the Christian life begins in 
 the man's being born anew under the influences of the Spirit of 
 God; that through Christ the sinner is justified by faith ; that 
 without other priest or mediator he comes into the immediate 
 presence of God, and there alone with God, face to face with the 
 Holy One against whom he has sinned, he confesses to God his 
 sins and is forgiven ; that thenceforward he enters into his closet 
 and shuts the door, and pra} 7 8 to his Father who is in secret, and 
 his Father who sees in secret rewards him openly ; and that thus 
 his whole Christian life becomes a life of communion with God. 
 
 Hence the preaching of the gospel is primarily testifying. The 
 apostles testified as witnesses of the historical works and teach- 
 
42 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ings of Jesus. But they also testified of what they had them- 
 selves experienced of the redeeming and renovating grace of God. 
 Paul always preached in the spirit of his own declaration, made 
 while in a Roman dungeon he was awaiting his bloody death : 
 " I know him whom I have believed." And in all ages the 
 preaching of Christ by Christians has been, in its deepest and 
 most vital root, their testimony as to what they have experienced 
 of the renovating and saving grace of God. Hence the preacher 
 of the gospel is primarily a prophet ; a man whose heart God has 
 touched, and whose teaching is illuminated and vitalized by his 
 experience of that divine touch. In this sense Christianity al- 
 ways realizes the fulfilment of the prophecy quoted by Peter on 
 the day of Pentecost : " I will pour forth my Spirit upon all 
 flesh ; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy." And 
 hence, with strict propriety, they who have testified of Christ 
 and sealed their testimony with their blood, are by preeminence 
 called martyrs, that is, witnesses. An ancient Israelite, going to 
 the temple of God to worship, sang: "Come, all ye that fear 
 God, and I will declare what he has done for my soul. Verily 
 God hath heard me ; he hath attended to the voice of my prayer. 
 Blessed be God who hath not turned away my prayer, nor his 
 mercy from me." In like manner Christians in every age are 
 witnesses declaring what they have known of God in their com- 
 munion with him, and in their experience of his grace, awaken- 
 ing and quickening their spiritual powers and inspiring, purify- 
 ing and strengthening them in the life of faith and love. 
 
 The ethnic or pagan religions rest on the assumption that man 
 knows God in experience. In the lowest animism or fetichism 
 the untutored man believes that he experiences good or evil from 
 the invisible power residing in the natural object, and that by 
 his own action toward the invisible power he can avert the evil 
 and win the good. Lucretius says that fear generates the gods. 
 But the fear reveals man's belief that the gods make themselves 
 known by their action on him, and that he by his offerings and 
 worship comes into personal communication with them. Pflei- 
 derer, on the contrary, says that the primitive Aryans in the 
 earliest times of the Vedic religion were far removed from slav- 
 ish fear, and were inspired with childlike, cheerful and joyous 
 trust. He cites in proof from the Vedic poems this prayer, ad- 
 dressed to Varuna : " As hens spread their sheltering wings to 
 protect their brood from harm, wilt thou, O Lord, thou who art 
 so great and good, protect us from the evils which terrify us." 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 43 
 
 He also cites from the same poems lines addressed to Indra be- 
 ginning : " Thou, Indra, art to us father, mother ; companion, 
 thou, and friend and brother." 1 But this cheerful trust in 
 Varuna and Indra implies that the worshiper believed that he 
 knew by experience his dependence on their benignity and that 
 he could communicate with them in his prayer. 
 
 In Greece and Rome it was not merely the priestess at the 
 oracle crying " Deus, ecce Dens," in the sense of the presence of 
 the divinity ; but the belief that the gods revealed themselves 
 to men, and that men knew by experience their presence and 
 their power, pervaded and controlled the common mind. Pro- 
 fessor Tiele says: "Socrates gained his belief in the deity by 
 the path of inward experience, and he heard within him the 
 voice of his good spirit, which was with him no figure of speech, 
 but an intense conviction." 2 Xenophon attached great impor- 
 tance to prayer. Plato says it is the best and noblest act of a 
 virtuous man to live in continual intercourse with the gods by 
 prayers and vows. The great Greek and Roman orators often 
 began their orations with prayer. Cornelius Scipio never un- 
 dertook any affair of importance without having passed some 
 time alone in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. All public 
 acts, all important domestic events, and all the great festivals 
 were consecrated with religious acts. In accordance with this, 
 Seneca says : " I tell you, Lucilius, a sacred spirit sits within 
 us, the observer and overseer of our good and evil. As he is 
 treated by us, so he treats us. No one is a good man without 
 God." 3 
 
 These are instances, not of a religion of fear, but of trust in 
 the benignity of the divinity. Other examples are the confi- 
 dence of the Romans in their household gods, and the trust of 
 citizens in the tutelary god of their city. Hegel says : " There 
 rules among the heathen the consciousness of their happiness 
 that God is near them as the god of the people, of the city ; the 
 feeling that the gods are friendly to them and give them the 
 enjoyment of the best. In this way Athena was known by 
 the Athenians as their divinity, and thus they knew themselves 
 as originally at one with the same, and the divinity herself as 
 the spiritual might of their people." 4 Philo compares God in 
 
 1 Religionsphilosophie, p. 269. 
 
 2 Tiele, Outline of the History of Religion, Carpenter's Translation, p. 227. 
 8 Epist. 41. 
 
 4 Hegel, Philosophic der Religion, vol. i. pp. 225, 226. 
 
44 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 creating the world to a full cup foaming over. In some of the 
 oriental religions the origin of the world is referred 'DO the good- 
 ness of God. In creating, the Deity is conceived as surrendering 
 his essence to the world, as dividing and sacrificing himself and 
 thus producing the world. Thus they represent the Divinity's 
 goodness in creating as carried to the extent of self-sacrifice. 
 These facts accord with Paul's testimony at Lystra that among 
 the heathen God " left not himself without witness." 
 
 4. The consciousness of God is involved in man's moral con- 
 sciousness. He is conscious of moral obligation. In this he is 
 conscious of a law commanding him ; a law that presents itself 
 as imperative, immutable, universal. Thus he finds himself in 
 the presence of the absolute Reason in which the universal 
 truths, which are independent of man and are laws to his thought 
 and action, are archetypal and eternal. In the " I ought " of 
 the conscience, in the " tliou shalt " of the law, he hears the 
 voice of God. If in reflective thought we analyze our own moral 
 consciousness we find in it the consciousness of God, giving it its 
 significance, vitality and power; and in the normal development 
 of the moral constitution in the action of life, we come to recog- 
 nize God in it. This is a familiar argument in Natural Theol- 
 ogy. Even Kant affirms that the idea of God, necessary to the 
 speculative reason as an idea, finds positive contents in conscious- 
 ness in the moral constitution and consciousness of man. " My 
 belief in God and in another world is so interwoven with my 
 moral nature, that I am under as little apprehension of having 
 the former torn from me as of losing the latter." 1 
 
 No tribe of men has been found which is known to have been 
 without consciousness of moral distinctions, and none known to 
 have been without religious consciousness. But savage tribes 
 have been found in respect to whom there is no evidence that 
 they connect the two ; that they think that doing right is the 
 service by which they are to please the divinity, or that the divin- 
 ity is a moral lawgiver and judge. "So far as savage religions 
 can stand as representing natural religion, the popular idea that 
 the moral government of the universe is an essential tenet of 
 natural religion simply falls to the ground. Savage animism is 
 almost devoid of that ethical element, which to the educated 
 modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion. Not, 
 as I have said, that morality is absent from the life of the lower 
 
 1 Critique of Pure Reason ; Transcendental Doctrine of Method, chap. ii. 
 sect. iii. 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 45 
 
 races. Without a code of morals the very existence of the rudest 
 tribe would be impossible. And indeed the moral standards of 
 even savage races are to no small extent well-defined and praise- 
 worthy. The lower animism is not immoral, it is non-moral." 1 
 Perhaps further knowledge of these savage tribes would have 
 shown that they also recognized a connection of their religion 
 with their morality. If not, the fact would only show that they 
 were not yet sufficiently advanced in their development to recog- 
 nize the connection. But even these assume that they have 
 knowledge of their divinity in experience and come into commu- 
 nication with him in worship. In all the religions of the world, 
 with this exception, men have not only believed that they know 
 their divinity in experience, but have recognized their moral 
 responsibility to him. They form some conception of him as a 
 moral lawgiver and judge, and as punishing the wicked. They 
 are conscious of guilt, they fear his displeasure, they seek to 
 make expiation for sin and to propitiate him. Their own moral 
 consciousness becomes a consciousness of God. 
 
 5. Perhaps, also, it is not too much to say that God presents 
 himself in consciousness, not only in the religious and moral life, 
 but also in the intellectual activity of science. The consciousness 
 of God is involved in man's scientific consciousness. 
 
 All science rests on the assumption that the universal princi- 
 ples known in human reason and regulating human thought are 
 true throughout all space and time ; that the universe is intel- 
 ligible in accordance with these principles ; and that the univer- 
 sal Reason pervading the universe and revealed in it is the same 
 in kind with the human reason. These are immense assump- 
 tions ; but all science rests on them, and if they are false, science 
 is impossible. Thus all science rests on the existence and the 
 recognition of the universal Reason. The truths eternal in the 
 absolute and universal Reason are " the true light which lighteth 
 every man." 
 
 The scientist, therefore, in his explorations and discoveries, 
 may be said to be in intellectual communication with God. He 
 is illuminated with the light of the eternal Reason, which shines 
 into his mind. When the light of the remotest star enters the 
 astronomer's eye and reveals to him the star, the light of the 
 eternal Reason accompanying it enters the astronomer's mind 
 and reveals to him the scientific significance and law of the star, 
 and therein reveals to him the eternal Reason itself, that is, God. 
 1 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 327 ; see vol. i. p. 386. 
 
46 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 And from all microscopic objects, hidden in their littleness from 
 the human senses, but revealed by the microscope, and from the 
 internal composition of bodies, from molecules and ethers re- 
 vealed not to sense but to pure intelligence by the experiments 
 of the chemist, are revealed also the universal truths and laws of 
 the absolute Reason, regnant in the inmost constitution and es- 
 sence of things as really as in the remotest space and time. Thus 
 it may be said with a true significance that we see all things in 
 God. This Kepler recognized in saying, " O God, I read thy 
 thoughts after thee," and in the outbursts of his sublime and 
 adoring enthusiasm before the creator of the universe, recorded 
 in various places in his scientific writings. Many others of the 
 greatest scientific geniuses have expressed in a like devout spirit 
 their consciousness of God in their scientific researches. So 
 in ancient times Plotinus regarded philosophical investigation 
 as true prayer to God. 
 
 Professor J. R. Seeley, in his "Natural Religion," maintains 
 that the enthusiasm of scientific investigations constitutes a relig- 
 ion, and may fully satisfy the constitutional religiousness of man. 
 Certainly if science limits knowledge to material things and 
 physical forces, if shutting man up in materialism, like a mouse 
 in a glass receiver, it exhausts the air by which the spirit lives, 
 however great the enthusiasm and devotedness with which the 
 scientist works his air-pump, it cannot be religion nor meet the 
 demands of the religious constitution of man. But when a sci- 
 entist reverently recognizes the fact that the light of all his sci- 
 entific seeing is the light of truth in the absolute and universal 
 Reason, he must reverently feel that in all his explorations of 
 the universe he is intellectually receiving communications from 
 the God of truth, and his scientific enthusiasm will continually 
 nourish his religious reverence. 
 
 It is not meant that in scientific thought the attention of the 
 scientist is directed to the absolute Reason, whose universal prin- 
 ciples he trusts without wavering in all his investigations, and on 
 which all his conclusions depend entirely ; but only that his de- 
 pendence thereon, though complete, is implicit, and perhaps the 
 more complete and free from doubt or hesitation because it is 
 implicit. A similar explanation must be made of the conscious- 
 ness of God in the moral feelings, beliefs and actions. In the 
 distinctively religious consciousness the person's attention is al- 
 ready directed to the divinity as manifested in some way, arid he 
 is trying to form an idea of him in thought, and to devise an 
 
GOD KNOWN IN EXPERIENCE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 47 
 
 acceptable service. In the scientific and moral consciousness the 
 attention is occupied with scientific and moral objects, and the 
 consciousness of God, though necessarily implied, does not arrest 
 attention. Hence the person may never have apprehended it in 
 thought. But a correct and complete analysis of his mental state 
 will disclose this implicit consciousness of God in it ; and the 
 normal development of his rational powers and susceptibilities 
 will bring it out into explicitness. Hence it is truly said that in 
 the development of man's consciousness of himself and of his 
 own mental states the consciousness of God is always found in 
 the background. 
 
 From the foregoing discussion it is evident that, when in re- 
 flective thought we examine the evidence that God exists, we 
 start with the idea of the divinity and with the belief that he 
 exists. The investigation is analogous to the speculative inquiry 
 whether we have good grounds for believing that the outward 
 world exists. The world has presented itself in our consciousness 
 " in divers portions and in divers manners ; " but it has to be in- 
 vestigated and defined in thought before we have a definite idea 
 of it; and in every age the question whether we have real knowl- 
 edge of its existence comes up anew. And in the various forms 
 of idealism, acosmic pantheism, phenomenalism and complete 
 agnosticism, speculative doubt or denial of our knowledge of the 
 outward world has perhaps been avowed by as many as have 
 ever avowed speculative doubt or denial of our knowledge of 
 God ; and on very similar grounds. At last we find as the 
 result of our investigation, that the belief in God is as well war- 
 ranted to be real knowledge as any other of our primitive be- 
 liefs. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 GOD KNOWN BY REVELATION. 
 
 MAN knows God through God's revelation of himself to man. 
 
 Our 'first question is, What is revelation ? 
 
 In thinking on this question it is a common impression that 
 revelation is distinctively and exclusively an act of God. But 
 when we reflect, it is evident that our knowledge of any being 
 whatever presupposes some action of the being by which it re- 
 veals itself. 
 
 Any object may be said to reveal itself when by action on 
 us it presents itself in consciousness. Revelation, therefore, is 
 not distinctive of man's knowledge of God. It is equally true 
 that man knows the outward world through its revelation of 
 itself to man. The outward object acts in some way on the 
 sensorium and in sensation presents or reveals itself to the con- 
 sciousness, and the mind reacts and perceives the object. Thus 
 every act of sense-perception has two aspects : the outward 
 reality acting on the sensorium and revealing itself to the con- 
 sciousness, and the mind reacting and perceiving the object. 
 These are two different but complemental aspects of the act of 
 knowing the object, and each is essential to the reality of the 
 knowledge. And it is in such a perception of an outward reality 
 that man is awakened to the consciousness of himself. And it is 
 on occasion of some impact of an outward object that a rational 
 intuition first flashes into light, like a spark from steel when 
 struck by a flint, and becomes the regulator and guide of all 
 thought and action. 
 
 Thus the knowledge of a finite being can never be self-origin- 
 ating and unconditioned. It must first be awakened from with- 
 out. It depends ultimately on the revelation to the mind of 
 an object beyond it. Absolute knowledge has been defined : 
 " Thought thinking itself, knowing nothing of any other outside 
 of itself ; " it is not originated in the mind on occasion of the ac- 
 tion on it of any object from without and is completed as knowl- 
 edge within the consciousness of self. God alone has such knowl- 
 
GOD KNOWN BY REVELATION. 49 
 
 edge. No revelation is ever made to him. No presentation of 
 any object from without awakens him to consciousness and calls 
 forth his mind to action ; he is at once subject and object ; the 
 universe is eternally thought in his intelligence, before it is pro- 
 jected by his powor into finite reality in space and time. Man 
 is incapable of absolute knowledge. His spirit slumbers till con- 
 tact with the outward world awakens it to consciousness in know- 
 ing the presented object. The revealing of the object to the hu- 
 man spirit is also the revealing of the spirit to itself. Once thus 
 awakened it not only knows outward objects, but can also make 
 itself the object of knowledge, can be at once object and subject 
 of its own thought, and complete the circuit of knowledge within 
 its own self-consciousness. Thus man, even in the sphere of in- 
 telligence, is dependent on God. The action of the outward uni- 
 verse on the slumbering spirit awakens it to activity in knowing 
 the presented object, and to the consciousness of itself as spirit. 
 And because God is ever active in the universe, we may properly 
 say it is he who by his touch awakens the slumbering spirit to 
 consciousness and knowledge, as a mother by her loving touch 
 awakens her sleeping child. 
 
 Revelation, in its primary meaning, is the immediate presen- 
 tation of an object in consciousness. But it is not limited to 
 this. It is also revelation when the object presented in con- 
 sciousness is an external effect from which the mind infers what 
 the agent is that is causing it. If I see arrows successively strik- 
 ing a target, I infer that some one is shooting them. From the 
 motions of the planets, an astronomer infers the force of gravita- 
 tion with which they act on one another, and the law according 
 to which they uniformly act. From the phenomena of light, sci- 
 entists infer the existence and vibrations of an ether, an extra- 
 sensible agent never perceived by sense. We properly say that 
 these agents reveal themselves in the effects of their action, 
 though it is only the effect which is presented in consciousness, 
 and the agent is revealed only to the intelligent thought. In 
 these cases it should be noted that the agents are revealing them- 
 selves by causing the effects at the time when these are under 
 our observation. 
 
 An agent may also reveal what it was when energizing in pro- 
 ducing effects, to observers of the effects long after the causal 
 agency had ceased. In the buildings, implements, sculptures 
 and inscriptions disclosed in exploring buried cities, the ancient 
 inhabitants are revealed in their history, character and civiliza- 
 
50 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tion. The men of the early stone-age still reveal their existence 
 and their barbarism in their rude implements of stone. Here 
 also it is only the effect which is presented in consciousness ; the 
 agents are revealed only to thought. 
 
 Thus the cases in which the object reveals itself directly in the 
 consciousness, are distinguished from those in which only an ef- 
 fect or product presents itself in the consciousness, and the agent 
 that caused the effect is revealed by inference to the thought. 
 In all these ways man's physical environment reveals itself to 
 the man. 
 
 In a manner entirely analogous man's spiritual environment 
 reveals itself to man through his spiritual capacities and suscep- 
 tibilities. There is a spiritual or supernatural system behind the 
 physical and revealing itself through it. For the physical uni- 
 verse itself is an expression of the archetypal thought of God. 
 The spiritual system environs man as really as the physical does, 
 and through his spiritual capacities and susceptibilities he is able 
 to discern it. His spiritual environment reveals itself to him, 
 both directly in its action on him in consciousness and mediately 
 through effects, which he observes, revealing spiritual agency 
 acting at the time or having acted in the past. 
 
 The line of demarkation between the personal and the imper- 
 sonal is also the line of demarkation between the supernatural 
 and the natural, between spirit and matter. This is of funda- 
 mental importance in investigating the reasons for believing the 
 existence of God. 1 We start out in our quest after God with 
 knowledge of the supernatural and spiritual already attained in 
 our knowledge of ourselves. With this knowledge we are able 
 to recognize other personal and supernatural beings as they re- 
 veal themselves to us. Thus is revealed to us a realm of super- 
 sensible, spiritual and supernatural persons, including ourselves 
 and our fellow-men. 
 
 Man as a corporeal being is known to us through the senses. 
 If he comes within the range of our vision we see him ; if he 
 touches us we feel him ; if he is out of sight, buried it may be in 
 a fallen mine, he reveals himself to the ear by his cries. To the 
 senses, however, he is presented only as a corporeal being, like 
 any other body. 
 
 How, then, does he reveal himself as a rational free agent ? 
 How does he reveal himself as capable of knowing God, and the 
 True, the Right, the Perfect and the Good, and of sympathizing 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 409-414. 
 
GOD KNOWN BY REVELATION. 51 
 
 with us in our interest in these realities ? In a word, how does 
 he reveal himself to us as a personal being ? 
 
 In one wa} 7 , by the products of his actions in the past. By 
 these he reveals, not only his personality, but also the peculiari- 
 ties of his individual character, attainments and genius. St. 
 Peter's Church is the thought of Michael Angelo built up in 
 stone. The Sistine Madonna reveals the genius of Raphael and 
 his ideal of beauty. The steam-engine, the power-loom, the 
 electric telegraph, severally reveal the genius and express the 
 thought of their inventors. 
 
 Another way in which a man reveals his personality is by his 
 actions under our notice. These reveal what he is ; they are 
 symbols or signs through which we read his thought, his charac- 
 ter and his powers. In all revelation the mind reacts on the 
 object revealed and apprehends its reality and significance. It 
 sees the invisible through the visible, the supersensible through 
 the sensible. In like manner and by the same power we perceive 
 the personality of a man when he is present and acts before us. 
 We look through his action and perceive his personality. By 
 his action he revea-ls to us his intelligence, his knowledge of the 
 true, the right, the perfect, the good, and of God ; he reveals his 
 conscious freedom and moral responsibility ; we know him to be 
 a rational, free person like ourselves. In all his knowing, man's 
 sense and his reason are never disparted ; his perceptive and his 
 rational intuition act together. When an object of sense is pre- 
 sented, he perceives it as presented to the sense, and in the 
 same instant, by implicit rational intuition, knows it in the forms 
 in which reason sees it. Then in thought he recognizes it as 
 having the qualities which he ascribes to bodies or impersonal 
 beings. In the same way, when a man acts before him, he per- 
 ceives in him the qualities which he knows in his consciousness 
 of himself as qualities of a rational, free person. 
 
 Men also reveal their personality by words. The fact that 
 man is able to use language is itself a revelation of his personal 
 and spiritual power. But when man has acquired the power of 
 communicating thought by words, this of itself is an inadequate 
 way of revealing himself ; for it is only through the knowledge 
 of beings and actions that the meaning of the words can be 
 learned. A mother cannot communicate to her child the mean- 
 ing of the word mother by merely telling it, " I am your mother." 
 She reveals the meaning of the word to the child by the life-long 
 action of a mother's love. Actions speak louder than words. 
 
52 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 And it is by their action before us that men reveal their powers, 
 their characters and their attainments. But when the meaning 
 of words as symbols of realities has been learned, they become 
 an important medium of revelation. 
 
 Another way in which men reveal themselves as personal be- 
 ings is by natural signs. The soul looks out on us through the 
 eye ; it reveals itself through the attitude, the gait, the gestures. 
 What a tell-tale is the human face ; how thoughts and feelings 
 flush upon it, even those which the words deny and the actions 
 try to hide. A look may reveal the deepest secret of the heart, 
 a tone may disclose the hidden conflict and sorrow of a life. 
 Soul comes almost into immediate communication with soul. The 
 power of reading these natural signs seems to be spontaneous 
 and untaught. A babe in its mother's arms, long before it can 
 speak, answers its mother's smile with a smile, her frown with 
 tears. All which it sees is a certain configuration of lines and 
 lineaments, of lights and shadows ; but through these it looks 
 into her heart and sees her love or her displeasure. It deciphers 
 these hieroglyphics of nature, taught only by him who prompts 
 the wild goose to fly from the arctic winter and 
 
 " from zone to zone 
 Guides through the pathless sky her certain course." 
 
 There are also alleged facts of telepathy, accounts of a man's 
 revelation of himself to another person at a distance, apparently 
 by some immediate action of mind on mind of which science as 
 yet has no explanation. Such accounts are numerous, and many 
 of them seem to be well authenticated. If true, they would be 
 another and as yet unexplained revelation of man as a rational 
 free personality, a supernatural being. 
 
 The revelation of man's personality to man is not merely 
 through outward effects from which, when observed, we infer 
 his personality. There is also action of spirit on spirit, which 
 is immediate, in the sense that the effects produced are within 
 the consciousness of the recipient. In the presence of a man of 
 grand moral and spiritual power we are elevated and inspired. 
 The influence of such a man cannot be measured by specific acts. 
 It is a bracing, tonic, health-giving atmosphere, invigorating the 
 whole community. In a great congregation assembled for the 
 accomplishment of a grand moral and spiritual end, the assem- 
 bly itself, animated by one grand aim, breathes upon the speaker 
 and upon every individual an inspiration such as no speaker 
 alone, however eloquent, can impart. When a human spirit, by 
 
GOD KNOWN BY REVELATION. 53 
 
 whatever means, succeeds in putting itself into communication 
 with another, it immediately begins to act on and influence that 
 other. Love and friendship quicken and inspire. Sympathy on 
 great speculative questions and practical enterprises redouble the 
 power. One may influence another by argument and persua- 
 sion, by example, by courage, hope, lofty aspiration. Two per- 
 sons may go through life together, loving, inspiring, ennobling 
 and forming each other. The spirit of a man acts continually 
 on the spirit of another, continually reveals itself in the con- 
 sciousness of the other. 
 
 Thus man reveals himself to us. He reveals that in him 
 which is imperceptible to sense, which is supersensible and su- 
 pernatural. He reveals his personality, his free will, his char- 
 acter and aims. Thus we find ourselves in a moral and spiritual 
 system. 
 
 Revelation, therefore, is not peculiar to God. Any being 
 must reveal itself in order to be known. 
 
 God also reveals himself to men. This revelation I now pro- 
 ceed to consider. 
 
 The revelation of God has come to be regarded by many as 
 solely the revelation recorded in the Bible. But in fact all 
 knowledge of God presupposes some action of God revealing him- 
 self. The revelation in Christ and his abiding Spirit is not the 
 only one, but is the culmination of all God's revelations of him- 
 self to men. It is only because it is such that all the treasures 
 of wisdom and knowledge are hid in Christ. 
 
 God reveals himself directly to men in consciousness. Even 
 in the sphere of intellect and in all scientific thought, man finds 
 universal principles shining in the firmament of his thought, re- 
 vealing themselves by their own light, and enlightening, guiding 
 and regulating all his thinking. In these the universal and ab- 
 solute Reason shines into his mind and reveals itself in his con- 
 sciousness. All science assumes principles of universal reason, 
 and consists in discovering and declaring the revelations of uni- 
 versal reason in the universe. 
 
 In the practical conduct of life man finds himself under ob- 
 ligation to obey moral Jaw. Thus again he finds himself 
 confronted with the absolute Reason, revealing itself in his con- 
 sciousness and speaking imperatively in his conscience. 
 
 Man's distinctively religious consciousness is his consciousness 
 of God revealing himself in his soul. 
 
 God reveals himself not merely in the consciousness directly, 
 
54 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 but also to intelligent thought in effects which reveal him as 
 their cause. 
 
 He reveals himself through the. universe itself. It is essential 
 in the theistic idea of the universe that it is the progressive ex- 
 pression of God's thought, the progressive realization of the 
 archetypal ideas of his wisdom and love. As such it is in its 
 essence the continuous and progressive revelation of God. The 
 words in which he reveals himself are worlds and systems and 
 time-long action of providence and redemption. It is a necessity 
 of our rational constitution that in our processes of knowing and 
 thinking we must know that the absolute Being exists as the 
 ground of the universe. But what the absolute Being is, is re- 
 vealed through the universe itself. All merely a priori at- 
 tempts to define him can lead only to great sounding words sig- 
 nifying nothing. 1 
 
 God reveals himself, in the universe as a whole, both in the 
 abiding products of his action in the past and in his continuous 
 action through all time. His revelation of himself to us is not by 
 magical and abnormal processes, but in processes and products 
 which the human mind, in the exercise of its rational faculties 
 according to its rational constitution and laws, can take in and 
 interpret ; not through the extraordinary, the special, the mirac- 
 ulous alone, but also through the ordinary and the uniform ac- 
 cording to general laws. So Paul says : " The invisible things 
 of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being per- 
 ceived through the things that are made, even his eve'rlasting 
 power and divinity." tfc He is not far from each one of us." 
 Immanent and continuously active in the universe, he is continu- 
 ously revealing, in all its wondrously varied and complex action, 
 " the exceedingly variegated wisdom of God." 2 At all the 
 points in our physical and spiritual constitution at which we are 
 touched by the physical and spiritual universe and receive its in- 
 fluence, we are touched by God and receive his influence and his 
 revelation of himself. So Goethe says : 
 
 " Wouldst thou with thy bounded sight 
 Make survey of the Infinite? 
 Look right and left and everywhere 
 Into the finite ; you '11 find it there." 3 
 
 And the Psalmist gives a striking description of himself as en- 
 compassed by God, and beset by his action and influence on 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 287, 289. 2 Eph. iii. 10. 
 
 8 Goethe : Gott, Gemiith und Welt. 
 
GOD KNOWN BY REVELATION. 55 
 
 every side. " Thou searches! out my path and my lying down, 
 and art acquainted with all my ways. Thou hast beset me be- 
 hind and before, and laid thy hand upon me." As the physical 
 world environs a man, acts on him on every side and thus reveals 
 the realities known in physical science, so, in the universe, God 
 environs him, acts on him from every side and reveals the reali- 
 ties known by experience in religion and by reflection in theo- 
 logical thought. 
 
 God reveals himself in the physical system, both in the con- 
 stitution of nature, and in his immanence and action in it con- 
 tinuously and progressively expressing his eternal thought. Ac- 
 cording to evolution, nature is not a completed and fixed product, 
 but is always plastic, always growing, revealing from epoch to 
 epoch new and higher powers. It is not a casting which any en- 
 largement or change must break. It is more analogous to an 
 organism than to a machine. It requires therefore the recogni- 
 tion of God as always immanent and active in nature, progres- 
 sively revealing himself in higher and higher manifestations of 
 his perfections. 1 
 
 God reveals himself also in the moral and spiritual system. 
 
 The fact that man finds himself and his fellow-men in a rational 
 and moral system, of itself necessarily carries the thought to God. 
 The mere knowledge of himself and of other men as isolated per- 
 sons would not of itself be the knowledge of a moral system. 
 But he does not know himself and other men in isolation, but as 
 fellow-men. As soon as men know one another as rational, per- 
 sonal beings, they know one another as existing in a community, 
 with common knowledge, common principles of reason, common 
 susceptibility of motive and emotion, and under reciprocal obli- 
 gations. Therein they know themselves in the unity of a ra- 
 tional and moral system. But their unity in such a system is 
 possible only by virtue of their common relations to God, the 
 absolute Reason or Spirit, who is the ultimate ground of the 
 system and reveals himself in it. Without this basis in absolute 
 Reason the system is disintegrated, and only disconnected indi- 
 viduals remain. 
 
 God reveals himself also in the constitution of man as a ra- 
 tional, free, personal being, susceptible of rational motives and 
 emotions (Vernunft-triel) . 
 
 God reveals himself also in his action in human history in 
 providential and moral government. 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 491-536. 
 
56 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 He further reveals himself in his action in human history re- 
 deeming men from sin, culminating in Jesus the Christ. 
 
 He continues to reveal himself in his redemptive action in the 
 world since the death of Christ ; in the presence and power of 
 his Spirit renewing and sanctifying men ; in all the distinctive 
 Christian consciousness of believers in Christ ; and in the devel- 
 opment of his kingdom of righteousness, peace and good-will. 
 
 God's revelation of himself tlirectly in the consciousness may 
 be called private or prophetic. His revelation of himself in the 
 universe, in the constitution and course of nature, in the con- 
 stitution and history of man, in his redemption of men in Christ 
 and the establishment of his kingdom on earth, may be called 
 public or historical. 
 
 Revelation is not restricted to communicating knowledge of 
 something pertaining to God which had been unknown before. 
 My friend may reveal anew his well-known friendship by acts of 
 friendship every day. And God may reveal to us anew in the 
 experience of every day, his law, his righteousness, his mercy 
 and his sufficient grace. The essence of the revelation is not in 
 the newness of God's perfection revealed, but in the action of 
 God revealing it, "new every morning and fresh every evening." 
 
 We may not set up the revelation of man to man as the exact 
 pattern of God's revelation, nor assume that the latter must be 
 confined within the limits of the former. God must have access, 
 to the human mind in ways transcending man's ; especially in 
 the immediate action of mind on mind we must suppose a freer 
 access of the Spirit of God to the human spirit, and a more inti- 
 mate communion with it than is possible to man. 
 
 From the foregoing explanations it appears that God's revela- 
 tion of himself to us is analogous to the revelation of themselves 
 to us made by material things or by our fellow-men. God acts. 
 on us or under our notice, and our minds reacting thereon know 
 him ; it may be immediately, as we perceive outward things, or 
 mediately by thought discovering what the object affecting us 
 is and interpreting its significance. God finds us and we find 
 him. Coleridge says : " In the Bible there is more that finds 
 me than I have experienced in all other books put together ; 
 the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being ; 
 and whatever thus finds me brings with it an irresistible evi- 
 dence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit." It is 
 God who finds us in the reading of the Bible. It is his Spirit 
 who, through its truths, moves our spiritual being in its pro- 
 
GOD KNOWN BY REVELATION. 57 
 
 foundest depths. God reveals himself to the readers of the 
 Scriptures as really as to their writers. If God exists and man 
 is a spiritual being in his image, it is no more strange or unin- 
 telligible that God should reveal himself to man as God, than 
 that outward things should reveal themselves as objects of sense, 
 or men as personal and spiritual beings. 
 
 The recognition of the fact that God reveals himself and that 
 our knowledge of him is through his revelation, is essential to 
 the right and wholesome study of theology. It is the teaching 
 alike of the Scriptures and of philosophy that it is primarily God 
 who seeks man, not primarily man who seeks God. And this is 
 true of God's communication with man at every point from the 
 beginning to the end of his historical action redeeming men from 
 sin. This has often been overlooked by theologians. They have 
 pushed their investigations as if by sheer dint of thinking they 
 were to find God and to prove his existence to others. But if 
 there is no movement of God toward us revealing his presence* 
 no action of God on us or before us on which our minds react* 
 we reach after all our toil only figments created by our own 
 thinking. God seeks and finds us before we can find him. And 
 this is only affirming of the knowledge of God what is true of 
 our knowledge of all other beings. The true attitude of a the- 
 ologian is that of an ancient prophet, the attitude of active re- 
 ceptivity : " I will hear what God, Jehovah, will speak." u As 
 the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their master, as the 
 eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress, so our eyes 
 look unto Jehovah our God." To him who is thus intent to 
 " mark the first signal of his hand," the signs and manifesta- 
 tions of God's presence will appear, through which he reveals 
 his power, wisdom and love. 
 
 The question, What is revelation ? has now been answered. 
 The next question to be considered is, What does God reveal ? 
 The answer is, He reveals himself. As Clement of Alexandria 
 says : " There is a great difference between preaching God and 
 preaching things about God." 
 
 God reveals himself in his personality, in his divine power, 
 wisdom and love, as distinguished from communicating certain 
 truths, doctrines or commands enunciated in words ; as distin- 
 guished from philosophy, ethics or theology. His revelation is 
 not primarily of propositions communicated in words, but he re- 
 veals himself in his own action. 
 
 What he reveals is himself as distinguished from the Bible- 
 
58 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 God's revelation does not consist of inditing the Bible and giving 
 it to men to convert them to the life of faith and love. He re- 
 veals himself in the grand courses of his own action in the crea- 
 tion, preservation and progressive evolution of the universe, in 
 providential and moral government, and in redemption. 
 
 What he reveals is himself as distinguished from a scientific- 
 ally formulated system of the universe. Nature reveals no sys- 
 temized astronomy ; it only reveals suns and planets in their 
 complicated movements and interactions. The astronomer must 
 find his astronomy by observing these movements and interac- 
 tions and calculating their laws. And he does not stop in his 
 formulas, nor let his theorems, his demonstrations and his system 
 hide the starry heaven from his mind ; but in it he declares 
 clearly and exactly what the starry heaven is. So, because man 
 is rational, he must try to define and systemize his knowledge 
 of God. But he must not stop in his definitions and his sys- 
 tem, nor even in his Bible, nor let them come between him 
 and the living God and hide him. He must use them as de- 
 claring what God is as he has revealed himself in his action, and 
 as the man through God's action has found him. 
 
 What God reveals is himself as distinguished from a religion. 
 He reveals himself in the experience of the person as the quick- 
 ener of his faith and love, as the being with whom he communes 
 in worship, and who is with him as a present helper in the work 
 and the burdens, the joys and the sorrows of his life. This com- 
 munion with God is religion, but it is so because God has re- 
 Yealed himself, and not a religion ; and the man has found God 
 in his revelation of himself, and so has found access to him in 
 communion. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 GOD KNOWN THROUGH REVELATION BY THE ACTION OF 
 MAN'S MIND RECEIVING AND UNDERSTANDING IT. 
 
 REVELATION imparts no knowledge without the action of the 
 recipient, perceiving the object revealed, attending to it and ap- 
 prehending it in thought. 
 
 1. Tliis is true of all objects presented or revealed in conscious- 
 ness. We do not so much see with the eye and perceive with 
 the senses as through them. The mind looks through the eye 
 and perceives the invisible ; it darts its intelligence through the 
 sense and reads in the presented object a significance transcend- 
 ing sense, yet disclosing the true reality revealed in sense. When 
 one looks on a page of Chinese writing, all which he sees is 
 some black marks on a white surface. When he reads his Eng- 
 lish Bible and thanks God that we have it "in our easy lan- 
 guage," he sees with the eye no more than on the Chinese page ; 
 but through the eye his mind reads thoughts which are divine 
 and sees the kingdom of God coming among men. So with the 
 eye man sees the face of the earth, but through his eye he reads 
 its true significance and sees reality which is not seen. When 
 one is prospecting for ore he sees only certain forms and arrange- 
 ments of rock, but to the intelligent miner these are the signs 
 and pass-words by which his thought passes to the secret of the 
 treasure. Physical science itself is a continual seeing of the 
 unseen, a continual passing through the sensible to the super- 
 sensible. 1 To the scientist the objects observed in nature are 
 always signs and symbols by which he penetrates to its secret. 
 
 In receiving the revelation of any object, the mind is active 
 both in immediate perception and in reflective thought. It can- 
 not stop in the sensations and impressions subjective in the con- 
 sciousness, but through them perceives the object which is re- 
 vealing itself. And the mind cannot stop with the perceived 
 objects ; but by reflective thought it reads in them the rational 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 415-418. 
 
60 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 principles, laws and ends, in accordance with which they are con- 
 stituted, ordered and reciprocally related in the unity of a scien- 
 tific system. Man is the interpreter of nature ; it is scarcely a 
 figure of speech when we speak of reading the book of nature. 
 All science is like deciphering an inscription. The theist be- 
 lieves it to be an inscription written by the finger of God. Thus 
 in all his knowing man exercises the power of looking through 
 the visible and seeing the invisible, of looking through the sensi- 
 ble and the natural and seeing the supersensible and the super- 
 natural. 
 
 In like manner man's mind is active in receiving and inter- 
 preting the revelations of God. 
 
 It follows that it is possible to communicate knowledge by 
 revelation, only to a mind endowed with powers competent to 
 perceive and apprehend the object revealed. Light gives no 
 vision where there is no eye ; undulations of air give no sound 
 where there is no ear ; sensation gives no perception where there 
 is no perceiving mind ; persons with their spiritual qualities 
 remain unknown when there is no personal and spritual power 
 to apprehend them. 
 
 It also follows that a revelation cannot be made to a being 
 that is passive. All knowledge, however communicated, is the 
 act of a mind knowing. 
 
 And further, the knowledge of an object revealed cannot be 
 imparted complete in the single act of revelation. When an 
 object is revealed to the mind, it remains for the mind by its 
 reaction on it to perceive what it is, and to investigate what are 
 its peculiarities and relations, and its real place and significance 
 in the system of things. If it is only an ivory die which we have 
 thrown from a box, which we can take up in our fingers and sur- 
 vey on every side in a moment, yet, if we would ascertain all 
 that may be known about it, we find that it reveals an encyclo- 
 paedia of knowledge. The " open secret " of the earth and skies 
 has been revealed to man through the senses every day and night 
 since the human race existed ; yet by the studies of all genera- 
 tions man has not attained the full knowledge of them and their 
 significance. On the cross Jesus said, " It is finished," and he 
 bowed his head and gave up his spirit. The action of his earthly 
 life was ended. The revelation of God which he had made in it 
 was, as Jude expresses it, " once for all." But all who trust him 
 learn more and more, all their lives long, of the love of God to 
 man which his life and death revealed, and are always more and 
 
GOD KNOWN BY HUMAN THOUGHT. 61 
 
 more able "to apprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth 
 and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ 
 which passeth knowledge." From his crucifixion until now, more 
 thought has been expended on him in Christian countries than on 
 any other single object of learned investigation. But the studies 
 of all these generations have not mastered all the significance of 
 that revelation in its bearing on the renovation of the world, nor 
 attained " unto till riches of the fulness of understanding, that 
 they may know the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are 
 all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden." We may 
 suppose it to be as true now as when the apostle Peter wrote, 
 that " these things angels desire to look into." 
 
 And in this necessity of the reaction of the mind on an object 
 revealed in order that the revelation may give any knowledge, we 
 see that the action of human reason is necessary, both in receiv- 
 ing a divine revelation and in interpreting its meaning. A reve* 
 lation is utterly nugatory except as human reason receives and 
 apprehends and interprets it. 
 
 The three factors of the knowledge of God are divine revela- 
 tion, religious experience or the consciousness of God as revealed, 
 and the reaction of the mind in spiritual perception and reflective 
 thought. 
 
 2. The action of the mind, apprehending and interpreting the 
 revelation by thought, is as follows : 
 
 The man must begin with defining in his own mind what idea 
 he really has of the divinity that is the object of his worship. 
 He finds himself believing in the existence of a supernatural and 
 superhuman being and worshiping it. He thinks he has had ex- 
 perience of its presence and its power. He may think he has 
 knowledge of many such beings. As he reflects on these sup- 
 posed experiences and this spontaneous belief, he forms in his 
 mind an idea of what the divinity that he worships really is, in 
 his own conception of it. The same is true of the Christian be- 
 liever, with his larger knowledge and richer experience. He also 
 must begin his investigations by defining to himself what he sup- 
 poses the God, whom he worships, is. 
 
 The next step will be to ascertain the reasons for believing 
 that this God really exists, and that the belief is real knowledge. 
 It is objected that the existence of God is not a legitimate object 
 of proof. This is true in the sense that the idea of God does not 
 arise at the end of our proofs, but at the beginning. We must 
 have an idea of God, before we investigate the reasons for believ- 
 
62 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ing that he exists. The objection would be valid also, if the idea 
 of God were a pure creation of thought, without data in experi- 
 ence, either in presentative or rational intuition, giving at least 
 the elements entering into the idea. If the reasoning starts with 
 such an empty idea, it can only issue in an idea equally empty. 
 But the mind cannot create an idea empty of all contents given 
 in perceptive or rational intuition. And in this case the inquirer 
 starts with belief, founded on experience, in the existence of God, 
 and with an idea of God, founded on that belief, all the ele- 
 ments of which are given in intuition. The proof that God ex- 
 ists is simply the statement of the reasons why we believe him 
 to exist ; that is, of the evidence on which the belief rests. If 
 there can be no proof of the existence of God, it must be be- 
 cause there is no evidence of his existence and no reason for be- 
 lieving it. 
 
 Jacobi maintains that the existence of God cannot be proved, 
 because to prove it would be to infer it from something, and thus 
 would imply God's dependence on that from which his existence 
 is inferred. He here makes the monstrous mistake of identifying 
 the logical dependence of thought with the causal dependence of 
 concrete reality. He also assumes that an inference is possible 
 only from cause to effect, never from effect to cause. In the 
 latter case the movement of thought is the inverse of the move- 
 ment of the causal efficiency; in the actual process of the con- 
 crete reality the cause precedes the effect ; in the logical process 
 of thought the knowledge of the effect precedes the knowledge of 
 the cause. Jacobi's objection implies that to infer the cause from 
 an effect would prove that the cause is dependent on the effect. 
 In perceiving rational words and actions, we infer the existence 
 of a rational person; but that does not imply the dependence of 
 the person's existence on his words and actions, or on my percep- 
 tion of them. So from what one knows in experience and ob- 
 servation, he infers the being of God ; but this does not imply 
 that God's being depends on what is thus experienced or ob- 
 served, nor on the inference from it. The same is true of other 
 regulative principles of reason. In reality the universal is before 
 the particular, the absolute before the conditioned. But in the 
 process of human thought, the particular must be known before 
 the universal, the conditioned before the absolute. In the par- 
 ticular, thought finds the universal revealed, and in the condi- 
 tioned, the absolute. Among us this objection of Jacobi still 
 finds utterance. But it is only the identification of the world- 
 
GOD KNOWN BY HUMAN THOUGHT. 63 
 
 process with a logic-process, familiar in German idealistic and 
 pantheistic philosophy. 1 
 
 The third result of reflective thought on the revelation of God 
 is the clearing of the idea of God from error, the supplying of 
 defects and the gradual development of it, with the increase of 
 knowledge, to the true idea of the one God, the absolute Reason, 
 the eternal Spirit, and to the ascertaining and enunciating of all 
 truth respecting God and his relations to man which from all 
 sources the human mind can attain. This is doctrinal theology ; 
 which is merely the highest result, so far as attained in any age, 
 of human thought, apprehending and defining what God has re- 
 vealed of himself, and systemizing it, as far as possible, by find- 
 ing its harmony with itself and with all known reality. 
 
 We all remember the transition from our infantile idea of God 
 to the grander conceptions of mature years. We have all expe- 
 rienced liberation and help in dropping oppressive conceptions of 
 God derived from false teaching, or from our own misconceptions 
 of the truth. Every mature Christian is aware of the greatening 
 of the idea of God as he increases in the knowledge of him. 
 
 The same is true of the progress of the knowledge of God in 
 the history of the race. In animism and fetichism, the lowest 
 forms of religion, man recognizes an invisible and supernatural 
 power in every natural object. As his knowledge of nature 
 increases, he still recognizes the invisible and supernatural, but 
 regards it as resident in the sun, the moon, the bright and all- 
 embracing heavens, or in others of the higher powers and forms 
 of nature. As he comes to know the natural universe as a Cos- 
 mos of which all the parts are in unity under the reign of law, 
 he still finds, in and above all, the invisible and supernatural 
 power, but knows it as the one personal God, revealing in the 
 universe his power, wisdom and love. At last through God's 
 
 1 " Always and necessarily the ground of proof is above that which is proved 
 by it. The former includes the latter under itself. From the former, truth 
 and certainty flow on what is to be proved from it; the latter holds its reality 
 from the former." 
 
 This is true only on the assumption of the formal logic, that the only reason- 
 ing is the syllogistic distribution of the contents of a general notion already 
 formed and named. It entirely excludes induction, on which science rests, 
 both in its Baconian form of inferring the universal from particulars, and in 
 its Newtonian form of inferring the cause from an effect. It is a confounding 
 of words with things not surpassed by that of a half-civilized oriental monarch, 
 who, having received the present of a coach, ordered the driver's seat to be 
 lowered before he would ride in it ; because otherwise the coachman would be 
 "above" the king. 
 
64 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD 
 
 more complete revelation of himself in human history through 
 Christ, man, still retaining the primitive knowledge of the super- 
 sensible and the supernatural, and of all by which it had been 
 enriched in his progress to monotheism, now attains his highest 
 and most inspiring conception of God as the redeemer of men 
 from sin. 
 
 It is in this process of apprehending and interpreting the rev- 
 elation in thought and denning the idea of God as revealed, that 
 mistakes are made, and, in the various stages of human develop- 
 ment, different and sometimes fantastic ideas of God arise. In 
 the early missions to the Canadian Indians, the Jesuits found 
 that they already had some idea of God. In explaining to them 
 that God punishes the wicked, they said : " When you capture 
 your enemies you torture and burn them ; God does the same to 
 his enemies." This produced a powerful impression. But so far 
 as it led them to think God's justice to be the same with their 
 revenge and ferocious cruelty, they might better have been left 
 to work out their idea of God themselves. 
 
 The fact that men form erroneous conceptions of the divin- 
 ity and that this conception varies in different ages and nations, 
 is no argument against the reality of his existence. In the 
 first place, because there are elements of reality which persist 
 through all these diverse and changing conceptions. In all of 
 them is some sense of the infinite. In all of them is the con- 
 sciousness, more or less clear, of the presence of a supernatural 
 and superhuman power ; a power invisible, like the invisible 
 mind of man, manifesting itself in effects inexplicable to the ob- 
 server by aught which he has known of the powers either of 
 nature or of man. It is contrary to all observed facts in the his- 
 tory of the uncivilized races, to say that the idea of spirit or 
 of the supernatural is of late origin or of difficult attainment. 
 Man's consciousness of himself in his own individuality and iden- 
 tity is so strong, from our earliest knowledge of him, that he 
 believes that death itself does not interrupt the continuity of 
 his existence. Far from being in the beginning a materialist 
 and believing only in what he can see and handle, he is so con- 
 scious of the invisible and intangible powers of his own mind, 
 that at first he believes that every object in nature is animated 
 by a mind like his own. Hence when a person dies the surviv- 
 ors believe, not only that his spirit passes into the unseen land, 
 but that the horse sacrificed at his grave, and the food and weap- 
 ons deposited in it, pass thither with him as the phantom or 
 
GOD KNOWN BY HUMAN THOUGHT. 65 
 
 spirit of the horse or food or weapon. It is this unseen, spirit- 
 ual, supernatural power, like his own unseen thought and will 
 and yet above and beyond him, which the uncivilized man be- 
 lieves to exist and which he worships as a divinity. And this 
 idea persists at the basis of all the forms in which he represents 
 his divinity in his thought. His conception of it is purified, cor- 
 rected and developed only in his progress in knowledge and 
 civilization from age to age. So Schweitzer says: "It is indu- 
 bitable that the human mind has from the earliest times wor- 
 shiped the reality hidden behind phenomena, but consciously felt 
 in the heart, and has ascribed to it greater analogy with ideas 
 than with matter and force." l 
 
 Feuerbach raises an objection against theism from the fact 
 that in the ethnic religions the gods are supposed to reveal them- 
 selves to men, and that Cicero and other non-christian writers 
 used arguments for the reality of the objects of pagan faith vir- 
 tually the same as those urged in the present day for the ob- 
 jects of Christian belief. 2 But this objection is without validity 
 because the spiritual, the supernatural and the superhuman are 
 always elements in the pagan's divinity, as really as in the 
 Christian's ; in whatever form the pagan conceives it in his im- 
 agination, it is always a supernatural and spiritual power, like 
 his own unseen thought and will, yet mightier than himself, that 
 is revealed, and whose existence and agency among men the eth- 
 nic philosophers adduce arguments to prove. There is always 
 some sense of the spiritual, the supernatural, the infinite. These 
 are fundamental elements in the highest idea of a divinity ; if 
 the pagan found the same evidence of the existence of such a 
 being as the Christian finds, it is because to that extent he had 
 a true idea of the deity. 
 
 And when men have begun to adduce proofs that there is a 
 God, they have already begun to be civilized and are leaving 
 the puerilities of heathen mythology behind. Anaxagoras, So- 
 crates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero were not trying to prove that the 
 fables of heathen mythology were true, nor that the idols of the 
 heathen were the true God. 
 
 In the second place, in attaining the knowledge of the uni- 
 verse, as really as of God, men have fallen into gross mistakes 
 and have advanced to larger and more correct ideas only by toil- 
 some progress through the centuries. If this discredits our 
 
 1 Schweitzer; Zukunft der Religion, page 94. 
 
 2 Feuerbach ; Wesen des Christenthums, chap. xxi. 
 
 5 
 
66 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 knowledge of God, it equally discredits all physical science. In 
 the progress of knowledge in every sphere there is always a nu- 
 cleus of real knowledge in a penumbra of obscurity. In the 
 gradual development of the human mind and the progress of cul- 
 ture and knowledge, the nucleus of knowledge persists while it is 
 progressively enlarged, extending its area of light into the ob- 
 scurity around it. It is incidental to this progress that there 
 be errors and defects, doubt, criticism and new investigation, 
 and thus the correction, clearing and enlarging of the field of 
 knowledge. So in the progress of man's knowledge of God there 
 has been a persistent nucleus of real knowledge, gradually en- 
 larging its area of light into the penumbra of obscurity, and the 
 defects and mistakes attending it have been only such as are 
 incidental to the progress of all knowledge. 
 
 3. Because a revelation of God imparts knowledge only as the 
 man receives it in his own active intelligence, it follows that, 
 however he reveals himself, the knowledge of God must be pro- 
 gressive. The knowledge imparted by the revelation must de- 
 pend on the degree to which the man's receptivity for it has been 
 developed by his own culture and growth. This is not a pecu- 
 liarity of the knowledge of God, but is equally characteristic of 
 knowledge in every sphere. 
 
 What any one finds revealed in any object depends not merely 
 on the keenness of his sense-perception, but also on his range of 
 knowledge, the power of his intellect, the clearness of his spirit- 
 ual vision, and his varied susceptibilities to impression. When 
 Peter Bell was the observer, 
 
 u A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 This is precisely what is now praised by many as the real and 
 only true view of the world. It is a grasp of the bare facts re- 
 vealed to the senses, and it is nothing more. Yet almost every 
 one does see something more, and probably each one sees some- 
 thing not perceived by the others. Suppose a tract of land with 
 a stream running through it, and hills and forests in the back- 
 ground. A farmer sees in it its capacity for the growth of wheat 
 and grass. A civil engineer sees in it mill -sites, and already 
 seems to hear the clatter of machinery, and the bustle of a busy 
 city. A sportsman sees a run for game and a chance for trout 
 A geologist reads in it a history of the construction of the earth. 
 A painter sees in it beauty which, could he transfer it to the 
 
GOD KNOWN BY HUMAN THOUGHT. 67 
 
 canvas, would be a joy forever. A Christian sees in it the out- 
 shining of the glory of God. A savage and an astronomer look 
 on the same starry sky ; the former sees only a blue expanse 
 with innumerable shining spangles; the latter sees the depths of 
 space, immeasurable magnitudes and distances, suns and sys- 
 tems, the universal reign of law. The u something more " each 
 one sees is a reality not less than the bare fact of sense grasped 
 by Peter Bell. George Herbert says : " Man is one world and 
 has another to attend him." Rather he has as many worlds to 
 attend him as the spheres of knowledge which his mind has en- 
 tered. And they are not worlds created by his own fancy but 
 are real. For the universe is the expression of the endlessly 
 varied richness arid fulness of the thought and love of God. That 
 is the truly realistic view of the world which knows it in its 
 deepest reality and significance, in its relation to God. Every 
 ascending step in a man's culture and development opens to his 
 vision a new world. So the knowledge which a man receives 
 from any revelation of God, depends on the receptivity and ca- 
 pacity of the man. As in his progress his spiritual capacity and 
 receptivity are enlarged, he sees new significance in the revela- 
 tion ; in it new vistas of the divine glory open to his view. His 
 own progressive growth and development become the Jacob's 
 ladder by which he ascends from height to height of knowledge, 
 with ever widening prospect, till he comes to the open heavens 
 and the presence and vision of God. 
 
 A little girl once said she supposed the stars were holes in the 
 sky to let God's glory through. In her infantile mind she was 
 creating myths, as full-grown men were creating them in the in- 
 fancy of the race. The progress in the knowledge of God from 
 the conception of him held by the little child and by the infantile 
 man to the sublime idea of God as the all-powerful Spirit of 
 wisdom and love, is hardly greater than the progress of the 
 knowledge of the starry heaven from the conception of children 
 and savages to the knowledge of a modern astronomer. The 
 starry heaven in which the astronomy is discovered has spread 
 itself alike before the eyes of the infantile man and of the as- 
 tronomer ; that the latter sees in it immeasurably more than 
 the former is due to his own enlarged receptivity and capacity. 
 So in the constitution and course of nature, and in the constitu- 
 tion and conscious experience of man is a primitive revelation 
 of God, both to the savage and the philosopher. It is the greater 
 culture and growth of the one which enables him to see more in 
 it than the other. 
 
68 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 It follows also that the higher revelations of God must be de- 
 layed till man becomes competent to receive them. A child can- 
 not be taught to solve problems in proportion and computing in- 
 terest before it has learned addition. It is impossible to reveal 
 the principle and construction of an electric telegraph or a steam- 
 engine to the lowest savages. A caligraph or a sewing-machine 
 would be useless presents to them, for they could not use them. 
 A missionary in Africa imported a plough and took great pains 
 to teach some of the natives to -use it. But when he next visited 
 them he found that, instead of using it, they had set it on end, 
 daubed it with red paint and were worshiping it. Mechanical 
 inventions are useless to man till he has made such progress as 
 to need them. It is not uncommon when a machine is invented 
 to find that a similar invention had been made generations be- 
 fore and had been neglected and forgotten. In like manner 
 God's revelation must adapt itself to the receptivity of the peo- 
 ple, and consequently must be progressive. Missionaries to sav- 
 age tribes find difficulty in communicating to them the Christian 
 ideas of spiritual purity and holiness. In this progressive way 
 the revelation recorded in the Christian Scriptures was in fact 
 made. When the Israelites escaped from Egypt, it was only by 
 a long process and patient painstaking that the molds of thought, 
 which had been wrought into them by heathenism and slavery, 
 and which long continued to receive into themselves and give 
 their own shape to the monotheistic teachings of their leaders and 
 prophets, were broken up. It was necessary to delay the reve- 
 lation of truths and of applications of truth which transcended 
 their capacity of reception, till they should be educated and de- 
 veloped to a capacity of receiving without transmuting and de- 
 basing them. Hence the elements of a higher revelation had to 
 be taught to their gross and debauched minds by restrictions and 
 requirements, by symbols and types, by forms and ceremonies, 
 which, as they accomplished their design, were to make them- 
 selves useless and to pass away. On the same principle our Lord 
 said to his disciples, " I have yet many things to say to you, but 
 ye cannot bear them now." Accordingly the coming of our Lord 
 himself was delayed till by various and long continued prepara- 
 tory agencies the world was, in the fulness of time, in condition 
 to receive the new revelation, and, instead of the hand-leading 
 and schooling of the Old Testament, could be left to the guid- 
 ance of the invisible Spirit of God sent from Christ and " poured 
 out upon all flesh." 
 
GOD KNOWN BY HUMAN THOUGHT. 69 
 
 4. The fact that revelation imparts no knowledge without the 
 action of man's mind receiving and interpreting it, throws light 
 on the course of God's revelation of himself recorded in the 
 Bible ; it corrects some misapprehensions and exposes the un- 
 reasonableness of some objections. 
 
 God cannot reveal himself immediately to the senses. It is 
 sometimes asked why God does not reveal himself more plainly, 
 so that we cannot doubt. This complaint searched to the bottom 
 will often be found to involve a demand that God should reveal 
 himself to the senses. But God is a Spirit and as such cannot 
 reveal himself immediately to the senses, but only to the spirit 
 in man. " No man hath seen God at any time." God can re- 
 veal himself through physical effects only as media through 
 which the rational spirit of man perceives the present God ; only 
 as signs or symbols through which the human mind reads the 
 thought of God. 
 
 We see also that God's revelation of himself must be adapted 
 to the development and culture of those to whom it is made. It 
 may be through types and symbols, through forms and institu- 
 tions, which are to pass away when once man is educated to the 
 knowledge of God as the one absolute Spirit ; or in historical acts 
 and prophetic inspiration which, while revealing God in some 
 important particular, carry the thought forward in the expecta- 
 tion of a greater revelation in the future. 
 
 Consider, for example, some of the revelations of the Old Tes- 
 tament. 1 On a critical emergency in the journey of Israel 
 through the wilderness, Moses prayed : " I beseech thee, show 
 me thy glory." On the next morning, on the heights of Sinai, 
 his prayer was answered, and the glory of Jehovah passed by be- 
 fore him. But Moses was hidden in a cleft of the rock and saw 
 nothing, for God had said, "Thou shalt not see my face;" he 
 
 1 Learned men are enthusiastically and laboriously studying the ethnic 
 myths and communicating their results as of the highest importance. Profes- 
 sor De Gubernatis tells us in his Zoological Mythology that the milkmaid 
 with her pail of milk on her head meant "that little pipkin the moon," and 
 that the two ass-ears of Midas meant the morning dawn and the evening twi- 
 light, " whose changeableness the mobility of the ears of an ass must have 
 served very well to express." While researches and conclusions like these 
 are lauded as learned and valuable contributions to science, it is not uncom- 
 mon to hear or read sneers at the theophanies of the Old Testament as pue- 
 rile and unworthy of scientific attention. But whoever studies them in any 
 real sympathy with the spirit of the Old Testament and its religion, will find 
 in them monotheistic truths of rich, varied and profound significance immeas- 
 urably in advance of the ethnic myths. 
 
TO THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 heard only a voice which proclaimed the memorial name, Jeho- 
 vah, signifying the covenant-God of Israel ; the name, El, the 
 Mighty ; and the spiritual and moral attributes of mercy and 
 grace, of goodness and long-suffering, of truth and righteousness. 
 And Moses saw the retreating glory and fell on his face and wor- 
 shiped. 1 Thus was it revealed to him that God is spirit ; that 
 he cannot be revealed directly to the senses ; that his glory con- 
 sists in those spiritual and moral attributes and powers which 
 spiritual and moral beings alone can know. The same was the 
 significance of the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and the tem- 
 ple. There was the mercy-seat where God revealed his grace to 
 men ; but it was hidden by a veil behind which no eye might 
 look ; it was in a solitude into which no man entered except the 
 high-priest ; and he, but once a year and then bearing the blood 
 of the sacrifice of atonement for himself and the people. There 
 God dwelt in the solitude of his own invisible and spiritual be- 
 ing. And this was a continual teaching to the Israelites that 
 God is a spirit; that what reveals him to the sense is itself a veil 
 which hides him ; that he can be represented by no image and 
 worshiped under no visible form ; that the material universe, 
 while as the work of his hands it reveals him, is itself also a 
 veil which hides him. No symbol can be conceived more effec- 
 tive to impress on a rude people the fatuity of idol- worship, and 
 to teach them at every entrance into the temple that God is a 
 spirit and that they who worship him must worship him in spirit 
 and in truth. 
 
 Persons sometimes imagine that if God had revealed himself 
 continually and to all men by working miracles before them, it 
 would have been impossible to doubt his existence. But mira- 
 cles are presented to the senses and therefore, like the familiar 
 works of nature, are a veil which hides God while revealing him ; 
 the mind must pass through them, just as it passes through the 
 sensible phenomena of nature, to the God unseen and spiritual 
 behind the veil. And if miracles were as common as summer 
 showers and rainbows, they would attract no more attention than 
 they. It is sometimes thought that if God should habitually re- 
 veal himself in theophanies such as the Bible records, doubt 
 would be no longer possible. But even in the theophanies the 
 prophets did not see God; they saw only signs and symbols 
 through which their spiritual eyes saw what can be only spiritu- 
 ally discerned. Ezekiel saw a cloud coming out of the north 
 1 Exod. xxxiii., xxxiv. 
 
GOD KNOWN BY HUMAN THOUGHT. 71 
 
 with whirlwind and with infolding fire and flashing lightning ; 
 and from its amber brightness a crystal firmament evolved borne 
 on four Cherubim, with wheels of beryl so high that they were 
 dreadful, and all moving with flashing light and, to the very 
 wheels, instinct with the spirit of life. On the firmament was a 
 sapphire throne, and on the throne the appearance of a man. 
 But if that vision should rise on our view every morning from 
 the north, wherein would that miniature firmament reveal God 
 any more than the sun which rises every morning in the east, or 
 the firmament with its thousands of stars which wheels majesti- 
 cally above us every night? What theophany presented to the 
 senses can open to view such energies, such swiftness of motion, 
 such greatness and such fineness of being, such grand and har- 
 monious systems, such powers instinct with the spirit of life, such 
 manifestations of reason, such manifestations of God, as science 
 is disclosing in the physical universe itself? 
 
 We discover also a certain limitation in the nature of things to 
 the revelation of God through words. Some may think it would 
 be a great help to faith if u GOD IS LOVE " were written across 
 the sky in letters of stars. We might ask in what language it 
 should be written, and might suggest that such an arrangement 
 would imply that the earth is the centre of the universe, and that 
 all other worlds exist for it. But were the words written thus, 
 it would still be only an orderly arrangement of the stars through 
 which the mind must look to read its significance ; and orderly 
 arrangements we see everywhere in nature. And how immeas- 
 urably more significant the revelation of his love, which God has 
 made in the life and self-sacrificing love of Jesus the Christ. 
 
 God reveals himself by words, as people of all religions are 
 wont to believe. Persons, who have had rich experience of his 
 grace, and by intimacy with him have had spiritual reality opened 
 to their thought and life, testify of what they have known ; and 
 in a still higher degree prophets and apostles have been inspired 
 to declare the truth of God. We have seen that a woman can- 
 not reveal to her child what she is as mother by words, until she 
 has revealed herself in the action of a mother's love. So the 
 words of prophets and apostles fall without significance on the 
 ear, until God by his divine action has disclosed their meaning. 
 The hearer must first know God by his own experience of God's 
 grace, or by his knowledge of God's action in nature, or in human 
 history, or above all in Christ, in order to understand the prophet's 
 communication. 
 
72 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Feuerbach objects to a revelation of God that it must be " a 
 determinate revelation given at a particular epoch ; God revealed 
 himself once for all in the year so and so, and that, not to uni- 
 versal man, to the men of all times and places, to the reason, to 
 the species, but to certain individuals." i 
 
 The revelation of God in the broader and deeper meaning of 
 the word is a revelation by the divine action, and goes on in 
 all places and all times ; while special revelations at particular 
 times or to particular persons are not excluded. The revelation 
 culminating in Christ as recorded in the Bible had been progres- 
 sive in its preparatory stages through all preceding human his- 
 tory, and is perpetuated and made universal in the Christian 
 Scriptures and church, and in the Holy Spirit poured on all flesh 
 and abiding forever. 
 
 5. This discussion of man's reception of revelation gives the 
 true significance of the common sayings, that man in his own self- 
 consciousness finds the consciousness of God ; that his conscious- 
 ness of self, unfolded into its full significance, contains the con- 
 sciousness of God ; that the consciousness of God is in the back- 
 ground of self-consciousness. It is only as a man knows God 
 and his relation to him, that he becomes aware of his own 
 highest capacities and powers. Conversely, his consciousness of 
 his own highest capacities and powers carries in it the con- 
 sciousness of God. The outward world acting on the sensorium 
 reveals itself in the consciousness. But in the consciousness of 
 the outward world, man knows himself as perceiving it, living 
 in it, acting on it ; he knows himself in all his susceptibilities 
 and powers as related to the material world ; and he could never 
 have known himself thus if the world had not revealed itself by 
 acting on his sensorium. In an analogous way God acting on 
 man's spirit reveals himself in the man's consciousness, and at 
 the same time the man is revealed to himself ; he knows himself 
 as knowing God, living in his presence, acting in relation to 
 him ; he could never have known himself thus, if God had not 
 revealed himself in his consciousness. Hence we may truly say 
 that in knowing himself, in unfolding the full significance of his 
 self-consciousness, the man knows the outward world ; and that in 
 knowing himself, in unfolding the full significance of his own 
 self-consciousness, he knows God. And we may truly say that 
 the consciousness of the outward world, and the consciousness of 
 God are each in the background of man's consciousness of him- 
 1 Wesen des Christenthums, chap. xxi. Trans, p. 209. 
 
GOD KNOWN BY HUMAN THOUGHT. 73 
 
 self. In this sense Clement of Alexandria says : " The noblest 
 and greatest knowledge is to know one's self ; for if any one 
 knows himself he will know God." l 
 
 Thus these sayings are cleared from a pantheistic meaning. 
 They do not imply that man's consciousness of himself is his 
 consciousness of God, and is in reality God's only consciousness 
 of himself. This is implied in Biedermann's definition : " Im- 
 mediate revelation is an act of God whose content is at the 
 same time content of a subjective spiritual act of man." 2 Fouer- 
 bach puts it plainly: "The antithesis of the divine and the hu- 
 man is altogether illusory ; it is nothing else than the antithesis 
 between the human nature in general and the human individual. 
 Religion, at least the Christian religion, is the relation of man to 
 himself, or more correctly to his own nature ; but a relation to 
 it viewed as a nature ( Weseri) apart from his own. The divine 
 being is nothing else than the human being, or rather the human 
 nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made 
 objective, that is, contemplated and revered as another, a distinct 
 being." 3 The words of Biedermann may be explained as mean- 
 ing merely that the man receiving the revelation, apprehends in 
 his own thought the same contents or reality which God reveals. 
 But one, who claims to be a Christian theologian, ought to write 
 at least clearly enough to show without ambiguity which, of two 
 systems so widely apart as theism and pantheism, he is teaching. 
 
 1 Pedagogus, bk. iii. chap. i. 
 
 2 Christliehe Dogmatik, p. 63. 
 
 8 Wesen des Christenthums, Einleitimg, 2, p. 20. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION AND 
 TO KNOW HIM THROUGH IT. 
 
 THROUGH his spiritual susceptibilities man is receptive of im- 
 pressions and influence from God, and knows him as thus re- 
 vealed in his consciousness, in a way analogous to that in which 
 he knows the physical world and his fellow-men. 
 
 In the broader sense of the word, consciousness is both subject- 
 consciousness and object-consciousness. Then the object of con- 
 sciousness may be an object of sense, or a man in his personality, 
 or God, as they severally present themselves. 
 
 In its own subjective states and acts, the mind in self-con- 
 sciousness perceives itself as the one identical subject of them. 
 In its object-consciousness it perceives the sensible object, which 
 presents or reveals itself in the sensations. When a person, 
 by words or deeds affecting the sensorium, makes also the im- 
 pression, through the spiritual susceptibilities, of rationality, free- 
 will, love or other personal or spiritual properties, the mind, 
 reacting, perceives not only the body through the sensations, but 
 also the rational, free personal being through these impressions 
 of reason or spirit. The man perceives the Thou as well as the 
 I. And, in a similar way, in the conscious religious impressions 
 responsive to the supernatural and the infinite, the mind, react- 
 ing, perceives the being that is divine revealing himself in the 
 consciousness. 
 
 It is now to be shown that man has capacity to receive such 
 revelations of God, and to know him through it. 
 
 1. The possession of this capacity is assumed in all religions. 
 In this we have the testimony of mankind to their common belief 
 that they have and exercise this capacity to receive revelation 
 of a divinity, and to know him through it. It is, therefore, the 
 strongest presumptive evidence that this is a capacity of the 
 human mind. 
 
 If the object of the religions of mankind has any reality, 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 75 
 
 man must be susceptible of receiving revelation from God, and 
 capable of knowing him through it. All religions presuppose 
 communication between God and man. They all presuppose 
 that man knows God in experience ; that God reveals himself 
 by some action, influence or impression in the consciousness, 
 and that man knows God through his experience of the effects 
 of this action. As Hegel says : " The substance of religion 
 cannot be brought into a man as anything new ; this would be 
 as preposterous as it would be to try to introduce a spirit into 
 a dog by letting him gnaw the printed Scriptures." l If, then, 
 the object of religion has reality, there must be in man what 
 Jacobi calls the " Vernunftsinn," the reason-sense, the suscepti- 
 bility of the spirit to impressions and influences from God re- 
 vealing him in the consciousness, and the power to know God 
 through this revelation. If this is not so, then all religious feel- 
 ing, belief and action are wholly subjective and have no real 
 object. And if they are wholly subjective, all the religions of 
 the world have been and are sheer illusions. But religion is a 
 common characteristic of humanity, and is rooted in the consti- 
 tution of man. If all the beliefs, feelings and actions which are 
 essential in religion are sheer illusions, then man's constitutional 
 capacities in their normal exercise are discredited as untrust- 
 worthy, and the reality of all human knowledge is impugned. 
 On the other hand, if religion is not an illusion, God, as the ob- 
 ject of it, exists and reveals himself in man's consciousness; and 
 man is constituted with spiritual sensitivity to the divine action 
 and influence, and with capacity to know God in the revelation 
 which he makes. 
 
 2. The reality of human knowledge and the true conception of 
 man's powers of knowing necessarily imply his capacity to re- 
 ceive God's revelation of himself, and to know him through it. 
 The denial of this capacity can be justified only by some false 
 theory, logically involving the denial of the reality and possibil- 
 ity of human knowledge. 
 
 The essential point of difficulty as to the reality of any knowl- 
 edge is at the transition from the subjective impression to the 
 objective reality. This difficulty, however, is no greater in 
 knowing God than in knowing other beings. On the contrary, 
 the real action of the mind in this transition necessarily implies 
 the existence of God and admits of no reasonable explanation 
 without it. In other words, the existence of God is essential to 
 1 Hegel's Philosophic der Religion, vol. i. p. 6. 
 
76 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 any real knowledge which, as rational and scientific, is anything 
 more than the consciousness and recollection of the impressions 
 of sense. This will be evident from the following considerations. 
 
 Physical science rests on natural realism. It assumes with- 
 out question the reality of matter and motion, of masses, mole- 
 cules and ethers ; of force, molar and molecular ; of all reality 
 presented in sense ; of extra-sensible realities inferred from ob- 
 served facts ; . and of the interaction and relations of all these. 
 It assumes, also, the laws of causation and of the uniformity and 
 continuity of nature, the axioms of mathematics, and other first 
 principles of reason, which are regulative of all thought. It jus- 
 tifies the assumption of these as sustained by experience. It is 
 found by experience that it is always safe to reason under the 
 regulation of these principles, and thus they are continually re- 
 ceiving verification from observed facts. In this natural realism, 
 theism is in entire accord with physical science. 
 
 But philosophy, exploring the ultimate grounds of things, goes 
 farther than physical science can go. It recognizes the profounder 
 truths of reason, a.nd shows the grounds of natural realism in 
 reason itself. It thus broadens and deepens natural realism into 
 what may properly be called rational realism. In this, philosophy 
 is in no conflict with physical science, but simply presents the 
 rational grounds of the natural realism in which physical science 
 trusts without question. We thus find the real action of the 
 mind in the transition from the subjective impression to the ob- 
 jective reality. 
 
 Sense-perception is the perception, not of mere subjective sen- 
 sations, but also of the object revealing itself in them. There 
 can be no sense-perception unless an object first acts on us 
 through the sensorium, and thus reveals itself in the conscious- 
 ness. In his intellectual reaction, the man perceives the object 
 revealed, and at the same time perceives himself as the percip- 
 ient. In this interaction the perception of the object and the per- 
 ception of the self are inseparable in one and the same mental 
 act, and the knowledge of the one is as real as of the other. If 
 there is no object perceived there is no subject perceiving; and 
 if there is no subject perceiving there is no object perceived. 
 
 Further, when an object thus presents or reveals itself in con- 
 sciousness, it is perceived not only by sense-perception, but also 
 by rational intuition. In every perceptive intuition a rational 
 intuition is implicit. In one and the same act we perceive the ob* 
 ject in the presentation of sense and in the forms of reason. By 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 77 
 
 the intuition of reason the man knows that every beginning or 
 change has a cause, that every action reveals an agent and every 
 phenomenon a being. Therefore he perceives every presented 
 object in these forms of reason ; in every change he perceives a 
 cause, in every action an agent, in every phenomenon a being. 
 He does not merely perceive impressions which are disintegrated 
 and unsubstantial, or only subjective, but he perceives the being 
 which reveals itself in them, and gives them unity and substan- 
 tiality. His attention is on the object perceived, and he does not 
 fcake notice of either the rational or the perceptive intuition of it. 
 But both are implicitly present in the knowledge. He knows the 
 object at once in the presentation of sense and in the forms of 
 reason. 
 
 Thus the transition from the subjective impression in con- 
 sciousness to the objective reality is securely made. Thus knowl- 
 edge in its beginning is ontological ; it is the knowledge of being. 
 The object and the subject is each known as a being. The 
 phenomenon or appearance in consciousness is not separated from 
 the being which appears, but is filled with it. It is the being 
 itself which appears. 1 
 
 The knowledge makes this transition and remains equally real 
 as knowledge, whether the object is a body presented through 
 the sensorium, or a human being presented bodily through the 
 senses and in his spiritual personality through the spiritual sus- 
 ceptibilities and powers, or God revealed through the spiritual 
 and distinctively religious susceptibilities and powers. The mind 
 cannot leave these presentations disintegrated and unsubstantial 
 in the last case any more than in the others. It recognizes the 
 being actually revealed in them. It knows the object both in 
 the presentation of it in consciousness and in the forms of reason. 
 
 The same is true not only of beings, but also of their relations. 
 No object is presented in isolation, but always in relation to 
 something else. Things are presented nebulous and undiscrim- 
 inated. By attention we apprehend and distinguish them, and 
 find their unity in relations. These relations and unities are not 
 mere subjective concepts of the mind ; they are realities objec- 
 tive to the mind. The mind does not create them, it finds them. 
 We know all things in relations simply because all things exist 
 in relations The human race, for example, is not a mere sub- 
 jective concept known merely in a name, as the Nominalists 
 taught. It is not the Great Human Being, the Generic Man, as 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 152, 155-158, 167, 168. 
 
78 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the Realists taught; for these also are mere words, and words 
 with no intelligible meaning. But the human race is a concrete 
 reality consisting of all human beings existing in the race rela- 
 tion. If the race were completed, as extinct races of animals 
 now known only as fossils have been, then to a person capable of 
 perceiving the assemblage of them all MS they existed in the race- 
 relation, the race would be a concrete object of perception. Every 
 general concept or notion designated by a general name denotes 
 either certain definite real beings existing with certain actual 
 qualities and powers in certain relations, as man, horse, stone, 
 planet ; or certain actual qualities, powers or acts of such be- 
 ings, contemplated abstractly in thought but objectively real in 
 the beings, as whiteness, hardness, virtue, motion, energy ; or cer- 
 tain objectively real relations of beings in which they actually 
 exist, as distance, direction, past, future, dependence, resem- 
 blance. They are not mere subjective mental concepts and 
 names ; they are concepts of beings and their real objective qual- 
 ities, powers, acts and relations. 
 
 Here again the things in relation are known both in the pres- 
 entations of sense and in the forms of reason. In thought we ap- 
 prehend and distinguish the objects presented, and find their 
 unity in their various relations. In this process our thought is 
 regulated by the necessary principles of reason. We find also 
 that the outward objects in their relations exist and act in ac- 
 cordance with these principles of reason ; these are at once the 
 laws of thought and the laws of things. We reason in accord- 
 ance with them from what we observe to what we have not ob- 
 served. Afterwards we find our inference verified by the facts. 
 Thus the principles of reason which regulate all thinking are 
 continuously confirmed by observation and experience, and are 
 found to be objectively real as well as subjectively necessary. 
 Physical science rests on the assumption that these principles are 
 true, and that they regulate things as well as thought. And its 
 great and ever advancing discoveries are a continuous verification 
 of the truth of the principles, and of their objective reality as 
 regulating things, as principles and laws in accordance with 
 which the universe is constituted. These principles are thus 
 found to be the constitution of the universe and the laws of its 
 orderly action and evolution, the matrix in which the universe 
 is molded, the essence and intelligible significance of all things. 
 Hence Aristotle called these rational principles or ideas the es- 
 sence, or, if we had such a word, the beingness of things. 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 79 
 
 And we see, further, that these constitutive norms or regulative 
 principles of all things cannot be themselves impersonal, floating 
 as abstract thoughts in vacuity. Since they are universal, and 
 regulative of all thought and energy, they cannot be mere sub- 
 jective beliefs in the mind of the observer. Since they are them- 
 selves the constitution of the universe, they must be the revela- 
 tion of Reason transcending the universe, and yet energizing in 
 it, and continuously and progressively expressing and realizing 
 in finite beings in the forms of space and time the rational prin- 
 ciples, laws, ideals and ends, which are archetypal and eternal in 
 the transcendent Reason. In the absolute Reason we have the 
 ultimate all-conditioning Being of which the whole universe, 
 physical and spiritual, is the revelation. Thus the rational prin- 
 ciples, laws, ideals and ends, which are revealed in finite things 
 and constitute their intelligibility, and of which finite things are 
 in this sense the phenomena, are themselves the phenomena in 
 which the absolute Being appears, and reveals itself as the abso- 
 lute Reason energizing in the universe. And here as before the 
 phenomena are inseparable from the being and are filled with it, 
 and it is the being that appears and reveals itself in the phe- 
 nomena. 
 
 The existence of the absolute Being is also known by a neces- 
 sary intuition of reason. Man cannot proceed far in the knowl- 
 edge of the objects and changes about him without finding in 
 himself the irresistible certainty that some being exists which 
 never began to be, something unconditioned and all-conditioning 
 manifested in all that is. And this is not a mere subjective im- 
 pression: If it is so, then nothing objectively real exists. If we 
 know ourselves and outward things as real beings, then the abso- 
 lute must be real being. If knowledge begins as ontological, it 
 must go on as ontological to the knowledge of the absolute Be- 
 ing. In knowing myself in self -consciousness, and outward 
 things in sense-perception, I know them in the forms in which 
 reason knows them. In knowing the universe I must know it in 
 the form in which reason knows it, as dependent on some abso- 
 lute, unconditioned and all-conditioning Being. 
 
 In rational intuition the mind knows universal truths and 
 knows them as laws to all thought and action. It has the fun- 
 damental ideas of the True, the Right, the Perfect, and of the 
 Good estimated by reason as having true worth. These are uni- 
 versal, transcending the person seeing them in the light of rea- 
 son. Human reason cannot leave them disintegrated and with- 
 
80 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 out substantial being, but must know them as principles, laws, 
 ideas of the universal and absolute Reason. And when we study 
 the universe, we find revealed in it the ideas of the True, the 
 Right, the Perfect and the Good, which we have already found 
 in our own rational intuition, and in our own constitution as 
 rational beings. Thus reason finds in the universe, in nature and 
 in man, the presence and direction of the universal and absolute 
 Reason. The universe is known in the forms of reason as de- 
 pendent on God and as the revelation of him. Thus scientific 
 knowledge is inseparable from the knowledge of God. In its 
 essence as science it must, explicitly or implicitly, recognize God, 
 the absolute Reason, as the ground of the universe ; and on this 
 the truth of all its conclusions depends. 
 
 Such is rational realism. In this philosophy there is no place 
 for Kant's doctrine that the phenomenon is totally separated from 
 the noumenon or thing in itself, and that the latter is therefore 
 entirely unknowable, except that it is known not to be like the 
 phenomenon. On the contrary, what we know of an object is 
 the object itself in its essential being, and in its essential signifi- 
 cance to rational intelligence. Minds superior to ours may per- 
 ceive in it reality and intelligible significance which we cannot 
 perceive. But so far as we do know it, it is the object itself 
 which we know, and in its real relations. And no rational be- 
 ing, however superior, can know in it anything contradictory 
 thereto. And we have this knowledge of the thing in itself as 
 really whether the object known is a body, or ourselves, or other 
 rational and personal men, or God. 
 
 Thus the evidence that man has capacity to receive God's rev- 
 elation and to know him through it, is found in his constitution 
 as a rational free person, and in his action and development as 
 such. Jacobi says : " To have reason and to know God is one ; 
 as not to know God and to be a beast is one." At least it may 
 be said that to be a personal being and to have capacity to re- 
 ceive God's revelation and to know him are one ; and not to 
 have this capacity and to be impersonal are one. 
 
 But this capacity is not a naked rational intuition by which, 
 as a pure intellectual act in the dry light of reason, man perceives 
 God. As in sense perception there is the reception of action 
 from without through the sensorium, as well as the perceptive 
 intuition, so in the knowledge of God there is the receptive side 
 as well as the intuitive ; there are rational and spiritual suscepti- 
 bilities through which God reveals himself in the consciousness, 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 81 
 
 and the reason reacting in its intuition perceives him. This is 
 what has been called the reason-sense, the God-sense, the God- 
 consciousness. And this is recognized in the theological state- 
 ment that no man- knows God by *' unaided reason." It is 
 equally true that no man knows the outward world by " unaided 
 reason." The outward world reveals itself through the sensorium 
 before it can be known by perceptive intuition or apprehended 
 in thought ; God reveals himself through the rational or spiritual 
 susceptibilities before he can be known in rational intuition or 
 apprehended in thought. 
 
 On the other hand, the mind of man is not a colorless surface 
 passively receiving with equal readiness whatever is impressed 
 on it from without. If so it would be totally indifferent to im- 
 pressions as true or false, and incapable of discriminating between 
 them. It could have no certainty of truth, because it would have 
 in itself no rational norms or standards by which to test it. On 
 the contrary, we are so constituted that what is true appeals to 
 our rational constitution in a wholly different manner from the 
 untrue. Hence the teaching of our current Illuminism that entire 
 indifference is essential to scientific investigation, is always false 
 and in contradiction to man's constitution as rational. It is im- 
 possible for a mind, seeing things in the unchanging forms of rea- 
 son and in the light of its universal principles and laws, to receive 
 indifferently, with no consciousness of their incompatibility, the 
 propositions that two straight lines inclose a space, and that two 
 straight lines cannot inclose a space. Man is constituted rational. 
 The knowledge of the principles and laws of reason and of all 
 things in its unchanging forms is normal, and, in the deepest 
 sense of the word, natural to man ; that is, it is accordant with 
 his constitution as rational. The present tendency to recognize 
 physical things as the only objects of knowledge, and sense as its 
 only source, is abnormal, and, in the deepest sense of the word, 
 unnatural. It is contrary to the constitution of man. It proves 
 him to be in an abnormal condition, either degenerate from a 
 healthier condition, or as yet undeveloped. God in revealing 
 himself to man aims to awaken him to the knowledge of his 
 spiritual environment and thereby of his own constitution as ra- 
 tional and spiritual, not as anything abnormal and strange, but 
 as his normal condition and his deepest nature or constitution. 
 It is man's ignorance of the spiritual and supernatural in himself 
 and his environment, not his knowledge of it, which is strange and 
 abnormal. 
 
82 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Thus it is evident that the denial of man's capacity to receive 
 God's revelation and to know him through it rests only on some 
 false conception of man's knowledge and his power of knowing, 
 and logically involves the denial of the reality and possibility of 
 human knowledge. 
 
 3. Man as personal or spiritual has likeness to God which 
 makes communion with him and knowledge of him possible. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor speaks of the necessity of " the commentary of 
 kindness; " we must be of the same kind or kin with a being if 
 there is to be any conscious and intelligent intercommunion. In 
 order to such communion between two there must be a common 
 rational and moral constitution, common principles of truth and 
 right to which to appeal, common feelings and motives to action. 
 So far as they thus participate in a common constitution they 
 are intelligible to each other and can hold conscious communion. 
 
 o 
 
 So far as they do not thus participate, they are separated by an 
 impassable gulf across which even thought is unable to pass. 
 Because man participates both in nature and spirit, both can act 
 upon him and reveal themselves in his consciousness. But though 
 he can act upon stones and trees, he cannot reveal himself to 
 them because they are insensate. On the lower animals, like 
 star-fishes and oysters, he can act so as to produce sensation in 
 them ; but they have not intelligence to take any distinct cog- 
 nizance of him and to acquaint themselves with him in any intel- 
 ligent intercourse. He can have some intercourse with his dog, 
 his horse, and a few others of the higher animals ; for these have 
 some intelligence, and some appetites, desires and affections as 
 motives of action, in common with his own. But these have not 
 the intuitive reason, nor the free will, nor the rational, moral 
 and religious sentiments, which characterize personality. 1 Along 
 the line which distinguishes the personal from the impersonal the 
 impassable gulf opens and separates us even from these. A dog 
 may accompany a boy to school, but he cannot participate in his 
 trouble in learning arithmetic or in his pleasure in any attain- 
 ment in scholarship. He may accompany his master to public 
 worship, but he remains as insensate to its significance as are the 
 stone pillars of the church. The dog cannot even look across 
 the dividing gulf and become aware of his own ignorance of all 
 which lies beyond it or even of the existence of the separating 
 gulf. No brute can have any consciousness of its ignorance of 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 537-554. 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 83 
 
 the multiplication- table or of its incompetence to know and wor- 
 ship God. 1 
 
 If man is in nothing like God, if he participates in no qualities 
 of the divine, the same impassable gulf opens between them ; 
 man is shut out both from all knowledge of God and from aB 
 consciousness of his ignorance and of his incompetence to know 
 and worship him. A likeness even in character is necessary to 
 a full understanding of another ; contrariety of character makes 
 a person to that extent unintelligible. One who has always ab- 
 stained from intoxicating drinks cannot understand fully the 
 temptations, the pains and the pleasures of an habitual drunk- 
 ard ; the character of Nero is an enigma and a seeming impossi- 
 bility to all good men. One cannot rightly appreciate God's 
 love in Christ if he interprets it only from his own life of selfish- 
 ness. Yet, notwithstanding their difference of character, on ac- 
 count of their similar rational constitution both the righteous 
 and the sinner may know the law of love ; the sinner may under- 
 stand and approve the requirement of the law and condemn him- 
 self as a transgressor. But if one lacks entirely a constitutional 
 quality or power possessed by another, so far he is shut out from 
 all knowledge of the other and from all intercourse with him. 
 We cannot understand God's revelation of himself either in the 
 constitution and history of man or in nature, unless we are en- 
 dowed with reason the same in kind with God, the supreme Rea- 
 son. It is because man is a personal spirit like God that he is 
 capable of knowing God ; capable, like Kepler, of ** thinking 
 God's thoughts after him ; " capable also of loving like God ; 
 and so capable of knowing the things which are spiritually dis- 
 cerned. 
 
 Here theism finds a philosophy which shows the reality of 
 man's likeness to God and in what it consists. 
 
 As personal or spiritual, man is also supernatural, that is, 
 above nature. Herein is man's likeness to God, which enables 
 him to receive God's revelation of himself and to know God 
 through it. 
 
 The line marking the distinction between nature and the 
 supernatural is commonly regarded as the same with that between 
 the finite and the absolute, that is, between finite beings and 
 God. If this is so man is not supernatural ; he has no knowl- 
 edge of the supernatural in experience ; it has never presented 
 itself in his consciousness ; he is destitute of all elements by 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, p. 18. 
 
84 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 which he can construct the idea in thought ; it is merely that 
 which is not included in nature ; the idea is void of positive con- 
 tents. When he attempts to throw his thought across the line 
 dividing nature from the supernatural his thought rebounds on 
 him as a, mere negation ; he has no positive knowledge which he 
 can carry across with him. Thus logically he is forced upon 
 Spencerian agnosticism. If he attempts to escape by saying that 
 he has positive knowledge of what God is through the universe 
 in which God reveals himself, he is driven on another difficulty 
 equally fatal. For by the supposition the whole universe is in- 
 cluded in nature ; there is in it nothing above nature ; and thus 
 nature is all which the theologian has to carry across the line 
 and with which to account for nature. God, then, is only nature ; 
 the Great Nature, as he is sometimes called. Then the super- 
 natural has disappeared and nature is all and is from everlasting. 
 Thus if a theologian identifies the line of demarkation between 
 nature and the supernatural with that between the finite and the 
 absolute, logically he has only the alternative between Spencerian 
 agnosticism and a materialism which recognizes nothing but na- 
 ture going on in its invariable sequences of causal dependence 
 from all eternity. This concession of theologians that the finite 
 universe includes nothing supernatural, cripples them in their 
 conflict with skepticism, agnosticism and materialism ; and to 
 this these forms of unbelief in great part owe their prevalence. 
 The question is not so much whether God exists, as whether 
 there is anything spiritual or supernatural in man. 
 
 In truth, the line between the supernatural and the natural is 
 between personal beings and impersonal. The rational free will 
 is in its essence supernatural, not as originating power but as 
 directing and exerting it. It is a power which being enlightened 
 by reason is self-directive and self-exertive, and as such is above 
 the correlations of force in the fixed course of nature, and pro- 
 duces effects in nature which nature left to its fixed course would 
 not have produced. Without at least so much as this there can 
 be no free and morally responsible agent in the universe. 
 
 Man, therefore, as a personal or spiritual being is supernatural. 
 As such he knows what the supernatural is. He knows in him- 
 self reason and free will and rational motives, the essential attri- 
 butes of a supernatural or spiritual being. As a spirit he is like 
 God who is a Spirit; he participates in reason the same in kind 
 with God, the eternal Reason ; he recognizes as imperative in his 
 own reason the same law of love which God commands , he can 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 85 
 
 love like God. Thus he has something in common with God. 
 He is on the same side of the line with God, he is a rational spirit 
 like him. When he tries to think of God he has positive knowl- 
 edge of him as personal Spirit, as energizing Reason, or rational 
 Will. His thought is still negative as to the unconditionateness ' 
 or infinitude of God, but positive as to the rational Spirit that 
 is unconditioned and infinite. And so far as the miraculous re- 
 veals the supernatural, man has knowledge of it in his own 
 rational and free personality, in his own supernatural powers. 
 Thus man is in the image of God. Thus, and thus only, is he 
 capable of communion with God, of receiving revelation of him, 
 of knowing and serving him. 
 
 Therefore, in considering whether man has knowledge of God, 
 the decisive question is, Are we rational, free, personal beings ? 
 If so, we are supernatural in the true meaning of the word. If 
 we can honestly and heartily affirm our own personality in its 
 true significance, the belief in God, the eternal Spirit, can hardly 
 fail to follow. 
 
 Tliis common misplacement of the line of demarkation between 
 nature and the supernatural not only precludes logically the pos- 
 itive knowledge of God, but also the full and correct knowledge 
 of man. It shuts him up in nature with no outlook into the su- 
 pernatural. But because man is spirit and therein supernatural,, 
 he has the knowledge of the supernatural in his consciousness of 
 himself. While as to his physical organization he is in nature 
 as really as are the trees, is sensitive to its action on him, and so 
 knows it in his conscious experience, in his spirit he is supernat- 
 ural, is sensitive to the action of the supernatural on him, and 
 knows it in his conscious experience. Thus he knows two sys- 
 tems in the universe, the natural, and the spiritual or supernat- 
 ural. As he belongs to nature, he receives in his sensorium im- 
 pressions from material things and physical forces, and his con- 
 sciousness becomes a centre on which all the forces of nature 
 converge and in which they reveal themselves. As spirit he is 
 sensitive to spiritual and supernatural influences from man and 
 God ; his consciousness is a centre on which the powers of the 
 spiritual system converge and in which they reveal themselves. 
 Thus he has knowledge of the system of nature and of the ra- 
 tional and moral system, and of their unity in the universe which 
 is the manifestation of God. The unity of the two appears in 
 the subordination of nature to spirit and its harmony with it as 
 the sphere in which it acts and the medium through which it is 
 
86 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 revealed. Nature is filled with the divine Spirit and reveals it, 
 as the atmosphere is filled with the sunlight and reveals the sun. 
 
 " The earth is crammed with heaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God. 
 But only he who sees takes off his shoes ; 
 The rest sit round it and pick blackberries." 
 
 And if the physical organization of man is but the form and 
 medium in and through which the human spirit reveals itself, if 
 all nature is but the form and medium in and through which God 
 and the spiritual system are revealed, the antagonism between 
 nature and the supernatural disappears, but the distinction be- 
 tween them remains ; and man by virtue of his spiritual and su- 
 pernatural powers is participant in the light of the divine Rea- 
 son, and is capable of knowing God and of communing with him, 
 of knowing the supernatural and participating in it. 
 
 Thus man is at once a supernatural being in a supernatural or 
 spiritual environment, and participant of an animal nature in a 
 physical environment. If we once grasp this reality it will be 
 impossible to doubt that his spiritual environment may reveal it- 
 self in his consciousness through his spiritual susceptibilities, as 
 his physical environment reveals itself through his senses. And 
 spirit will no longer be conceived as the ghostly and ghastly, but 
 as the essentially and distinctively human. 
 
 4. This capacity to know God is discovered in the examination 
 of man's constitution as a personal being. 
 
 As a personal and supernatural being man is endowed with 
 reason, susceptibility to rational and spiritual motives and emo- 
 tions, and free will. Through each of these he has capacity to 
 receive the revelation of God. 
 
 By his human reason man participates in the light of the di- 
 vine and universal Reason. In this light he knows the divine and 
 universal Reason revealed in his own consciousness. In this light 
 he confronts the universe as the object of his intelligence, and 
 finds the divine and universal Reason revealed in the rational 
 principles and laws which regulate it. He ascends "through 
 nature up to nature's God," because he sees it in the light of 
 universal principles which are the "constituent elements of rea- 
 son ; " and these illuminate his thinking because he is in the 
 image of God and the light of the divine Reason shines in his 
 rational intelligence. Beginning at the level of the brute in tin- 
 impressions of sense, the mind is able to penetrate through sensa- 
 tion far beyond sense, to know the systems both of nature and 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 87 
 
 spirit, and their unity in their common dependence on God. As 
 Plato says, " The soul is a sort of oracle." 1 This it is by virtue 
 of the fact that it is Reason. 
 
 Thus God is revealed to man through his reason, both immedi- 
 ately in his consciousness and mediately through the universe, 
 including both the physical and the moral systems. 
 
 And these are revelations and not mere products of thought. 
 Knowledge cannot originate in mere thinking. Thought must 
 strike on some object already revealed, and be reflected back from 
 it, in order to illuminate the mind with knowledge. As the every- 
 where diffused daylight comes from the reflection of the light of 
 the sun from the atmosphere and innumerable objects, the mind is 
 illuminated with intelligence by thought reflected from innumer- 
 able points of reality presented around it. Goethe says : " All 
 the thinking in the world does not bring us to thought. We 
 must be right by nature, so that good thoughts may come before 
 us like free children of God and cry, ' Here we are.' " Genius 
 does not create its great thoughts by thinking. Rather it is a 
 power that sees farther and deeper than others into the realities 
 presented before it. The thoughts that come trooping before it 
 as the children of God crying, " Here we are," come from all the 
 objects of the physical and moral systems, as they present them- 
 selves before its " vision and faculty divine," and reveal the spir- 
 itual and divine that is in them, visible to him who can see. ,So 
 in the spiritual life the knowledge of God is not originated by 
 thinking, but presupposes revelation. And there is a spiritual 
 insight analogous to that of genius, which sees into the signifi- 
 cance of the reality revealed. In the revelation of God in the 
 Christian consciousness, the humblest mind has a vision of God 
 and of the universe in its relation to him, which ungodly genius 
 with all its powers cannot see. 
 
 God reveals himself also through the feelings. While revela- 
 tion is always to the intellect, it is not always immediately to it, 
 but may be made through other powers and susceptibilities of our 
 being. God reveals himself through man's feelings, the motives 
 which impel him to action and the emotions in which his feelings 
 react on the action and its object ; and he is constitutionally en- 
 dowed with susceptibilities through which he is capable of receiv- 
 ing this revelation. The sensibilities are points of sensitivity to 
 the action of outward agencies, through which they can make 
 their presence felt in the consciousness. The sensorium and the 
 
 yi n K.OL rj Tpv^- Phaedrus, 242. 
 
88 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 natural appetites, desires and affections are the points of sensi- 
 tivity at which man's physical environment comes in contact with 
 him and makes its presence felt in his consciousness. The ra- 
 tional sensibilities, the susceptibility of scientific, moral, sesthetic, 
 teleological and religious motives and emotions, are the points 
 of sensitivity to the spiritual environment, through which it 
 makes its presence felt in the spiritual consciousness. Through 
 these God reveals himself ; through motives and emotions per- 
 taining to truth, to right and wrong, to perfection and beauty, to 
 the honorable and worthy, to the realization of the true good, and 
 through the religious motives and emotions pertaining directly tc 
 God. Man not only knows himself to be a part of the system of 
 nature, but also feels it in the weight of his body, in the impact 
 of physical forces, in hunger and thirst, in all sensation. So he 
 not only knows himself to be a part of the moral and spiritual 
 system, but feels it in all rational and spiritual motives and emo- 
 tions. In these, spiritual reality is felt and revealed before it is 
 proved or even reflected on in thought. Plato said : u I know 
 nothing more clear and certain than this ; that I must be as good 
 and noble as it is possible for me to be." Says W. S. Lilly : " I 
 cannot prove to you the beauty of a sunset, or the sacredness of 
 sorrow, or. the nobleness of ' Regulus and of the Scauri, and of 
 Paulus, prodigal of his great soul when the Punic enemy tri- 
 umphed.' ' : Religious sentiments are inwrought into our inmost 
 consciousness. In them man knows his contact with the infinite 
 and his kinship with the divine. In them the reality of the un- 
 seen and the eternal reveals itself in the soul, and all its sensi- 
 bilities quiver at the mysterious presence. These religious sen- 
 sibilities lie deeper than thought ; the consciousness of them is 
 antecedent to reasoning, and cannot by reasoning be destroyed ; 
 nor by the crowd and turmoil and pressure of other interests be 
 overwhelmed. We are voyagers on the ocean of eternity ; and 
 though we go down into the ship and hide the great expanse from 
 our eyes, though there we abandon ourselves to amusement or 
 business, we must sometimes feel the heaving of the infinite ocean 
 on which we sail. It is the voice of God within the soul, not al- 
 ways definite and articulate ; it is the felt presence of the Most 
 High. 
 
 " Like an aeolian harp that wakes 
 No certain air, but overtakes 
 Far thought with music that it makes; 
 Such seemed the whisper at my side. 
 What is it thou knowest, sweet voice ? I cried. 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 89 
 
 A hidden hope, the voice replied, 
 So heavenly toned that in that hour, 
 From out my sullen heart a power 
 Broke, like the rainbow from the shower, 
 To feel, although no tongue should prove, 
 That every cloud that spreads above 
 And veileth love, itself is love." 
 
 If this is not so, then man is constitutionally endowed with no 
 susceptibility through which he is sensitive to the action of his 
 spiritual environment, or through which any action of God upon 
 him can make itself felt; he is constituted, as Schel ling expresses 
 it, with " an original atheism of consciousness." 
 
 Man knows God also in the sphere of free will. In the ex- 
 ercise of free will he knows himself as a person ; he becomes 
 aware of his own spiritual power, of his moral obligation and re- 
 sponsibility. He knows himself in the moral and spiritual sys- 
 tem ; law in its reality, universality and imperativeness opens to 
 his view like an all-encompassing firmament glowing with light, in 
 the centre of which and beneath its zenith, move where he will, 
 he must always act. In this knowledge of the all-encompassing 
 and all-illuminating law, he has the vision of the all-encompass- 
 ing, all-illuminating God, who " besets him behind and before." 
 
 The conclusion must be that man is endowed with capacity to 
 receive God's revelation of himself and to know God through it. 
 
 o 
 
 He finds God within himself revealed in his consciousness. This 
 knowledge is not rooted in any single faculty alone, but in the 
 whole personal or spiritual constitution of the man; and it dis- 
 closes itself as a factor in the whole life and history of mankind. 
 In his thinking he finds his thought regulated by transcendent and 
 universal principles through which he sees the Reason that is 
 universal and supreme. In his motives and emotions he finds 
 himself drawn to that which is above and beyond him and re- 
 lated to the divine. In his voluntary energizing he finds himself 
 under a law above himself laying obligation on him in every act 
 and speaking within him with the voice of God. 1 
 
 5. Man's capacity to know God is not a special faith-faculty. 
 
 Some refer our knowledge of God to a special faith-faculty. 
 They are, however, commonly not careful to define with exact- 
 ness what they mean by it. Hamilton acknowledged a faith in 
 God while denying the knowledge of him ; but he nowhere de- 
 
 1 I here merely indicate the evidence in man's constitution of his capacity 
 to know God. It is involved in the evidence in man's constitution of the ex- 
 istence of God, which will be fully presented in a subsequent chapter. 
 
90 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 fines what the faith is. Wace explicitly declines to define it : 
 44 Without any strict definition we know sufficiently well where 
 to observe it, and on what main principles the structure of the 
 Christian creed is built." l 
 
 It is not worth while to dispute about a word. Of course the 
 mind has power to do whatever it does. If we call this power a 
 faculty it is still nothing but the mind itself in its integral unity 
 considered as capable of doing it. But this is more than a ques- 
 tion of words. 
 
 In the foregoing discussion it has been shown that the belief 
 in God is rooted in man's constitution as a rational person, and 
 ramified through all the powers and susceptibilities of his per- 
 sonality. There is, therefore, in the constitution of man no psy- 
 chological basis for an isolated faculty for the knowledge of God, 
 and no facts requiring it for their explanation. On the contrary, 
 the assumption of such a faculty involves serious errors, weakens 
 the defense of theism, and lays it open to difficulties and objec- 
 tions which otherwise would not have arisen. 
 
 The treatment of the supposed faith-faculty commonly implies 
 that it is outside of human reason, and that the belief arising 
 from it is not knowledge. Thus theism and all theology are ex- 
 cluded from knowledge and remanded to faith and fancy. The 
 real question is, whether man's belief in God is knowledge, in 
 harmony with reason and with all which is essential in rational 
 personality. 
 
 If man has knowledge only through the senses and his intel- 
 lectual action is limited to reaffirming what is given in sense, and 
 if these are all the powers used in the acquisition of scientific 
 knowledge, then, if he is to know God, he must be endowed with 
 an additional and special faculty for that service. But if man is 
 endowed with reason, by which he knows universal principles 
 and laws regulative of all thought and action, then in rational 
 and religious susceptibilities his being will be open to the revela- 
 tion of the supernatural and of God, and he will need no special 
 faith-faculty for the knowledge of God. Then his reason is in 
 affinity with the absolute Reason, which has ordered and consti- 
 tuted the universe, and he is capable of knowing both the uni- 
 verse and the God who reveals himself in it. 
 
 Religious belief is a spontaneous forth-putting of the constitu- 
 tion of man. It has its roots in all that constitutes him a person 
 
 1 Hampton Lectures, 1879; The Foundations of Faith, p. 27. On the faith- 
 faculty, si-e Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 76-80. 
 
MAX'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 91 
 
 or spirit, and so distinguishes him as human from the brutes. 
 The capacity for religion is inherent in humanity ; its manifesta- 
 tion in religion is inseparable from the normal development of 
 man. But this is no longer true if religious belief arises from a 
 special faculty or organ. Then it is no longer rooted in the en- 
 tire constitution of man as personal ; it is isolated from ordinary 
 intelligence, from the ordinary laws of thought, and from all the 
 powers of reason which make him capable of empirical, mathe- 
 matical, logical and philosophical science. Then the faculty of 
 religious belief is put outside of the community of human facul- 
 ties, and set apart from all that is essential to constitute man per- 
 sonal and give him knowledge of the universe. It necessarily 
 follows that the faculty of religious belief, set apart from the rea- 
 son, conies into contradiction to it; antagonism between religious 
 knowledge and science is organized into the constitution of the 
 human mind, and the belief in God can maintain itself only by 
 vaulting over or breaking down the reason, and the rational in- 
 telligence which gives us science. Then religion itself is in its 
 essence ghostly and ghastly, but not human, a concern of another 
 and unknown world, but not of this. 1 
 
 This error can be eradicated only by correcting the erroneous 
 theory of knowledge on which it is founded. It is not the belief 
 in God which first opens to man a glimpse of the supernatural. 
 By virtue of his personality man is himself supernatural, and his 
 whole experience is in the supernatural sphere not less than in 
 the natural. In every rational intuition of a universal principle 
 or law, in every motive and emotion pertaining to truth, right, 
 perfection or worth, in every choice of free will, he knows him- 
 self as supernatural, he sees and feels supernatural realities. His 
 belief in God is his knowledge of the absolute Reason, of whom 
 he himself, as rational, is the image ; and in that knowledge alone 
 he finds the reality and unity of all his knowing. We cannot es- 
 tablish theism in the face of agnostic and materialistic science 
 
 1 The words of Leslie Stephen are significant here: "What could be easier 
 than to form a catena of the most philosophical defenders of Christianity, who 
 have exhausted language in declaring the impotence of the unassisted intel- 
 lect? Cointe has not more explicitly enounced the incapacity of man to deal 
 with the absolute and the infinite than the whole series of orthodox writers. 
 * Trust your reason,' we have been told till we are tired of the phrase, 'and 
 you will become agnostics.' We take you at your word; we will become 
 Agnostics." Hegel says that the humility which affirms that the finite cannot 
 know God nor come into direct relations with him, simply ascribes to God 
 powerlessness to make himself known. Phil, der Religion, vol. i. p. 195. 
 
92 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 by conceding that man is a creature of nature only, a higher 
 animal, and then adding to his nature a special faculty through 
 which he may catch a glimpse of the supernatural a sphere of 
 reality which he has never entered and in which, drenched in 
 nature, he does not participate. Such a faculty would be in 
 philosophy what Horace censured in poetry, a purple patch on a 
 worn and faded garment. On the contrary, we must show that 
 man is constituted supernatural and knows the supernatural in 
 knowing himself ; that his knowledge of God is at home in the 
 community of his human faculties ; and that it arises in the high- 
 est exercise of his reason, not in vaulting over it and standing 
 apart in antagonism to it. 
 
 Mr. Wace exemplifies the dangerous tendencies which I have 
 pointed out. He says that the faith which believes in God's love 
 and almightiness in face of evil " has abandoned the ground of 
 mere rational belief, and has taken a step which justifies in prin- 
 ciple any subsequent advance. It has given up once for all the 
 right to measure its assent by the dictates of reason alone, and 
 has committed itself to the hands of another guide altogether. 
 . . . The faith of the creeds recognizes these difficulties. It owns 
 that they are insuperable on any grounds of mere natural reason, 
 and it offers supernatural realities and supernatural assurances 
 to overcome them." Speaking of attempts to compromise with 
 science by minimizing the articles of faith he says, " As long as 
 we retain any of them as more than bare speculations we go be- 
 yond scientific grounds and rest on assurances which transcend 
 the capacity of mere reason." Even the witness and the categoric 
 imperative of conscience he regards as an exercise of a faith - 
 faculty distinct from the reason ; " to believe in the absolute su- 
 premacy of right over wrong " is " a momentous act of faith, . . . 
 respecting which it is hardly too much to say, in Hume's own 
 words, that it 4 subverts all the principles of the understand- 
 ing.' " l In short, he seems to declare a complete separation and 
 antagonism of reason and faith, and to assert the right and ne- 
 cessity of believing through the faith-faculty what is in contra- 
 diction to reason. 
 
 I heartily concur with him in affirming that man has capacity 
 to know God ; as he intimates, we are in direct contact with him. 
 The objection is to a special organ of faith distinct and isolated 
 from man's reason, his rational intelligence, and his human con- 
 stitution as a rational and personal being. Man has a distinct 
 1 The Foundations of Faith, pp. 15, 18, 43, 44. 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 93 
 
 faculty of religious knowledge only in the sense in which lie has a 
 distinct faculty of mathematical, ethical or aesthetic knowledge. 
 The preeminent and imperative demand on the Christian theism 
 of this day is to establish the synthesis of reason and faith. 
 Faith involves the highest exercise of reason. As Dr. Thomas 
 Arnold defined faith, it is " reason leaning on God." We know 
 God by leaning on him. We know God by leaning on him in 
 the faith which implies an act of will, and which, as such, is es- 
 sentially trust ; we know him thus in experience. But in the 
 case now under consideration it is not will leaning on God, but 
 reason. Reason knows its intuitional principles and laws, which 
 regulate all thought and action, as true, real and universal only 
 as they lean on the absolute Reason and are supported by it as 
 its eternal truths and laws. In the words of Principal Tulloch : 
 " The mind, intuitive in its lowest energy, is equally so in its 
 highest. If looking outward it has no further explanation of the 
 visible world than that it is present in apprehension and there- 
 fore must be conceived as existent, so looking upward from the 
 sphere of finite reality, it perceives a higher world of truth which 
 equally makes itself good in apprehension. Such a higher world 
 of intuition, by which we apprehend realities beyond the region 
 of the sensible, is one which is admitted by every school of phil- 
 osophy save that which, from the extremely unphilosophical as- 
 sumption lying at its basis, is bound to ignore everything beyond 
 the sensible." * 
 
 Those who find man's knowledge of the supernatural only in 
 an isolated faith-faculty are wont to epeak of " mere reason," 
 " natural reason," " unaided reason," as incompetent to know 
 God. To this true philosophy assents. Man does not know God 
 by unaided reason, but only as God by his action has revealed 
 himself to man. And philosophy further affirms that it is 
 equally true that the unaided reason of man cannot know any- 
 thing. Man does not know the physical world by unaided rea- 
 son, but only as by its action on the sensorium it first reveals or 
 presents itself in consciousness. He does not know his fellow- 
 men in their personality by unaided reason, but only as by their 
 action on him through his spiritual susceptibilities and powers, 
 they present or reveal themselves as personal in his conscious- 
 ness ; as when we see a heroic act of virtue our spiritual sus- 
 ceptibilities thrill responsive to it. In like manner man does not 
 know God by unaided reason, but only as God by some action 
 1 Tulloch ; Theism, p. 319. 
 
94 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 on the man reveals or presents himself in his consciousness. 
 God alone has absolute knowledge independent of revelation 
 from without. In this respect our knowledge of God is the same 
 as our knowledge of the universe. Thus there is a basis for the 
 scientific knowledge of God, the same in kind with the basis for 
 the scientific knowledge of nature and of man. The Christian 
 doctrine of man's dependence on the Spirit of God for spiritual 
 light and life accords with this philosophical principle. The 
 physical world is continually revealing itself in man's conscious- 
 ness, not only through the sensorium as existing, but also 
 through the appetites, desires and affections of his animal life, as 
 that on which he depends for the satisfaction of his desires and 
 for all merely natural good. In an analogous way God, who 
 environs man spiritually, according to the Christian doctrine 
 of the Holy Spirit, is continually revealing himself in the con- 
 sciousness, not only as existing, but also as that on which the 
 man depends as the source of all spiritual light, the satisfaction 
 of all spiritual desires, and the realization of all spiritual perfec- 
 tion and good. 
 
 Dr. Carpenter says in his Mental Physiology, there are 
 branches of science in which " our conclusions rest not on any 
 one set of experiences, but on our unconscious coordination of 
 the whole aggregate of our experience ; not on any one train 
 of reasoning, but on the converging of all our lines of thought 
 toward one centre." This is true of our knowledge of God. Its 
 roots are in our feelings, our reason, our consciousness of free 
 will and moral responsibility ; in our experience and our reflec- 
 tive thought ; in our speculative thinking and our practical action 
 as to the true, the right, the perfect, the good and the absolute ; 
 in all the elements and ramifications of human personality. Ac- 
 cordingly Luthardt defines faith as " that mental act in which 
 my whole spiritual being, my knowing, feeling and willing com- 
 bine in uniting themselves with the object of faith." 1 
 
 Because this belief thus springs from man's inmost selfj from 
 all in him which constitutes him a human person, it intertwines 
 itself with all his normal action. Therefore it is as certain to 
 him as his own existence. To give up this belief is to give up 
 his belief in himself as a rational, personal man, to give up all 
 that is noblest and most worthy in the development of his being, 
 and in the ends for which he lives. 
 
 1 Apologetic Lectures on the Fundamental Truths of Christianity, Trans., 
 page 153. 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 95 
 
 For the same reason it calls for the consecration of the whole 
 person to God in loving trust and service. A man does not give 
 his life for a mere speculation, a conclusion reached by dint of 
 argument ; but for truth which inspires, guides and quickens 
 him in the right conduct of life, and which he believes essential 
 to realizing the true good of mankind. The Christian belief is 
 not a speculation ; it is not so much that the believer has laid 
 hold of truth as that he has laid hold of God ; not so much that 
 he has laid hold of God as that God has laid hold of him. 
 
 And the believer has not merely found God, but therein has 
 also found himself. In discovering his relations to God he has 
 discovered the true greatness of himself, his highest possibilities, 
 his real good, his eternal life. He has also discovered what is 
 the true glory and good of mankind ; and in whatever sphere of 
 life he may be, he becomes a witness for God to testify of God 
 to men, and to convince them that only in knowing him can 
 they know what is greatest and best in themselves, and what is 
 of true and imperishable worth in human life. 
 
 6. Here the objection is urged that it is absurd to suppose 
 that God, the absolute and infinite, can present himself in the 
 consciousness of a finite mind. 
 
 The theist agrees with the objector that it is absurd that a 
 finite mind should have complete knowledge of the absoluteness, 
 the infinitude of God. God alone knows God in completeness. 
 But since the absolute Being has positive qualities and not 
 merely negative, it is possible to have a positive and real, though 
 incomplete, knowledge of him. We have positive knowledge of 
 him as Spirit, supernatural like ourselves. We can know that 
 he is unconditioned or absolute. But what the absoluteness is 
 we can know only negatively, by denying his dependence on any- 
 thing independent of himself, and his limitation in time, space 
 or quantity. And because God is a Spirit, there is nothing in 
 his absoluteness making it impossible for him to reveal himself 
 as spirit in the consciousness of a finite mind, and to be posi- 
 tively though incompletely known. A babe is incompetent to 
 have a full knowledge of what its mother is. But she is re- 
 vealing herself to it every day, and more and more, as its mind 
 expands, it knows her. All knowledge begins in spontaneous 
 belief ; a nucleus of knowledge within a periphery of indefinite- 
 ness opening room for opinion, conjecture and error in thought, 
 and for progressive enlargement of knowledge. 
 
 So the spontaneous belief in a divinity arises in the experience 
 
96 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of men. When defined and tested even as it exists in the rudest 
 men, it is found to contain at least the consciousness, however 
 dim, of a supernatural and superhuman being or beings, which is 
 a nucleus of knowledge; and around it a periphery of indefinite- 
 ness which opens room for opinion and conjecture, for fancy and 
 error, as to what the being is in detail. This nucleus of relig- 
 ious knowledge will be gradually enlarged as God continuously 
 reveals himself in nature and in man, and is known in the expe- 
 rience of the individual and the history of mankind, and as man 
 continues to define and test his spontaneous beliefs in thought, to 
 set aside the false, to leave the doubtful for the present as opin- 
 ion, and to verify the others as true and so transform them into 
 definite knowledge. 
 
 This is the true Christian agnosticism. From the greatness of 
 what is known of God we become the more conscious of the tran- 
 scendent mystery and incomprehensibleness of his being ; the 
 wider area of the known makes visible a larger horizon of the 
 unknown. 
 
 It appears, therefore, that God is presented or revealed in con- 
 sciousness as really as a finite tiling or person is ; and that the 
 limitations of our immediate knowledge of God are analogous to 
 the limitations of our immediate knowledge of a finite thing or 
 person. We know the one as really as the other in consciousness ; 
 and in the one as really as the other it is through impressions and 
 indications made in consciousness by the object that the mind in 
 its reaction knows the being. In the constancy of the action on 
 us of finite persons and things we forget that we know them 
 through impressions which they make in our consciousness, in 
 which the mind in its reaction perceives them, and imagine that 
 somehow we have a sure knowledge of them, such as we cannot 
 have of God. But our knowledge of God is in the same way 
 through impressions and indications in consciousness of his pres- 
 ence and action, and in each case the mind perceives the being 
 through these. It is true that finite persons and things affect us 
 in part sensibly, and God only spiritually ; but not that our 
 knowledge of the former is immediate and of the latter is not. 
 The spiritual is deeper in our being than the physical and sensi- 
 ble. If the spiritual wants, on the satisfaction of which our spir- 
 itual life depends, were as obtrusive and obstreperous as the nat- 
 ural wants, on the satisfaction of which the natural life depends, 
 if God's touch were on the body instead of on the spirit, if he 
 shone in our eyes instead of in our hearts, if his grace spoke in 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 97 
 
 the ear instead of in the silence of the spirit, we should think our 
 knowledge of him as immediate as of the sun when it shines on 
 us and of our friends when they speak to us. But the influences 
 of the Spirit of God do not fall on the senses, but on the spirit. 
 The natural man with his natural senses and sensibilities " re- 
 ceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know 
 them, because they are spiritually discerned." But the human 
 spirit's knowledge of the things of the divine Spirit is as immedi- 
 ate and real as the natural man's knowledge through the senses 
 of the things of nature. 
 
 7. Another objection is that, however man's belief in God 
 arises, it can never become knowledge, but must remain always 
 a mere subjective belief. Agnostics, materialists and skeptics, 
 who acknowledge man's constitutional religiousness, acknowl- 
 edge that he may have a belief in a god, but deny that it can 
 become knowledge. Theists sometimes so distinguish belief 
 in God from the knowledge of him as to imply that the belief 
 can never become knowledge. 
 
 The first question is, What do they mean by belief ? For as 
 in the case of the faith-faculty, the term is not clearly defined. 
 Elaborate essays have been written on the distinction between 
 belief and knowledge without making clear what the distinction 
 is or securing for it any fixedness of meaning. In literary and 
 philosophical usage there is a great diversity in the meanings at- 
 tached to belief as distinguished from knowledge. 
 
 Belief is used to denote assent resting on testimony as distin- 
 guished from perceptive or ratiocinated knowledge. 
 
 Especially it has been used in theology to denote assent rest- 
 ing on the authority of the Bible as the word of God ; or on the 
 authority of the church as supposed to declare the meaning of 
 God's word. Here a moral element enters into the belief. It 
 includes the act of the will trusting God, or the church, as au- 
 thoritative. 
 
 Belief is also used to mean subjective assent. In distinction 
 from this, knowledge would be an assent founded on the action 
 of some object on the man revealing itself in his consciousness, 
 on the reaction of the mind perceiving the object, and on the fur- 
 ther action of the mind apprehending and defining the object 
 and comprehending it in unity with other things by ascertaining 
 its relations to them. But the subjective assent is an element 
 essential in all knowledge however elaborated, and without it 
 there cannot be any knowledge. On the other hand, the sim- 
 
98 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 plest subjective assent implies at least the presentation of some 
 object in consciousness and the reaction of the mind on it in 
 perceiving it. 
 
 Belief or faith is also used to denote the self-evident, spontane- 
 ous knowledge arising in presentative and rational intuition and 
 in memory. But this belief is not distinct from knowledge. It 
 is knowledge in its nascent state. It is the primitive knowledge 
 on which all knowledge elaborated in thought depends. It fur- 
 nishes the material about which we think and the laws which 
 regulate the thinking. 
 
 Assent arising from the practical experience of life is some- 
 times called belief, as distinguished from knowledge. By expe- 
 rience, for example, we learn what are the issues of certain lines 
 of conduct and what principles must regulate action in order to 
 attain the highest ends of life. But beliefs thus arising are often 
 the most certain knowledge. It is for beliefs thus springing out 
 of the practical experience of life and intertwined with all human 
 interests that a man may be ready to die a martyr. 
 
 Evidently, then, the objection has no force, because belief, as 
 distinguished from knowledge, is used in so many different senses, 
 and those who urge the objection use the word without discrim- 
 inating between its various meanings, and in their arguing pass 
 interchangeably from one meaning to another. 
 
 It must also be noticed that in each of the meanings belief is 
 not in antithesis to knowledge, but is itself knowledge in a par- 
 ticular aspect ; and at least in the third and fourth meanings is 
 essential to all knowledge. In each it may be the intellectual 
 equivalent of reality ; and knowledge can be no more. 
 
 If, indeed, belief in God springs from a special faith-faculty, 
 then it may be distinguished from knowledge and in antithesis 
 to it. But there is no evidence of the existence of such a fac- 
 ulty. 
 
 And we find, further, that scientific knowledge itself begins 
 in faith or belief and rests on "assumptions" as really as the- 
 ism does. The objector says: "Theology, which develops its 
 knowledge from faith, and is itself a belief only, is therefore no 
 science at all, inasmuch as science must be independent of faith 
 and is developed apart from all assumptions." No statement as 
 to science could well be further from the fact. The scientist's 
 knowledge of the physical realities about which he thinks, of 
 himself the thinker, and of all the principles which regulate his 
 thinking and give validity to his conclusions, rests entirely on 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 99 
 
 self-evident, unproved and improvable belief. It is spontaneous 
 belief developed by thought. As Ulrici says truly : " Always in 
 science, knowledge (Wisseri) and belief (Glauben), far from a 
 severe separation, are in the closest connection even in the exact- 
 est sciences ; a great part of our scientific knowledge {Erkennt- 
 niss) really belongs not to knowledge ( Wissen), but to the sphere 
 of belief. It is, in fact, only the thoughtlessness and the lack of 
 scientific accuracy in the thinking of modern investigators of na- 
 ture, which leads them to fancy in all their results, inferences 
 and presuppositions, that they possess a rigorously exact knowl- 
 edge ( Wissen*), from the height of which they look down on the 
 endeavors of philosophy and the other sciences." 
 
 On the other hand, the knowledge of God begins as spontane- 
 ous belief through God's revelation of himself in consciousness 
 and man's knowledge of him in experience, grows up in the prac- 
 tical experience of life and intertwines itself with all man's high- 
 est interests, is scrutinized and verified by thought, and is thus 
 developed into knowledge in its most highly elaborated form. 
 As Ulrici says : " Religious belief rises to the highest certainty 
 possible, so that for it men sacrifice property and life, which 
 is rarely done for scientific knowledge. This shows that the 
 difference between belief and knowledge is not as to the degree 
 of certainty, not quantitative but qualitative. . . . When relig- 
 ious belief is developed by reflective thought to scientific belief, 
 without losing its living personal conviction, it is the highest 
 attainable form of human knowledge ( Wissen), and the most 
 perfect expression of genuine humanity." l 
 
 Thus it appears that man's knowledge of God does not differ 
 as knowledge from his knowledge of the universe, but only as to 
 the object known. Thus the objection resolves itself at last into 
 the dogmatic assumption that human knowledge is limited to the 
 objects perceived through the senses. 
 
 8. Theology is thought of by many as consisting only of ab- 
 stractions, as busying itself only with general notions and words, 
 with distinctions and definitions. This mediaeval tendency to 
 neglect concrete thought for abstract, to make general notions 
 and words the objects of thought instead of concrete realities, has 
 not wholly passed away from theology, 2 as it has not from other 
 lines of thought. But in truth theology concerns itself with the 
 living God revealing himself in our own consciousness, in the 
 
 1 Ulrici; Glauben und Wissen, pp. 283, 267, 343. 
 
 2 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 54-61. 
 
100 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 universe, in the history of man, in Christ and the historical es- 
 tablishment of his kingdom ; with man in his relations to God, 
 to his kingdom and to the spiritual system ; with all the deepest 
 realities of human life and of the universe. 
 
 Under the lead of physical science the thinking of the present 
 day is setting strongly away from words to things, from the ab- 
 stract to the concrete. But, as it comes under the influence of 
 skepticism or materialism, it still misses the deepest reality. For 
 it excludes the spiritual, and busies itself only with what pre- 
 sents itself to sense. It contents itself with the mechanism of 
 the world without considering the deeper reality which it reveals. 
 It contents itself with examining the binding, the print, the gen- 
 eral getting up of the book of nature, without grasping its signif- 
 icance and its design. Thus it falls into a barren realism scarcely 
 less superficial than the mediaeval logomachy. It is satirized by 
 
 Goethe : 
 
 " He who seeks to know a thing well 
 Must first the spirit within expel ; 
 Then he can count the parts in his hand, 
 Only without the spiritual band." 
 
 Matthew Arnold tells of a young man at college who turned 
 Shakespeare's " Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" 
 into " Can you not wait on a lunatic ? " The change strips off 
 the poetry, the sentiment, the real depth of woe, and leaves only 
 the physical disease. The current realism strips off not the po- 
 etry and sentiment only, but the philosophy, the religion, all that 
 belongs to the spiritual. It pictures the universe and life with- 
 out perspective, with all the flatness of a Chinese painting. 
 
 Theology is not one-sided in excluding either the physical or 
 the spiritual. It does not exclude the physical world, but reveals 
 it in its true reality and its highest significance. It does not 
 exclude the spiritual world, but reveals it as the deeper reality 
 which is manifested in nature, and to whose higher ends nature 
 is subordinate ; in which man, knowing himself as spirit, finds 
 himself at home and lives in intimacy with God. And his knowl- 
 edge of God is not vacant in empty thought, but is knowledge of 
 concrete reality in its fullest and richest significance, the knowl- 
 edge of God and of spiritual realities given in the experience of 
 life. This knowledge does not lie in the mind as gold coins lie 
 in a purse, the purse unchanged and not benefited by its contents, 
 and the coins having no vital connection with the purse ; but the 
 mind has taken it up in. the processes of its own life and growth, 
 
MAN'S CAPACITY TO RECEIVE GOD'S REVELATION. 101 
 
 as a living plant takes up the soil and water and transforms them 
 into its own living organization. 
 
 We see then that knowledge is not an empty, subjective act, 
 but is the subjective intelligence, acting on a presented or re- 
 vealed object, which gives body and illuminating power to its oth- 
 erwise thin and uneftulgent flame. If the mind can pass beyond 
 all that is immediately before the senses and explore the uni- 
 verse, it is because it apprehends planets and suns, molecules and 
 masses, motions and forces, bodies and spirits, and, supported on 
 their substantial reality, advances to the knowledge of all that 
 is. So the knowledge of God presupposes a revelation of God. 
 It is a revelation found by the seeker after him in nature, in the 
 history of mankind, and in Christ, but first of all in the soul of 
 the seeker himself. We have seen that God reveals himself in 
 the religious sentiments common to all men. A Christian has 
 the clearer and larger revelation of God in his purer and more 
 powerful experience of God's presence and grace in the Spirit, 
 which testifies of Christ and brings the great motives of God's 
 revelation in him to bear upon the soul. Thus the idea of God 
 and the belief in him is not at the end, but at the beginning of 
 the so-called proof of his existence. We ascertain the elements 
 which enter into the idea, and the reasons why we believe that 
 he exists ; we bring the grounds of the belief into the light of 
 reason and judge whether they are reasonable ; and we find it 
 reasonable to believe that God reveals himself in our experience ; 
 that we know him as present and acting within the compass of 
 our own consciousness. We find him within ourselves. " No 
 man climbs to the throne of God by the pathway of the stars 
 who has not first faced him in the inner sanctuary of his own 
 soul." So Augustine, after his long speculations and his strug- 
 gle with speculative difficulties, at last with wonder and joy 
 found God revealing himself within his own soul. " Too late 
 I loved thee, O Beauty, ancient yet ever new. Too late I loved 
 thee. I searched for thee abroad, and thou wert within ; I, 
 deluded, abroad, plunging amid those fair forms which thou 
 hadst made. Thou wert with me but I was not with thee. 
 Things held me far from thee which, unless they were in thee, 
 were not at all. Thou didst call and shout and burst my deaf- 
 ness. Thou didst flash, shine and scatter my blindness. Thou 
 didst breathe odors and I drew in breath and panted for thee. 
 Thou touchedst me and I burned for thy peace." 1 And when 
 1 Confessions, bk. x., xxvii. 38. 
 
102 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 once we have found him within, we see all the world full of evi- 
 dences of his existence, presence and activity. As Hawthorne 
 beautifully says : " Christian faith is a grand cathedral with di- 
 vinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory 
 nor can possibly imagine any ; standing within, every ray of 
 light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors." 
 
 This knowledge of God revealing himself by his gracious action 
 in the spiritual life within the soul has often been overlooked by 
 modern writers on the evidence of the existence of God. But it 
 has been the confession, the faith and the joy of Christ's spiritual 
 disciples in all ages. Theophilus, writing to Autolycus, said: 
 " If thou sayest, Show me thy God, I answer, Show me first thy 
 man, and I will show thee my God. Show me first whether the 
 eyes of thy soul see and the ears of thy heart hear. For as the 
 eyes of the body perceive earthly things, light and darkness, white 
 and black, beauty and deformity, and the ear distinguishes sounds, 
 so the ears of the heart and the eyes of the soul can perceive 
 divine things. God is seen, by those who can see him, when they 
 open the eyes of their soul. All men have eyes, but the eyes of 
 some are blinded so that they cannot see the light of the sun. 
 But the sun does not cease to shine because they are blind; 
 they must ascribe it to their blindness that they cannot see. 
 This is tby case, O man. The eyes of thy soul are darkened 
 by sin, even by thy sinful actions. As a mirror must be bright, 
 so man's soul must be pure. If there be rust on the mirror man 
 cannot see his face in it ; likewise if there be sin in man's soul 
 he cannot see God." l 
 
 The necessary conclusion is that man is constituted with ca- 
 pacity to receive revelation from God and to know him through 
 it. As on one side of his being he is part and participant of the 
 system of nature and constituted capable of knowing the realities 
 of the physical world, so on the personal side of his being he is 
 part and participant of the spiritual and moral system and con- 
 stituted capable of knowing the realities of the spiritual world. 
 As Quinet expresses it: " Man is drawn toward God, his cre- 
 ator, by all the ties of the soul and of the body. The lion when 
 it comes into being moves to the desert, the eagle to the moun- 
 tain-tops, man to society, to humanity and to God. Yes ; behold, 
 the great name is uttered ; and if you do not recognize some 
 instinct to the divinity in the heart of the peoples in their cradle, 
 all remains inexplicable." 2 
 
 1 Theophilus to Autolycus, bk. i. chap. ii. 
 
 2 Edgar Quinet, Le Genie des Religions, p. 28. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED TO BE AWAKENED. 
 
 MAN'S power to know God needs to be aroused to action and 
 his spiritual vision clarified by the spiritual quickening and de- 
 velopment of the man. 
 
 1. This may be so because his spiritual powers are not yet 
 developed, or else because they have been voluntarily neglected 
 or perverted. 
 
 Paul distinguishes in man the natural or fleshly from the spir- 
 itual. This distinction is founded on the fact that man belongs 
 alike to the rational or spiritual system and to the physical or 
 natural. Thus he is a natural or fleshly man and a spiritual 
 man. By the natural is meant all which is common to man 
 with the brutes ; by the spiritual all that is common to him with 
 God. 
 
 Here is the basis of Paul's assertion that the natural man can- 
 not know the things of the spirit, because they are spiritually 
 discerned. Man by his merely natural powers as here defined 
 cannot know God, and through them God cannot reveal himself 
 to man. The senses perceive material things but they cannot 
 perceive the spiritual. Hunger, thirst, all merely natural appe- 
 tites and desires, are responsive to the touch of the divine spirit 
 no more than miry clay to the bow of a musician. They do not 
 lead to God, nor even to any life regulated by truth and law and 
 directed to the realization of rational ideals and ends, but only 
 to a life seeking enjoyment in the gratification of desires. Hedon- 
 ism, because itself is founded exclusively in the nature-side of 
 man, recognizes this as his highest life ; and thus, because man 
 being rational cannot be blessed in nature alone, sets up Pes- 
 simism as the true philosophy. As the brute can have no knowl- 
 edge of the spiritual in man nor even of its own ignorance of it, 
 so man, by those powers and susceptibilities of nature which are 
 common to him with the brutes, can have no knowledge of God 
 nor even of his own ignorance of him ; and equally no knowledge 
 of any distinctively spiritual power or susceptibility in himself. 
 
104 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 God reveals himself to spirit only, and by spirit only can the rev- 
 elation be received. The work of God in the heavens and the 
 earth may be perceived by the senses, but they do not perceive 
 God. They report the outward form and motion ; it is the spirit 
 that through these perceives God. 
 
 Here we find in the constitution of man a reason why a spiritual 
 awakening and development are necessary in order that he may 
 know God. The natural in man precedes the development of 
 the spiritual. The spiritual in the human constitution lies poten- 
 tial and dormant for a longer or shorter period, before it begins 
 to reveal itself as an active energy. A new-born babe discloses 
 only the instincts &,nd powers of a little animal. The spiritual 
 capacities are in its constitution. Dr. Maudsley, in his Trea- 
 tise on Insanity, says that an insane infant sometimes shows a 
 precocity of seeming vice which reveals a potentiality, a latent 
 power, which no monkey ever has. But in the healthiest infant 
 it is only a potentiality. By its own action the infantile spirit 
 slowly develops its powers and susceptibilities, educates its own 
 functions, and seems almost to create itself. 
 
 By this precedence the sensuous and natural in man has an ad- 
 vantage over the spiritual and overlays it. And because the im- 
 pulses of nature are essential to the continuance of the natural 
 life, they have an obtrusiveness, urgency and incessancy of in- 
 fluence, which the spiritual powers, as they struggle upward to 
 their legitimate supremacy, at least in the outset, cannot have. 
 
 Analogous to the development of the spirit in a child is its de- 
 velopment in the history of the race. The history of man's true 
 progress is the history of his growing consciousness of his own 
 rational or spiritual powers, of the rise of the spiritual in him to 
 ascendency over the natural, subjecting his natural powers to 
 rational laws and directing them to worthy ends ; of its rise also 
 to ascendency over external nature, ascertaining its laws and con- 
 trolling its powers and resources for the service of man. The 
 history of religion is the history of the emergence of man from 
 the life of nature to the knowledge of God, and of his progress 
 to a true and spiritual religion. 
 
 The spiritual may be further submerged beneath the natural 
 by man's voluntary action. He may neglect to exercise his spir- 
 itual powers, so that they become enfeebled by disuse; while, 
 living in the life of nature exclusively, all the propensities of the 
 natural life are overgrown. And in a life of selfishness and 
 worldliness, by his voluntary action in sin he is continually per- 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. 105 
 
 verting his powers, dulling his spiritual susceptibilities, and by 
 the whole force of an evil character turning himself away from 
 God. 
 
 To this it must be added that in a life of selfishness the spirit 
 of man closes itself against the ever environing influences of 
 God's grace. 
 
 Man as a created being is always dependent on God. He is 
 dependent in his rational and spiritual powers not less than in 
 his physical organization. In his normal condition he is always 
 receptive of divine influence. He is not only constituted rational, 
 in the image of God, and thus by his very constitution participant 
 in the light of the divine Reason, but he is also in living commu- 
 nication with God and continuously receiving the influx of illu- 
 minating and quickening grace in God's revelation of himself to 
 him. Only in this union with God does he realize the normal 
 illumination of his mind and the normal quickening and develop- 
 ment of his spiritual life. Christ declares this when he says 
 that the Christian lives and is fruitful only by union with God, 
 as the branch by its union with the vine. 
 
 By sin man repudiates his dependence as a creature on God 
 and sets up for himself in self-sufficiency, and thus wilfully closes 
 the channels through which the ever environing grace of God 
 had penetrated his spirit. Though God continues to reveal him- 
 self before him and within his consciousness, he refuses to heed 
 the God that comes to him and to conform his life to his influ- 
 ence. The necessary result is that more and more the channels 
 of spiritual influence are dried, and his spiritual life withers. 
 And in this process the revelation of God in his consciousness is 
 obstructed and his vision of God is obscured. And this may go 
 so far that he loses all consciousness of his ignorance of God, and 
 of his lack of all true spiritual life. He is in the condition which 
 Paul describes in the terrific words, "dead through your tres- 
 passes and sins." 
 
 For such a man the first requisite for his knowing God is that 
 his spiritual susceptibilities and powers be awakened, so that he 
 may see his separation from God and the spiritual death which 
 he has brought on himself thereby, and may turn to God and 
 open his soul to receive God's ever encompassing light and grace. 
 
 This is the act of faith, which is the condition of his justifica- 
 tion before God. There are but two possible lines of human ac- 
 tion, reception and production. In all finite agents reception 
 must precede production ; all production is conditioned on recep- 
 
106 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tion. This is the law of mechanics, of organic life and growth, 
 and of man's spiritual life and energy. God alone can produce 
 without having first received. The act of a person when he 
 turns to God and opens his soul to receive his ever environing 
 grace, is faith. This is the condition of justification, because it 
 is the only possible beginning, in a finite person, of a right char- 
 acter, of a true spiritual life, of the illumination of his spirit in 
 the true knowledge of God, and of that union with God in which 
 alone it is possible for God to communicate to the man the true 
 good, which is primarily the perfection of his being. 
 
 This union of God with man through the man's faith and the 
 influx and indwelling of the divine Spirit is essential to the true 
 and most complete knowledge of God, and is what Paul describes 
 as the Spirit of God witnessing with the spirit of man. 
 
 Thus separated from God and submerged in fleshly, worldly 
 and selfish interests, the man is deadened to spiritual motives. 
 The religious life seems to him unattractive or even positively 
 repulsive. If you appeal to his deepest aspirations, the response 
 is only, " What shall I eat, what shall I drink, and wherewithal 
 shall I be clothed ? " The spiritual life of faith in God and love 
 to God and man does not attract him as good. He is attracted 
 only by what meets the fleshly, the worldly and the selfish de- 
 mands. In his spiritual insensibility, Feuerbach's coarse pun is 
 pertinent to him : " Der Mensch ist was er isst : " The man is 
 what he eats. To him the true good appears as evil ; the real 
 evil appears as the good. Hence all appeals io seek the higher 
 excellence and enjoyment of the spiritual life fall powerless on 
 him. In illustration of this, Fenelon has imagined a dialogue 
 between Ulysses and Grillus, whom Circe had turned into a hog. 
 Ulysses wished to change him back into a man ; but Grillus had 
 no desire for it and would not consent to it. He said, " The life 
 of a hog is so much pleasanter." Among other arguments Ulys- 
 ses says : " You then count as nothing eloquence, poetry, mu- 
 sic ? " Grillus could only reply : " I am so happy, I am above 
 all these fine things. I would rather grunt than be as eloquent 
 as you." " But," said Ulysses, " how can you endure this nauseat- 
 ing nastiness and stench ? " And Grillus answers : " It all de- 
 pends on the taste ; the odor is sweeter to me than that of amber 
 and the mire and filth are sweeter than nectar. " 
 
 Hence in proportion as the spiritual life in man is overlaid by 
 the sensuous and the material, his capacity for discerning and ap- 
 1 Dialogues des Morts, vi. (Euvres, Paris, 1856, torn. ii. p. 551. 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. 107 
 
 predating the spiritual is dulled. At the annual meeting of the 
 American Scientific Association in Montreal in 1882, a paper was 
 read in which, as reported in the morning papers, it was affirmed 
 that man is brother to the tree. Materialism recognizes in man 
 no powers different in kind from those of the brute ; necessarily 
 it must emphasize his lower powers to the neglect of the higher 
 powers distinctive of personality, characterizing him as spirit and 
 allying him with God. In the prevalence of religious unbelief 
 in the last century the savage state was eulogized as that of primi- 
 tive simplicity and happiness, from which in civilization man has 
 degenerated. Of late in discussions of morals the brutes are 
 sometimes referred to as exemplifying the perfect right. We 
 also find Mr. Whitman, in one of his brawny meditations, look- 
 ing on them as superior beings and longing to live with them : 
 
 " I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-con- 
 tained, 
 
 I stand and look at them long and long. 
 They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 
 They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 
 They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, 
 Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, 
 Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, 
 Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth." 
 
 Hartmann reaches the same pessimistic conclusions : " The hap- 
 piest folk are the rough savages, and of a civilized people the un- 
 cultivated classes. Dissatisfaction increases proportionally with 
 increasing culture. . . . The poor, low, rough conditions of life 
 are happier than the rich, the genteel, the cultured ; the stupid 
 are happier than the bright and clever. . . . Beasts are happier, 
 that is, less miserable, than men, because their overplus of dis- 
 satisfaction is less. Only think how comfortably an ox or a hog 
 lives, almost as if it had learned from Aristotle to seek for free- 
 dom from care and cumber instead of, like man, chasing after 
 happiness. ... It is important to make beast-life better known 
 to the young as being the most genuine source of pure nature, 
 wherein they may learn to understand their own being in a sim- 
 ple form, and in it revive and refresh themselves after the arti- 
 ficiality and distortion of our social condition." 1 
 
 Thus when in a man the spiritual is submerged in the sensuous, 
 he can see nothing in all the universe above the life of sense. At 
 the touch of science the firmament " bursts its starry floor " and 
 
 1 Philosophie des Unbewussten, part C, xii. pp. 616, 624, 598 ; part B, xi 
 p. 314; Ed. Berlin, 1869. 
 
108 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 " opens on and up " revealing to him what ? Immensity of 
 space and time, vast masses of matter, innumerable worlds and 
 systems of worlds, forces everywhere active and resistless, mo- 
 tions inconceivably swift, all grinding on forever without intelli- 
 gence, plan or aim, without guidance, or wisdom or love ; behind 
 everything and behind all, mystery impenetrable and the absolute 
 unknowable ; and man, who looks through it all and confronts 
 the mystery behind it, is inferior to the beasts and a brother of 
 the trees. 
 
 What a contrast to the reality disclosing itself to the Chris- 
 tian theist ; man in the likeness of God, sending his intelligence 
 through all the universe, seeing God in all, and everywhere at 
 home with God; God revealing himself in humanity, God in 
 Christ reconciling the world unto himself ; Christ, the bright- 
 ness of God's glory and the express image of bis person, the 
 Redeemer of men from sin and " not ashamed to call them breth- 
 ren ; " and man thus redeemed, destined through endless time to 
 " be forever with the Lord," progressively realizing all perfection 
 and good. 
 
 This completes the significance of Paul's representation of the 
 natural man as unable to know the things of the spirit. He is 
 submerged in the life of nature, and insensible to the spiritual 
 realities which encompass him. In the Scriptures he is said to 
 be enslaved, blind, deaf, dead in sin, given up to delusions, and 
 believing lies. To such a man the material heavens and earth 
 are the great, the enduring, the real, while the spiritual is un- 
 real, transitory, a phantom or a dream. And when he looks on 
 men he sees only animals of a higher order, driven in all their 
 vast and complicated labors by the resistless forces of nature, 
 like the plants in germinating and growing, like the winds which 
 blow and the waters which flow. He expects when he dies to 
 be buried and to roll unconscious with the rolling earth ; and 
 while he lives he is buried in nature rolling in spiritual uncon- 
 sciousness with the rolling earth. This is all which the eye of 
 the flesh can see. 
 
 To such a person the Bible is as empty of spiritual meaning 
 as is nature. An American studying in a German university be- 
 came intimate with a young German who was pursuing archaeo- 
 logical studies. He did not believe in Christ nor in God. He 
 could not be induced to read the Bible, declaring that he found 
 nothing in it which interested him. At last the American 
 directed Ms attention to the account of the building of the taber- 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. 109 
 
 nacle ; and the German was so interested that he sat up all night 
 studying it. Here was a man who found nothing to interest 
 him in the history of God's love redeeming men from sin, and 
 revealed in Christ and in the establishment of his kingdom of 
 righteousness and good will on earth, as recorded in the Bible ; 
 but the whole capacity of his soul was filled and flooded with the 
 description of the architecture of the tabernacle. Men as dry in 
 rationalism sometimes write criticisms and commentaries on the 
 Bible. But their estimate of its significance is as disproportion- 
 ate and as superficial as that of this young student ; they give the 
 grammar and the archaeology, but not the real significance ; the 
 letter and the word, but not the life and power. Renan says : 
 u A man who would write the history of a religion must have 
 believed it once, but must believe it no longer." He acknowl- 
 edges the necessity of knowing religion by experience in order 
 rightly to describe or criticise it. But the sinking back into dis- 
 belief would be a positive disqualification. The competent critic 
 and interpreter of any religion may have passed beyond that 
 particular religion to a higher, but must know in his own ex- 
 perience what religion is, and in his own spiritual life and insight 
 be able to sympathize with religious life and belief, however 
 crude the forms in which they appear. 
 
 2. The power to know God exists in man's deepest spiritual 
 insensibility. 
 
 In an infant the spiritual powers exist only as potential, as yet 
 undeveloped and inactive in the constitution of the child as a 
 personal being. They cannot at first act and reveal themselves 
 through the infantile organism as yet imperfectly developed. 
 But as the natural life of the child goes on, its spiritual powers 
 begin to act. In this action the child gradually becomes distinctly 
 conscious of itself as a person or spirit. The spirit "comes to 
 itself," knows itself as spirit, brings itself forth from the life of 
 nature, and reveals itself to others. 
 
 As the person advances in life he may by his own volun- 
 tary action submerge the spiritual in him beneath the natural 
 and live in spiritual insensibility. But in the deepest insen- 
 sibility his spiritual powers remain imperishable in his constitu- 
 tion, and by them he is always free to struggle upward again 
 into the spiritual life, to exalt the spirit to supremacy, and to 
 direct his powers to worthy ends. His spiritual susceptibilities 
 stir within him, but he takes no note of their significance as in- 
 citing him to a higher life and worthier ends. He chafes under 
 
110 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 his spiritual capacities as they make him conscious of duty and 
 of sin, and incapable of contentment in all which the animal life 
 can give. He envies the ox the placidity of its rumination and 
 the hog the felicity of its sty, and complains of his lot because he 
 cannot, like the horse, be groomed and foddered into blessedness. 
 
 The capacity to know God is as persistent as the constitutional 
 powers of the spirit. Of these powers it is one, and from them 
 it is inseparable. It can even be in exercise, and effects of the 
 divine action on the soul may appear in consciousness, without 
 the man's recognizing them as manifestations of God or himself 
 as competent to know God in them. 
 
 Analogous to this is the fact that one may believe that his 
 knowledge is limited to the objects of sense, and may deny the 
 validity of rational intuitions, while all his thinking is under 
 their regulation, and he feels rational motives and emotions 
 which presuppose ideas dependent on the rational intuitions. So 
 a person may deny the existence of free will, while constantly ex- 
 ercising it and conscious of freedom and of moral responsibility. 
 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen argues : " If you want me to be- 
 lieve that you possess faculties of which I am destitute, you must 
 prove yourself to be my superior by appealing to faculties which 
 we have in common." He says that a man proves his own power 
 of seeing to a blind man by describing to him a distant object 
 and then leading him to it to feel it with his hand. No one can 
 object to this maxim or to this illustration of it. But he is not 
 as successful in his second illustration. He says that if a man 
 claims to " intue what is going on in Sirius," we may challenge 
 him, in proof of his power, to read a column of the Times across 
 the room. 1 But when I claim that I know by immediate intui- 
 tion what is going on in Sirius, that is, that I see it luminous or 
 emitting light, I appeal to the same power of immediate vision 
 which the objector himself exercises, when he " intues " a column 
 of the Times distant two feet from his eye, or the figures on the 
 wall-paper across the room, and which he also exercises when 
 he " intues " Sirius emitting light. For all sense-perception is 
 immediate, presentative intuition, self-evident and irrefragable, 
 and yet unproved and unprovable. And when I claim a power 
 of rational intuition by which I know what is beyond the range 
 of sense-perception, I again appeal to a power which the objector 
 himself also has ; for he knows that Sirius is a body acting ac- 
 
 1 Article on Authority in Matters of Opinion, in Nineteenth Century, April, 
 1877, pp. 296, 297. 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. Ill 
 
 cording to the laws of gravitation and of the persistence of force, 
 and that light there is the same kind of molecular action with 
 the light which affects his eye on earth. And he knows this by 
 reasoning which rests on the validity of rational intuitions. On 
 the validity of these intuitions, which the objector denies, all 
 science rests, and the progress of science and the experience of 
 mankind are continual verifications of them. 
 
 And in affirming that we have capacity to know God, and 
 that we have experienced his gracious revelation of himself in 
 our own souls, we do not appeal in confirmation to extraordinary 
 faculties which others do not possess, but to the powers and sus- 
 ceptibilities of personality common to all men, and by which all 
 men are distinguished from the brutes and allied to God. If the 
 objector does not know God, it is either because he has neglected 
 to exercise his spiritual capacities, or by abnormal living has 
 brought them into an abnormal condition. 
 
 When a blind man has once learned that other people see, he 
 is willing to accept their testimony as to what they see. The 
 testimony from age to age of innumerable witnesses to the 
 reality of their knowledge of God in experience, would justify 
 the most skeptical in inquiring whether there may not be some- 
 thing in it. And they will find, if they seek God aright, that 
 the words of an ancient prophet are the true words of God : " Ye 
 shall seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all 
 your heart/' 1 
 
 Against our position that a man may know God in experience 
 through his revelation of himself to the man the objection is 
 urged that there are multitudes of men who are destitute of all 
 religions feeling and belief. The groundlessness of this objec- 
 tion is now obvious. In the first place, the allegation of the 
 objection is contrary to the facts. Religion is a common charac- 
 teristic of humanity. Atheism is sporadic in individuals ; no 
 atheistic race or tribe or clan of men, destitute of religion, has 
 ever been known to exist. In the next place, agnostics, materi- 
 alists and atheists have the ideas of God and religion ; they, for 
 the most part, acknowledge the constitutional religiousness of 
 man and the necessity of providing some satisfactory object for 
 it, and they disclose plainly in themselves religious capacities 
 and susceptibilities in exercise. Lastly, in cases of the deepest 
 insensibility to God, after infancy, we discover obvious evidence 
 of spiritual powers active but perverted. 
 1 Jeremiah xxix. 13. 
 
112 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 We conclude that man's power to know God exists in his consti- 
 tution and survives in his deepest spiritual insensibility. It needs 
 only to be awakened and rightly directed. Its greatest possibili- 
 ties are hidden even from the person himself, because he has not 
 exercised it according to the law of his being, which is the law of 
 universal love. Under new influences or in some new emer- 
 gency, it may be quickened into activity, and thus at once reveal 
 to him God, and himself as related to God and capable of know- 
 ing him. A closed piano reveals itself only as a piece of elabo- 
 rate cabinet-work. On opening it and studying its construction 
 we may learn something theoretically as to its real and higher 
 design. An ordinary player reveals to the ear something of its 
 musical power. A Liszt touches it and enraptures the listeners 
 by revealing musical capacities in the instrument never before 
 disclosed. So in man there are hidden capacities for knowing, 
 feeling and efficiency, which new influences and emergencies 
 may bring to light. A great orator plays on an audience as a 
 musical genius plays on an instrument, bringing out all its pow- 
 ers. They sit down calmly before him, chatting about indiffer- 
 ent things ; he awakens and convinces their intellects, new ideas 
 break in on them and things are seen in a new light ; he rouses 
 their feelings, they weep, they laugh, they are indignant ; he 
 persuades their wills, they make high resolves, they put forth 
 new energies. He has revealed themselves to them. A great 
 genius in literature or art, in discovery or invention, mikes men 
 see in common things a significance and beauty, a fact or law, a 
 power and use, which had never been seen before. A reformer 
 or prophet reveals an application of moral truth which rouses a 
 whole people, and inspires them to great enterprises. Great 
 emergencies, like the late civil war in the United States, reveal 
 to a people, to the surprise of other peoples and of themselves, 
 capacities, never before called forth, for inspiration with the no- 
 blest sentiments and the loftiest enthusiasm, for willing self-sac- 
 rifice, for heroic enterprise, energy and endurance. 
 
 It is a law of human nature that a power is enfeebled by dis- 
 nse or abuse, but is developed by exercise and training accordant 
 with the laws of man's being. Muscular power astonishes us by 
 the revelation of its hidden capabilities in the dexterity of the 
 skilled workman, in Winship lifting almost a ton, in swimmers, 
 gymnasts and other athletes. The eye, the ear, the finger's end, 
 have hidden powers of perception astonishing when revealed by 
 training. The tactual perception of the blind seems scarcely 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. 113 
 
 less than a new sense. The greatest musical genius cannot re- 
 veal the hidden powers of a musical instrument to one who has 
 no musical taste and culture. But such a person can be trained 
 to an appreciation of it. The power to appreciate the beautiful 
 in nature and art is developed by education and culture. The 
 same is true of human powers and susceptibilities in every line 
 of action. They are developed by exercise. The result is often 
 so wonderful that it seems like the creation of a new faculty. 
 Hence, when one who knew a person as a boy in his rustic home 
 meets him, years afterwards, a cultivated and well developed 
 man in some position of commanding influence, he can hardly 
 believe him the same person. And it is this law of development 
 by exercise and training which determines the difference between 
 the dreary simplicity and monotony of savage life and the rich 
 variety of susceptibilities and powers which constitute the many- 
 sidedness of the civilized man. 
 
 This principle is equally true of man's spiritual power of know- 
 ing God. One may assert that he has no knowledge of God ; 
 that he never had any experience of God's presence, or of his ac- 
 tion or influence on him, or of his revealing himself to him in any 
 way ; he may say that he has "no faculty nor rudiment of a fac- 
 ulty," by which he can know him ; that he is unaware of any 
 faith or feeling by which he can come into communication with 
 God or any conscious contact or relation with him. But this 
 does not prove that the man is destitute of such power, any more 
 than the unconsciousness of any other power or susceptibility un- 
 developed or decayed through lack of exercise, proves that the 
 man is not constitutionally endowed with it and that it is not now 
 latent within him. On studying his constitution, we find that 
 he is constituted for spiritual ends as plainly as the mute piano is 
 found to be constituted for music ; and that he gives some expres- 
 sions, however rude or perverted, of his spiritual capacities. And 
 quickened by appropriate influences, this same man may come to 
 reveal capacities of spiritual vision, feeling and energy like those 
 of saints and martyrs. But as yet he stands mute, incased in 
 nature, giving no utterance to the spiritual harmonies of which 
 he is capable, and himself oblivious of these higher possibilities 
 of his being. As, when the body sleeps, the avenues of commu- 
 nication with the outward world are temporarily closed and all 
 its realities are seen only as transient dreams, so in spiritual slum- 
 ber the avenues of communication with God and the spiritual 
 world are closed and all spiritual realities are seen, if at all, only 
 
114 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 as dreams. To such a man a spiritual awakening is necessary 
 that he may know God and see the reality of spiritual things. 
 There is no lack of constitutional capacity to know God, just as 
 there is no lack of constitutional capacity to appreciate beauty, in 
 the boor who despises his wife's flowers as only weeds or in the 
 worldling who, intent on fashionable ostentation, values his pic- 
 ture-frames more than the pictures ; and no lack of constitutional 
 capacity to do good in the millionaire who, at the death of a 
 wealthy townsman distinguished for munificent beneficence dur- 
 ing his life, could sum up his estimate of the man and his life 
 only by saying, " He never knew the value of money." In each 
 the latent faculty needs only to be awakened and developed. 
 
 3. Christianity teaches that God in his love to man brings on 
 him the gracious influence of his Spirit to awaken him from his 
 spiritual insensibility and to renew and develop the spiritual life. 
 
 This awakening can be effected only as, through his conscience 
 and his other spiritual susceptibilities and powers, he is aroused 
 to see the sin and evil into which he has plunged himself, and to 
 begin to appreciate the higher life possible to him in his relation 
 to God and to the spiritual realities of which his senses give him 
 no perception, a life so grand in itself that its realization is his 
 highest good and his worthiest end of pursuit : " Der Zweck des 
 Lebens ist das Leben selbst." 
 
 This awakening comes from the Spirit of God, who brings on 
 men the influences of God's redeeming love in Christ to turn 
 them from their sin, to rouse them from the life of the natural 
 or fleshly man to the life of the spirit. When a man is thus 
 awakened to know God and therein to know himself in his true 
 character, if he turns from his selfishness to the life of faith in 
 God and of love to God and man, he therein experiences the 
 change which is described in the Scriptures by the most extraor- 
 dinary terms, a passing from darkness to light, an opening of 
 blind eyes, a new birth, a quickening of the dead to life, a put- 
 ting off of the old man and a putting on of the new. Thus, as 
 Ulrici says of this renovated faith in God: "It must well up 
 from the inmost life of the soul; for the inmost life of the human 
 soul has its root in God himself, while rooted in the man's own 
 religious and moral feeling." 1 
 
 In this spiritual renovation, also, there is no impartation of 
 any new faculty, no originating of spiritual powers not already 
 existing in the human constitution, but only an awakening of the 
 1 Ulrici, Gott und der Mensch, p. 725. 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. 115 
 
 spiritual powers already existing to the consciousness of God and- 
 the direction of them to him as the supreme object of trust and 
 service. 
 
 4. When the spiritual powers are thus awakened and rightly 
 directed, the spiritual knowledge widens and becomes more and 
 more the vision of God, and is more and more organized into the 
 ever advancing spiritual life and growth. 
 
 True culture requires not merely the acquisition of knowledge 
 to be held in the intellect unchanged as in a lifeless receptacle ; 
 it requires also its assimilation, its organization into spiritual life, 
 growth and power. We must transform thought into life; as the 
 ancients used to say, when we give grass to a sheep, we do not 
 expect to get back grass, but wool. The healthy mind digests its 
 knowledge into its own growth and gives it forth again as life, 
 character and power. Lord Bacon says : " Abeunt studia in 
 mores." He also gives us the maxim, "Truth prints goodness." 
 It is only in the imprint of truth on the heart that it is clearly 
 legible. The truths and ideals archetypal in the absolute Rea- 
 son and expressed in the finite creation are the constitution of 
 the universe ; therefore these are regulative of all thought and 
 efficient energy ; therefore in a universe thus constituted, the 
 true ends of life and the methods of realizing them are deter- 
 mined by the truth. To know it speculatively without seeing 
 and regarding its practical bearing as the law of action is not to 
 know it as it really is. It is knowledge one-sided and incom- 
 plete ; knowledge of half-truths which, accepted as whole truths, 
 are positive errors. Hence merely speculative inquiry is one- 
 sided and unhealthy ; it leads to skepticism in the intellect, dry- 
 ness of heart, and irresolution and weakness of will. This gives 
 rise to the common impression that a mere scholar is arid, and 
 practically unwise, weak and unreliable. The skeptic, the 
 merely speculative inquirer about God, is in the garden of 
 knowledge like Satan in Paradise, who 
 
 " On the tree of life, 
 
 The middle tree and highest there that grew, 
 Sat like a cormorant ; . . . 
 
 nor on the virtue thought 
 Of that life-giving plant, but only used 
 For prospect what well used had been the pledge 
 Of immortality." 
 
 Three requisites have been prescribed as essential to make a 
 theologian : " Meditatio, oratio, tentatio," thinking, praying, 
 
116 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 trying. It is not by thinking alone, by arguing with one's self, 
 or by controversial discussions with others, but also by praying, 
 opening the mind and heart to light and warmth from the wis- 
 dom and love of God. So Augustine says : " Iiitelligit, qui orando 
 pulsat, non qui rixando obstrepit ad ostiam veritatis." Nor is it 
 by both of these alone, but also by trying and testing beliefs in 
 the work and conflict of life. We are educated in the school of 
 life, as, with faith in God and love to God and man, we resist 
 the powers of wickedness in ourselves and in the world, and put 
 forth all our energies in the endeavor to realize the highest possi- 
 bilities of our being, and to accomplish the utmost for the ad- 
 vancement of Christ's kingdom and the reign of truth, righteous- 
 ness and benevolence throughout the world. Thus false beliefs 
 are exposed by their insufficiency, the true are verified, and new 
 aspects and applications of truth are discovered. 
 
 Bunyan gives graphic descriptions of his own struggles to ap- 
 propriate and assimilate spiritual truths. Of one promise of the 
 gospel he says : " If Satan and I did ever strive for any word of 
 God in all my life, it was for this good word of Christ ; he at one 
 end and I at the other. Oh, what work we made. It was for 
 this in John, I say, that we did so tug and strive ; he pulled and 
 I pulled ; but God be praised, I overcame him ; I got sweetness 
 out of it." At another time he writes : " Oh, one sentence of 
 Scripture did more afflict and terrify my mind, I mean those 
 sentences that stood against me ; and I sometimes thought they 
 every one did, more, I say, than an army of forty thousand 
 men that might come against me." Again : fc ' At this time I saw 
 more in these words, ' heirs of God,' than ever I shall be able to 
 express while I live in this world." At another time: "I had 
 not sat above two or three minutes, but that came bolting in upon 
 me, ' And to an innumerable company of angels ; ' and withal 
 the twelfth chapter of Hebrews, about the Mount Zion, was set 
 before my eyes. Then with joy I told my wife, Oh, now I know. 
 It was a blessed scripture to me for many days, and through this 
 sentence the Lord led me over and over, first to this word and 
 then to that, and showed me wonderful glory in every one of 
 them. These words have often since that time been great re- 
 freshment to my spirit." Thus the divine word, when it meets 
 a spiritual exigency, discloses its own divine meaning, as an eter- 
 nal truth or reality fitted in the constitution of the universe to 
 the exigencies of a human soul made to dwell in the universe ; it 
 becomes a word to the heart, a life-force to the man. We go 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. 117 
 
 among the people and we are wont to find that those whose lives 
 have moral earnestness have their treasury of precious truths, 
 which in the various exigencies of their lives have come to them 
 as angels from heaven for their help. It may be a psalm, a pas- 
 sage from the gospels, a strain of poetry, a clearly stated meta- 
 physical distinction which has relieved a sore perplexity, a golden 
 apothegm, a far-reaching principle of natural science, a widely 
 ramifying analogy, some truth which in some emergency of life 
 flashed light into the inmost soul, and which ever since has re- 
 mained like a window, then and there opened into the unseen, 
 through which the light of the eternal glory still streams. 
 
 As a man goes on thus organizing the knowledge of God into 
 his own being and growth, he not only acquires possession of the 
 truth thus appropriated and knows its significance as bearing on 
 life and disclosing the concrete realities with which he has to do, 
 but he is always gaining thereby new capacity to receive the 
 revelations of God and to know him through them ; according 
 to the old maxim, " Quantum sumus scimus," we know as much 
 as we are. The more we appropriate the truth and live by it, 
 and the more we come into the divine likeness, so much the more 
 are we prepared to receive further revelations of God and to 
 gain new and richer knowledge of him. Thus, when the spirit- 
 ual powers of a man have been awakened and put in the right 
 direction, he may go on to continually larger and richer knowl- 
 edge and approach more and more to realizing in its full signifi- 
 cance "the vision of God." 
 
 Hence, when under the influence of the divine Spirit, man re- 
 turns to God and begins the new life of love to God and man, 
 his love itself becomes the source of new knowledge ; it opens to 
 him a larger vision of God ; for God is love. Thus being himself 
 rooted and grounded in love, he is able, as Paul testifies, to know 
 the height and the depth, the breadth and the length of God's 
 love, which yet evermore surpasses human knowledge, and to be 
 filled unto all the fulness of God. Thus he brings himself and 
 his life into harmony with God and his law. He chooses God as 
 the supreme object of trust and service. He loves as God loves. 
 He brings his whole character into harmony with God's char- 
 acter and his whole activity into the line of God's activity ; he 
 enters into God's plans, stands with him for truth and righteous- 
 ness and good-will against falsehood, injustice and selfishness ; 
 he belongs to God's kingdom and is a " fellow-worker " with him 
 in advancing its interests. He lives a life of confidential inti- 
 
118 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 macy with God, and acquaints himself with him in daily commit 
 nication with him, in the reception of his grace and the indwell- 
 ing of his spirit. Thus he knows the things which are spiritually 
 discerned ; in his love he knows God, as mere intellect without 
 love cannot ; it opens to his vision the very heart of God. He 
 can testify in the words of Sidney Lanier : 
 
 " Sweet friends, 
 Man's love ascends 
 To finer and diviner ends 
 Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends." 
 
 Skeptics object that love to God is a bias hindering the dis- 
 covery of the truth ; that the inquirer, if he would be candid, 
 must strip off all feeling and in complete indifference investigate 
 in the light of the intellect alone. 1 Certainly, while the truth is 
 as yet unknown, there must be candor and impartiality in inves- 
 tigating ; and after it is discovered the mind should be always 
 conscious of its limits and open to receive new knowledge. But 
 also after the truth is discovered, the love of the truth implies 
 joy in it and fidelity to it as regulative of conduct. The objec- 
 tion excludes this and insists on persistent indifference after the 
 truth is known as much as before. It affirms that the love of 
 the truth is indifference to it. This presupposes that truth can 
 never be known ; no belief can have any final authority, not even 
 the belief of the existence of God, nor of the reality of the law 
 of love or of any moral distinctions, nor of one's own existence 
 or that of the outward world. They who rest in this objection 
 are logically universal skeptics ; " they wait to see the future 
 come," indifferent as to what beliefs it may bring, because all 
 beliefs are essentially alike uncertain. It is indifference which 
 rests on despair of attaining knowledge. The conclusion would 
 be, that if one has any belief respecting God it disqualifies him 
 for theological study ; that if one is eminently pure and devout 
 in his Christian life and earnest in his love to God and man, he 
 is most of all incompetent to attain any real knowledge of God. 
 This, however, would not be pertinent to the knowledge of God 
 alone. It would be equally true that any fixed belief on any 
 subject, as that the earth turns on its axis, would make the be- 
 liever incapable of candor in further investigation and incompe- 
 tent to attain any real knowledge on that subject. But man is 
 constituted, not for inactive waiting, but for achievement, there- 
 fore not for despairing skepticism, but for energetic belief. There- 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 38-43. 
 
MAN'S SPIRITUAL CAPACITIES NEED AWAKENING. 119 
 
 fore it is impossible to dispart his knowledge from his feelings ; 
 and if so disparted his knowledge would necessarily be defective 
 and not the true knowledge of the reality. Knowledge com- 
 monly bears on the conduct of life, and disparted from this prac- 
 tical bearing must be defective and erroneous. The most impor- 
 tant part of knowledge is our knowledge of intelligent beings ; 
 of this the most important part is the knowledge of them in their 
 freedom of will and their moral responsibility and relations, the 
 knowledge of the springs and motives of their action, the ends 
 which they propose to realize, and the principles which determine 
 their well-being ; and this knowledge is possible only to those 
 who participate in the same freedom, act in the same moral 
 sphere, and know in experience similar responsibility and motives 
 under the same moral law. And since knowledge bears practi- 
 cally on the conduct of life, the fact of that bearing is an im- 
 portant part of the reality to be known and an important fact to 
 be considered in weighing the evidence of the truth. He who is 
 most in sympathy with truth and righteousness and God, is best 
 qualified to understand the history of man. It is the history of 
 human feeling and passion, of choice, purpose and character, quite 
 as much as of human thought. It is the history of the struggles 
 of the oppressed against the oppressor, of wrong against right, 
 of selfishness against love, of laborious progress toward realizing 
 higher ideals. How can such questions be decided by dry intel- 
 lect stripped of all feeling, in entire indifference as to which 
 principles prevail ? To prescribe such conditions as essential to 
 the search after truth is both morally wrong and philosophically 
 false. Love to God is essential to the highest knowledge of him. 
 God is love. Love moves the power which sustains, orders and 
 directs the universe and determines the end for which it exists. 
 That God is love is the greatest and most important truth which 
 man can know. He can know it effectively only as he himself 
 loves like God ; only as he makes love to God and man the spring 
 of his own energies, the quickening, directing and beatifying 
 power throughout the entire sphere of his own activity. "Every 
 one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. He that 
 loveth not knoweth not God ; for God is love." 
 
 5. From the positions now attained we see the reasonableness 
 of the Christian doctrine of the witness of the Spirit. This the 
 reformers emphasized. They taught that it is through the testi- 
 mony of the Spirit of God in the heart of man that he comes to 
 the belief of the existence of God, and of the revelation of him in 
 
120 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Christ ; that it is through the Spirit, witnessing in the heart of 
 the devout seeker after God to the divine truth in the Christian 
 Scriptures, that he knows them to be the revelation of God. The 
 Christian doctrine of the witness of the Spirit is only a more ex- 
 plicit enunciation of a truth implied in all religions. A person 
 cannot lift himself to the knowledge of God by dint of thinking 
 alone. The same is true, as we have seen, of the knowledge of 
 sensible objects and of personal beings. One cannot reach them 
 in thought till they have first presented themselves in his con- 
 sciousness by their action on him. So God presents himself to a 
 man, besets him behind and before, and lays his hand upon him. 
 To this action of God the human spirit responds recognizing the 
 present God. This general fact is specifically set forth in the 
 Christian doctrine of the witness of the Spirit. It has occupied 
 of late a less prominent place in Christian apologetics and doc- 
 trinal theology than in the earlier period of the Reformation. 
 But it is a truth which must be fundamental in all right think- 
 ing either in defense of Theism and Christianity, or in the de- 
 velopment of their doctrines. As Hegel teaches, finite things 
 act on us through outward media, but it is the spirit that wit- 
 nesses of the spirit. The true ground of spiritual faith is the 
 witness of the spirit, and the witness of the spirit is in itself 
 spiritually quickening. But it is not merely the human spirit 
 that witnesses to the presence of the divine, but also the divine 
 Spirit that witnesses of its own presence with the human. 
 
CHAPTER YH. 
 
 SYNTHESIS OF THE EXPERIENTIAL, THE HISTORICAL AND 
 THE RATIONAL IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 GOD reveals himself in the consciousness of the individual and 
 is thus known in experience. In this case the effects through 
 which God reveals himself are subjective in the consciousness, 
 analogous to the affection of the sensorium through which the ex- 
 ternal world reveals itself in consciousness. In addition to this, 
 as already shown, God reveals himself in objective and external 
 effects, in the constitution and course of nature and in the con- 
 stitution and history of man ; and above all in Christ and his 
 abiding Spirit reconciling the world to himself and establishing 
 his reign of righteousness and good-will. 
 
 This objective revelation of God in nature, man and Christ, I 
 call public or historical. It will be the subject of investigation 
 in the subsequent Parts of this volume. But its relation to the 
 revelation in consciousness must first be more fully considered. 
 
 By this public or historical revelation, the revelation of God 
 in consciousness and the spontaneous beliefs arising from it are 
 tested and corrected, and, so far as true, verified and amplified. 
 This is done by the processes of reflective thought in the light of 
 the truths, laws, ideals and ends of reason. Thus all which may 
 be known of God from all sources is apprehended, verified and 
 discriminated, and found to be in unity and harmony in a rea- 
 sonable system. 
 
 Here human reason enters into the process and contributes an 
 element to the knowledge of God. Of this theologians have often 
 manifested an unreasonable jealousy. Certainly there is no way 
 of ascertaining that a belief is reasonable except by the use of 
 reason. In the light of God's historical revelation the spontane- 
 ous religious belief is tested and verified negatively. That can- 
 not be a revelation of God which contradicts the universal princi- 
 ples and laws of reason, or the facts and laws of the universe. 
 The spontaneous religious belief is tested and verified by reason 
 positively, by showing its harmony with the principles and laws 
 
122 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of reason, and with the constitution of the universe and its actual 
 facts and laws ; and by showing its necessity in order to realize 
 the ideals and ends of reason and to meet the spiritual needs of 
 man. It is further tested by the Christian by ascertaining its 
 harmony with the revelation in Christ as recorded in the Bible. 
 
 It must be remembered, however, that human reason is not 
 here represented as sufficient of itself and independent of God, 
 but as knowing itself, in its normal condition and action, de- 
 pendent on him as the absolute Reason and receptive of his rev- 
 elation of himself. So in physical science, human reason does 
 not claim to be sufficient of itself to know the physical world, in- 
 dependent of its action on the mind ; on the contrary, reason 
 teaches that man's knowledge of the world depends on the world's 
 revelation of itself through the senses, and, as thus dependent, is 
 real and rational knowledge. 
 
 There are therefore three elements in the knowledge of God, 
 which may be called the experiential, the historical, and the ra- 
 tional or ideal. 
 
 Theological knowledge is the comprehension of these three 
 elements in a unity or synthesis of thought. The historical is 
 the medium for the synthesis of the experiential and the rational. 
 
 This chapter is designed to show that the synthesis of the three 
 is essential to the true knowledge of God ; that, through all di- 
 gressions and regressions, the true progress of theology is always 
 toward the completing of this synthesis, and is thus from genera- 
 tion to generation testing, verifying and amplifying man's knowl- 
 edge of God ; arid that the recognition of this is necessary to a 
 right understanding of the movement and significance of the- 
 ological thought at the present day. 
 
 The necessity of this synthesis is evident from the fact that 
 thought, which recognizes only one or two of these three elements, 
 issues in disastrous error. 
 
 When the experiential belief withdraws into itself, the result 
 is mysticism. When the rational or ideal isolates itself, the 
 first result is dogmatism ; the later result is rationalism. In 
 each case the Bible, as the record of God's revelation of himself, 
 recedes toward the background, and ultimately is disregarded. 
 When the historical isolates itself, the result is unspiritual and 
 arid criticism of the Bible, and anthropological and archa3olog- 
 ical investigation. 
 
 1. Mysticism is the name of religious belief arising spontane- 
 ously in the immediate experience or consciousness of God's pres- 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 123 
 
 ence and action on the spirit, but not apprehended, discriminated 
 and systemized in reflective thought, therefore not tested and 
 verified by the legitimate tests or criteria of knowledge. It is 
 exemplified in the " Yoga " of the Hindus, and it is often said 
 that India is its native home. It may be found, however, in all 
 the higher religions and has often made its appearance in the 
 history of Christianity. 
 
 Mysticism is true and strong in its belief in the revelation of 
 God within the consciousness of man and in his immediate com- 
 munion with God. Its weakness is that it stops in this nebulous 
 consciousness, this undefined experience ; that it does not turn on 
 it the light of reason, nor investigate in thought its real signifi- 
 cance, nor compare it with the Christian experience and knowl- 
 edge of the past, nor test it by God's further revelation of him- 
 self in nature and in the constitution and history of man, and 
 in Christ as recorded in the Bible. 
 
 As thus one-sided it is prolific of errors and fraught with dan- 
 gerous practical tendencies. It has sunk into mere subjectivity 
 and often degenerated into fanaticism. And since even a mystic 
 cannot cease to think and must have some forms of worship and 
 some intellectual mold for feeling, he either joins a party under 
 the leadership of some hierophant, or, like Madame Guyon, ac- 
 cepts the guidance of a spiritual director and the authority of an 
 infallible church, or, like Bohme, Eckart and others, creates 
 strange theosophies, sometimes verging on Pantheism. It has 
 also sometimes disclosed a tendency to sensuousness, as in the 
 erotic language of Madame Guyon's hymns and of some other 
 hymns and devotional literature. 
 
 Because thus one-sided, it becomes a religion of emotion. It 
 subsides into Quietism ; it gives itself up to meditation and 
 prayer ; it retires to deserts and monasteries ; its strength is to 
 sit still. It rejoices in the assurance of salvation in the next 
 world rather than in helping men to live right lives in this. It 
 is introspective; it concentrates the energies on securing one's 
 own peace and joy ; it cultivates ecstasies and reports them as 
 the highest result of life. In its continuous introspection, like 
 the Hindu u Yogi " with his eye fixed in motionless contempla- 
 tion, it transforms its own feelings into divine revelations ; it ac- 
 cepts them as " the inner light " and lets it take the place of the 
 Bible, of reason and of common sense. It would have any sudden 
 and inexplicable impulse or emotion accepted as an inspiration 
 of God and followed as his guidance. This characteristic of mys- 
 
124 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ticism appears in various forms in the religious life of our own 
 times. A woman, who supposed that she had attained the 
 " higher Christian life," received news of the illness of her only 
 brother living in a neighboring town, with a request to come to 
 him. In a day or two she received another message that his 
 illness was pronounced fatal, with a more urgent request to come 
 to him. Soon after came information of his death and of the 
 time of his funeral. But she did not comply with his repeated 
 requests nor even attend his funeral, because she had felt no in- 
 ward impulse, and therefore believed herself not called and drawn 
 by God to do it. Thus, as is usual in fanaticism, in thinking 
 herself divine she became inhuman. Fanaticism like this is often 
 set forth as the representative of the truth that God reveals him- 
 self to a man by his action on him and is thus known by the man 
 in experience or consciousness. This truth is sometimes rejected 
 by Christian theists because they confound it with this fanati- 
 cism. But a little consideration would show that in denying 
 this truth they are denying the fundamental fact of man's com- 
 munion with God which is of the essence of all religions, and 
 denying the influence of God's Spirit in the human heart which 
 is an essential truth of Christianity. 
 
 Mysticism also takes on darker forms and becomes a religion 
 of awe and terror. God is so great and awful that one who be- 
 lieves himself to be in immediate communication with him is 
 overawed and oppressed by his greatness. Dr. Bellows says that 
 God's creatures are " scorched and shriveled in the glory of his 
 presence." 1 Especially is this the effect in the consciousness of 
 sin against him. " The consciousness of sin is in itself not enno- 
 bling, but the contrary. It is the consciousness of failure, of un- 
 worthiness, of ill-desert. It compels the substitution of self-loath- 
 ing and self-condemnation for self-respect. It is the consciousness 
 of having no claim to the approval of either God or man. It de- 
 presses with fear ; it crushes in despair. It makes life a dread of 
 the future, a despair of the present, a lament for the past. The 
 whole consciousness becomes concentrated in the one daily and 
 doleful cry : ' We are all poor creatures.' All religions necessarily 
 intensify the sense of sin. They bring God and the unseen world 
 and retribution close to the soul. The first effect is depressing. 
 The presence of an unseen, mysterious, everywhere present being, 
 whom no cunning can deceive, no art elude, no speed escape and 
 no power resist, paralyzes the soul ; his burning inquisition foi 
 1 The Suspense of Faith, p. 19. 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 125 
 
 sin terrifies it." 1 Thus is realized the religion of fear which 
 darkens all the interests of this life with the terrors of the life to 
 come. What is man in the presence of God ? What is time in 
 comparison with eternity ? What all the interests of this shift- 
 ing scene compared with the tremendous realities of the unseen, 
 which are forever ? " Law supreme, universal, broken by all, 
 penalty terrible and inevitable, hang glooming and threatening 
 over the world. Beneath their shadow pleasure is an imperti- 
 nence, the interests of earthly life trivial, secular business an in- 
 trusion ; worldliness is driven out by ' other-world liness ;'" the 
 sunny cheerfulness of life is driven out by the intensity of re- 
 sponsibility and the dread of the divine wrath ; and the religion 
 expends its whole energy in sacrifice and penance to appease the 
 offended divinity. 
 
 If then under this gloom and terror the man supposes all his 
 sudden and powerful religious impulses to be inspired communica- 
 tions from God, the door is opened to the most ferocious fanati- 
 cism, in which zeal for God may demand the sacrifice of men. 
 For what is man in comparison with God, and what man's inter- 
 ests in comparison with the interests of God's kingdom ? The 
 man becomes intolerant of dissent, and if he has the power may 
 enforce conformity by putting dissenters to death or by force of 
 arms in war. And since God demands the most precious things, 
 why may not the devotee offer human sacrifices, in obedience to 
 an imagined command of God ? Why may not a father offer his 
 own child ? Why may not the fanatic believe himself inspired 
 to kill a person who, he believes, hinders God's plans ? Through 
 an identification of such fanaticism with true religion, Feuerbach 
 goes even so far as to insist that it is of the essence of religion to 
 sacrifice man to God: '- Thus is the moral sentiment subverted 
 in religion. Thus man sacrifices man to God. The bloody hu- 
 man sacrifice is in fact only a rude, material expression of the in- 
 most secret of religion." 2 
 
 Therefore the truth that man receives revelation from God and 
 knows him through it in experience, and that the beliefs thus 
 arising are apprehended, tested and verified, are defined and 
 systemized in thought, must be distinguished from the mysticism 
 which rests solely on the feelings as the inspiration of the Al- 
 mighty, and which regards these feelings as the more certainly 
 
 1 The Kingdom of Christ on Earth, by Prof. Samuel Harris, pp. 49, 50, 
 173, 174. 
 
 2 Wesen des Christenthums, chap, xxvii. 
 
126 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 divine, the more they are inexplicable and unaccountable to the 
 reason. The beliefs founded in mysticism must always remain 
 shut up in the subjectivity of an individual, so that there may 
 be as many religions as there are persons. It reveals dangerous 
 practical tendencies, gives rise to various errors, to monstrous 
 misconceptions and perversions of religion, and to prevalent ob- 
 jections and disbelief on the part of many who mistake it for the 
 true representation of religion. Hegel truly says that if religion 
 and the belief in God are rooted in feeling only, no knowledge of 
 God is possible, and materialism or some form of atheism alone 
 can result. This is not peculiar to religion. In any sphere of 
 life, if a man follows the impulse of feeling and regards it as in- 
 fallible all the more because it is inexplicable and unaccountable 
 to his faculties of intelligence, the issue will be monstrous errors 
 of belief and still more monstrous errors of practice. But the 
 spontaneous religious beliefs are really rooted in the whole spir- 
 itual constitution of man, and are tested and verified as real 
 knowledge ; and thus the evil practical tendencies are arrested, 
 the misrepresentations corrected and the objections of unbelief 
 answered. The presence and revelation of God and communion 
 with him, instead of scorching and shriveling man, are seen to 
 disclose his real greatness ; they lift him to the life of love in 
 fellowship with God and realize in him all the highest possibil- 
 ities of his being. We need no longer sing : 
 
 " Great God how infinite art thou, 
 What worthless worms are we." 
 
 But we find in the greatness of God and our intimacy with him, 
 that we are not worthless worms, but participants in the divine. 
 We find that religion does not sacrifice men to God, but that in 
 it they " become partakers of the divine nature ; " that the only 
 sacrifice is the self-sacrificing love in which, trusting in God and 
 inspired and strengthened by him, they serve their fellow-men 
 and realize their own perfect development, culture and blessed- 
 ness in so doing. Even in the Middle Ages, after all which has 
 been said of the terrors and the depressing and oppressing in- 
 fluence of religion in those centuries, we find evidence of its 
 contrary effect, imperfectly as under prevailing errors it could 
 exert its full power. Mr. W. S. Lilly says : " Nothing is more 
 striking than the contrast between the peace and gladness which 
 breathe through the austerest mediaeval verse, and the deep un- 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 127 
 
 dertone of melancholy that pervades the strain of the most vo- 
 luptuous of the ancient poets." 1 
 
 2. The isolation of the ideal or intellectual element in the 
 knowledge of God from the experiential and the historical leads 
 to dogmatism and ultimately issues in rationalism. 
 
 Systematic theology is a product of the legitimate action of the 
 intellect, in the light of reason, concentrating its thought on God 
 and his relations to men in whatever way revealed, and thus at- 
 taining, as far as possible, a definite, verified and systematic 
 knowledge of him. But when once these doctrines have been 
 formulated and declared, the tendency is to treat them more and 
 more as dogmas to be received on authority ; and thus the intel- 
 lectual element begins to usurp predominance and to isolate it- 
 self from the revelation of God and from the witness of his Spirit 
 known in the experience of the individual and the history of 
 man. 
 
 The legitimate issue of dogmatism is rationalism. Rationalism 
 in theology passes through successive stages and appears in vari- 
 ous forms. But in all its phases it is essentially the doctrine that 
 human reason is of itself sufficient to elicit all religious truth and 
 thereby to quicken and direct the religious life. While mysticism 
 rests on the feelings and restricts itself within the spontaneous 
 belief arising in experience, rationalism, at the opposite extreme, 
 would evolve all religious knowledge from pure thought and, 
 equally one-sided, makes the intellectual or ideal element the 
 whole. In its earlier forms in Germany, it explained away the 
 miraculous in the Christian Scriptures, but retained the historical. 
 In its later stages it came to regard the historical itself only as a 
 vehicle for moral and religious instruction, and its truth or false- 
 hood as a matter of indifference, if only the speculative truths 
 and the moral precepts and motives, which the narrative con- 
 veyed, were secured. Strauss wrote his first Life of Jesus to 
 show that the truths taught in the story of his life will lose noth- 
 ing of their value, though the story itself should be found a myth 
 without historical truth. " This is the key to the whole of Chris- 
 tolocry, that, as subject of the predicate which the church assigns 
 to Christ, we place instead of an individual, an idea ; but an idea 
 which has an existence in reality, not in the mind only, like that 
 of Kant. . . . And is not the idea of the unity of the divine and 
 human natures a real one in a far higher sense, when I regard 
 
 1 Supernaturalism Mediseval and Classical, Nineteenth Century, July, 
 1883. 
 
128 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the whole race of mankind as its realization, than when I single 
 out one man as its realization ? " 1 The result is that to the ra- 
 tionalist, the Bible is no longer the revelation of the God of love ; 
 it is only the mythical and legendary remains of an ancient liter- 
 ature, in which are some true principles and some fine senti- 
 ments, " rari nantes in gurgite vasto." As the process goes on, 
 the intellectual or ideal element comes to occupy the whole 
 ground ; philosophy takes the place of theology ; and in the phi- 
 losophy, because it is an attempt to solve the problem of the uni- 
 verse solely by subjective thought, mental abstractions become 
 the objects of attention instead of concrete realities ; thought is 
 set forth as the ultimate reality of the universe ; God is resolved 
 into pure being, or pure activity, or the order of the world, iden- 
 tical with nothing or the zero of thought ; and the evolution of 
 the universe is identified with a process of logic. 
 
 This tendency in theology to isolate the ideal or intellectual 
 from the experiential and the historical, this transition through 
 dogmatism to rationalism, is exemplified in the history of Protest- 
 antism. 
 
 In the second period of this history, theological thought was 
 tending away from the concrete to the abstract ; from the vivid 
 conception of the living God known in experience as present and 
 energizing among men to the study of doctrine about God ; from 
 the conception of inspiration as imparting spiritual insight and 
 power to the conception of it as securing verbal accuracy ; from 
 the conception of the presence and witness of the Spirit, which 
 pervaded and dominated the thinking of the Reformers, to the 
 conception of the letter of the Scriptures as being itself the wit- 
 ness of the Spirit, because inspired by the Spirit, and, as the 
 Formula Consensus Helvetica, the younger Buxtorf and others 
 taught, even to the Hebrew vowel-points. 2 The thinking and 
 activity of the church became concentrated on the formulating 
 and systemizing of doctrine and promulgating creeds ; the intel- 
 lectual or ideal was isolated from the experiential and historical ; 
 and the church was broken into sects on formulas of doctrine. 
 Thus was verified anew the maxim of Paul : u The letter killeth, 
 but the Spirit giveth life." Even now we are not free from the 
 
 1 Life of Jesus, Trans, by M. Evans, vol. ii. p. 895. 
 
 2 The Formula Consensus Helvetica declared that the Old Testament was 
 " inspired by God both as to its consonants and as to its vowels or points, or 
 at least as to the power (or significance) of the points ; and both as to the mat- 
 ter and as to the words." 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 129 
 
 results of this tendency. In a paper on u The Alleged Progress 
 in Theology " read before an association of ministers in Massa- 
 chusetts in 1883, and afterwards published, the author says : 
 " Any statement of theological doctrines which abandons or mod- 
 ifies the usual terminology, would be a virtual abandonment or 
 modification of the doctrines themselves. Probably of no science, 
 excepting mathematics, is it as true that words are things, as 
 of theology." The movement of theological thought through 
 " words " to " things " is a healthy movement, even though, when 
 we reach the " things," we may sometimes find it necessary to 
 change the " words." 
 
 This lapse into dogmatism prepared the way for rationalism. 
 Lessing taught that all the truths revealed in the Bible would 
 eventually have been discovered by man himself, in the progress 
 of human thought, if he had been allowed time enough. By 
 giving the revelation God had helped him and accelerated his 
 progress in discovering truth. Such teaching had become possi- 
 ble because theologians had substituted truth and doctrine, which 
 man might discover by thinking, for the living God and histor- 
 ical redemption. It would have been impossible if the church 
 had held fast the knowledge of the living God revealing himself 
 in historical action in nature and among men, and especially in 
 his historical action in Christ redeeming men from sin, and 
 through till the courses of history organizing out of the world the 
 kingdom of righteousness and good-will and the reign of love, 
 under the lordship of Christ and by the power of the Spirit. 
 By thinking, men may ascertain, define and systcmize truth ; 
 but thinking cannot give the historical action of God. Thus, 
 through dogmatism, came in upon Germany the rationalism 
 under which, as a long and withering drought, the spiritual life 
 of theological thought was dried away. 
 
 3. The isolation of the historical element from the experiential 
 and from all recognition of the witness of the Spirit issues in the 
 study of the religions and the sacred books of mankind merely 
 as a branch of anthropology. The scholarly study of the Bible 
 thus isolated becomes merely an archaeological investigation and a 
 criticism of ancient documents. In fact, not infrequently this non- 
 religious study of the Bible starts with the assumption that the 
 miraculous is impossible and that all in the Bible which purports 
 to be a record of a supernatural revelation of God is mythical. 
 Thus by a gratuitous assumption the divine element is arbitrarily 
 ruled out of the Bible. Nothing then remains but an ancient 
 
130 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 literature and history, and the only interest in the study of it is 
 critical, archseological and historical. Then the living water has 
 dried away. Instead of a springing fountain we have only a 
 well-curb and a bucket ; instead of the river of life only the dry 
 bed of a once running stream ; and critical thought busies itself 
 in laboriously tracing its dry and stony course. To such a stu- 
 dent the admonition of Faust to his scholar is pertinent: " Is 
 parchment the holy well, a drink from which allays thy thirst 
 forever? Thou hast not gained the cordial if it gushes not from 
 thy own soul.'' Equally pertinent are the words of the younger 
 of the Piccolomini in Schiller : 
 
 '* The oracle within him, that which lives, 
 He must consult and question not dead books, 
 Not ordinances, not mold-rotted papers." 
 
 Important as scholarly criticism and interpretation of the Bible 
 are, they need not be separated from the experiential and 
 rational elements in the knowledge of God, and the witness of 
 God's Spirit within the soul. Devout scholarship may be as 
 scholarly as the undevout. And there is something in the Bible 
 which mere scholarship, however keen and critical, cannot see. 
 If the student feels his spiritual needs, if his spiritual sensibili- 
 ties are awakened and his spiritual powers active, God will find 
 him and he will find God in the study of the Bible. If it is only 
 critical and archaeological interest which moves him, criticism 
 and archaeology will be all which he will find. 
 
 It must be further noticed that only specialists, whether devout 
 or undevout, are learned enough for this critical and archaeolog- 
 ical investigation. And if this alone is to find all there is in 
 the Bible, then it is not the book for all the people, to be read 
 and interpreted by their private judgment; but an authority is 
 set up to declare its meaning. It is only as encyclicals are issued 
 from some specialist in a university that men can know what to 
 believe. M. Bersier, in one of his sermons, speaks of this result 
 in France : " Many young men believe that they have said all 
 when they appeal to criticism. They say, 'Criticism has decided,' 
 with the same confiding and tranquil tone with which others say, 
 4 The Church has decided.' They think they are exercising their 
 private judgment at the very moment when they are swearing in 
 verba magistri, on the faith which they have in him." 
 
 Other evils of isolated historical study and criticism are men- 
 tioned by Reuss ; and the lapse of years since he wrote has added 
 new exemplifications. "As the method became more and more 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 131 
 
 complicated and the estimate of arguments more and more de- 
 pendent on the subjective views of the critics, the more impos- 
 sible was agreement. The rampant undergrowth of unfruitful 
 hypotheses overspread and concealed the solid ground of history,, 
 and must be laboriously cleared away again ; skepticism spread r 
 acuteness and abuse of criticism bordered close on each other 
 and caused the very principles of the latter to be suspected ; and 
 it was often true on both sides in such investigations that it was 
 not so much the historical questions themselves as the theological 
 ones lying behind them which assured to the controversy its 
 importance and at the same time its endlessness." 1 
 
 On the other hand, there is apparent a tendency to isolate the 
 historical revelation from rational thought. It is common for 
 ministers to say that they hold to the facts of Christianity, but 
 not to any doctrine or philosophy which results from human 
 thought in defining, interpreting and vindicating them, or in draw- 
 ing inferences from them. They would have the Biblical revela- 
 tion only, without theology. But this is forbidding men to think 
 on religious subjects or to use their rational faculties in ascertain- 
 ing what God has revealed of himself in the Bible. It also implies 
 a contradiction between the facts of Christianity, and the reason 
 of man and all his thinking in accordance with the principles of 
 reason. It is the admission that Christianity will not bear the 
 scrutiny of human reason, thought and scholarship, not even 
 when these are exercised on it by the most devout and godly 
 men ; and that its facts and teachings cannot be comprehended 
 by human thought in any intelligible and reasonable system. 
 Yet when these persons declare what they believe to be the reve- 
 lation of the Bible respecting God in any particular, in any words 
 other than the very words of the Bible, they are giving us a 
 theology of their own. And they are often willing to get disci- 
 ples who will follow their isolated teachings. Thus the question 
 is not between religion without a theology and religion with it. 
 It is the question between religion with a crude, narrow or erro- 
 neous theology, and religion with a theology drawn from the Bi- 
 ble with prayerful, scholarly, earnest and rational thought. The 
 issue of this antagonism to Christian intelligence may be in irre- 
 ligion and unbelief ; in ignorant, fanciful or superstitious inter- 
 pretations 2 and applications of the Scriptures ; or in what the 
 
 1 History of the New Testament, vol. ii. pp. 357, 358, Trans. 
 
 2 It is reported that in a Sunday-school in England, the lesson for the day 
 mentioned that David rose from his bed and walked on the roof of his hous**. 
 
132 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Bishop of Norwich called " maudlin sentimentalism with its mis- 
 erable disparagement of any definite doctrine, a nerveless religion 
 without the sinew and bone of doctrine." Thus it opens the 
 way to a false religion of hysterical fanaticism. 
 
 4. It follows from what has been said that the true knowledge 
 of God can be attained only in the synthesis of the experiential, 
 the historical and the rational or ideal. 
 
 Mysticism is true so far as it insists on the life of immediate 
 communion with God and recognizes God's revelation of himself 
 by his action within the conscious experience of the man. Its 
 error is that it limits the religion to the feelings instead of rec- 
 ognizing it as rooted in the entire spiritual constitution of man, 
 and so shuts up the religious consciousness within this emotional 
 experience, without turning on it the light of intelligence and 
 reason. But the Christian Scriptures give no warrant for this 
 narrowness.. They require that the service which we render to 
 God should be a " reasonable service," that is, a service approved, 
 guided and purified by reason. Their requirement is, " Be ready 
 always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason 
 concerning the hope that is in you." Even in prophets they for- 
 bid the man tic fury of a heathen inspiration, and teach that " the 
 spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets," and that in 
 receiving alleged divine communications we must " believe not 
 every spirit, but prove the spirits whether they are from God," 
 and this for the significant reason that " God is not a God of con- 
 fusion." l It is preposterous to suppose that the Spirit of God 
 can reveal himself only through the feelings and makes no use of 
 -man's reason and common sense, his powers of reflective thought 
 and his already acquired knowledge. And feeling cannot be the 
 mltimate test of truth ; for in the light of reason we must always 
 first judge of the feelings themselves whether they are reasonable 
 or unreasonable, right or wrong. But mysticism turns away 
 from all such proving and testing in intelligence as deadening to 
 the power and life of religion. Thus it is, as Professor Pfleiderer 
 calls it, "a self -forgetting and world - forgetting God-intoxica- 
 
 A boy asked how he could walk on the roof without slipping off . The teacher 
 replied sternly, "You must not cavil at the word of God." At the close of 
 the school, as this teacher was leaving the room, another teacher who had 
 overheard the remark took him by the arm and said, " Brother, you did not 
 answer that boy right. You should have said to him, With man it is impos- 
 sible ; but with God all things are possible." 
 
 1 Rom. xii. 1; I. Pet. iii. 15; I. John iv. 1 ; I. Cor. xiv. 32, 33. 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 133 
 
 tion ; " and is, as compared with the true knowledge of God, but 
 a folded bud, compared with the blossom unfolded and rich in 
 color and fragrance. 1 The result is that mysticism, while above 
 all claiming revelation, loses hold of the divine reality revealed 
 and retains in its grasp only a subjective and empty conscious- 
 ness, a mere feeling, the object of which is unknown. Thus it 
 accepts for Christianity the very position into which skepticism 
 is trying to crowd it ; for skepticism admits that man is constitu- 
 tionally endowed with religious susceptibilities, but it insists that 
 the object of these sensibilities is a creation of the fancy and can- 
 not be an object of knowledge. 
 
 Rational thinking is also essential to the true and largest 
 knowledge of God. But unchecked and unsubstantiated by re- 
 ligious experience and historical revelation, it becomes rational- 
 ism, runs wild in speculation and misses the true knowledge of 
 God. 
 
 The true and largest knowledge of God is possible only in 
 the synthesis of the experiential, the historical and the ideal or 
 rational. These must test, correct and restrain, and at the same 
 time clarify, verify and supplement each other, and thus bring 
 their several results into unity and give the most correct and 
 comprehensive knowledge of God. The young student may chafe 
 under these restraints and imagine that they repress the freedom,, 
 independence and range of his thinking. But freedom is safe, 
 healthy and fruitful only as it is regulated by law. The seeming 
 restraint within which his thought is circumscribed is essential 
 to its true freedom and its highest power. It is fabled that the 
 beer working in a bottle thought if it could escape the confine- 
 ment it would fill the world. But when it burst the confining 
 glass, it was as water spilled on the ground. 
 
 5. The historical revelation is the medium through which the 
 synthesis of the three is to be attained. The Bible must be held 
 in solution in theological thought and be vital in spiritual life. 
 Religious experience and theological thought both centre in the 
 living Christ. In him is life ; in him also are hid all the treas- 
 ures of wisdom and knowledge. In the sphere of religious 
 thought and life, he is the centre in which all the radii meet and 
 from which they all issue. 
 
 Talleyrand, it is said, once received a deputation of theo-phi- 
 lanthropists, who consulted him as to the best way of introducing 
 their proposed new religion. After hearing them he said, Gen- 
 1 Religionsphilosophie, p. 307. 
 
134 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tlemen, I refer you to an historical fact which may give you some 
 light as to the best way to establish a new religion in the world. 
 When Jesus Christ undertook to establish a new religion, he 
 was crucified, he lay in the grave three days, he arose again and 
 ascended into heaven. If you would succeed, I advise you to do 
 the same. There is a profound significance in this story. God 
 cannot be felt out by feeling alone, nor thought out by thinking 
 alone. Before all religious feeling and thought God must in 
 some way present himself in the consciousness of the individual 
 and in the history of man, as the object of feeling and thought. 
 The world cannot be renovated nor its spiritual needs satisfied 
 by the meditations of quietism nor the dreams and ecstasies of 
 mysticism, nor by the speculations of thought, nor by culture and 
 " sweet reasonableness," nor by morality without religion, nor by 
 philanthropy with no relation to God and no root in the super- 
 natural ; but only by the living God revealing himself by his 
 own action in the lives of individuals and the history of man, 
 redeeming men from sin and establishing his kingdom of right- 
 eousness and good-will. 
 
 6. To attain this synthesis is the great problem of all religious 
 thinking. 
 
 In every living organism we find the unity of differences and 
 seeming incompatibilities realized practically in the life. It is 
 the problem of science to apprehend these diversities, to set forth 
 in thought the unity of the manifold thus realized in life, and to 
 discover and declare its principle and law. Religion is the life of 
 the spirit in which differences and seeming incompatibilities ap- 
 pear in unity. It is the business of theology to apprehend and 
 set forth in a unity of thought, the diversified truths and appli- 
 cations of truth already practically in unity in the religious ex- 
 perience and' life. Its great problem is to translate experience 
 into thought, to set forth spontaneous beliefs in intellectual forms, 
 to interpret and vindicate them to the reason, to show their place 
 and significance in the constitution and history of man, and thus 
 to make it evident that the synthesis practically experienced in 
 the religious life is apprehended and vindicated in intelligence ; 
 it is to show that the God whom the Christian heart worships is 
 the God whose real existence reason demands as necessary to any 
 reasonable explanation of the constitution and history of man, of 
 the constitution and order of the universe, and of its own right 
 to believe itself rational ; it is to find the synthesis of the abso- 
 lute being, that philosophy must recognize in order to be philoso- 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 135 
 
 phy, with the eternal Spirit, perfect in wisdom and love, that re- 
 ligion recognizes as the object of its trust and service. 
 
 In the necessity of this synthesis the process of knowing the 
 spiritual and the supernatural is the same with that of know- 
 ing the physical. The knowledge of the physical world begins, 
 like that of the spiritual, in intuitions which cannot be proved 
 but are known only in their own self-evidence. A scientist can 
 no more prove that he has real knowledge of physical realities 
 through sense-perception than a Christian can prove that he has 
 knowledge of spiritual reality through self-consciousness, or of 
 God through experience. Moreover in the primitive conscious- 
 ness of the scientist, as of every other man, factual realities and 
 rational principles lie together unformulated and undiscriminated 
 as an unresolved nebula. He can do nothing whatever to prove 
 that his perceptions give him real knowledge. All which he can 
 do is to apprehend what the perceived reality is, to distinguish 
 the things which are presented nebulously before him, and to 
 note their reciprocal relations ; he can verify his perceptions by 
 repeated observations, and by comparing them with the observa- 
 tions of others and with the highest results of human investiga- 
 tion of the matter under consideration ; he can bring all this 
 into the light of reason and under its regulating principles can 
 draw inferences and thus enlarge his knowledge. By these pro- 
 cesses he brings the presented realities definitely before his mind, 
 he finds their differences and relations, their harmony with one 
 another and with all the principles of reason and all the legiti- 
 mate conclusions of reasoning ; he brings it all into harmony with 
 the whole scientific system. In this harmony and consistency his 
 mind moves up and down through the whole sphere of his knowl- 
 edge of the matter in hand and of its relations to all that is 
 known, finding no contradiction or inconsistency of things with 
 each other nor with the results of his own mental processes ; then 
 lie rests in undoubting conviction of their reality. Thus his con- 
 tinued experience and thinking are a continued verification of his 
 knowledge ; without wavering he trusts to it the conduct of his 
 life. He finds errors which he must correct and deficiencies of 
 knowledge to be supplied ; but the great mass of his knowledge 
 is confirmed by his experience every day so long as he lives. In 
 like manner while the knowledge of mankind is cleared of errors 
 and enlarged from generation to generation, the great mass of it 
 persists and is confirmed by the experience of the race through 
 all the ages. 
 
136 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The same is true of man's knowledge of the spiritual, of the 
 supernatural and of God. These realities reveal themselves in his 
 consciousness in feelings, in moral dut} T , in the practical determi- 
 nations of the will in the conduct of life, as well as in his intel- 
 lectual action. He examines them in the light of reason and ap- 
 plies to them its universal and necessary principles. Step by step 
 he apprehends their significance, distinguishes them from physical 
 realities and finds their unity in a moral and spiritual system, the 
 recognition of which is necessary to a scientific knowledge of the 
 system of nature. Thus by continued experience of these spir- 
 itual realities and continued thinking on them, the whole progress 
 of his knowledge is a continued confirmation of his belief in the 
 spiritual world, which more and more opens itself to his vision as 
 the deepest reality of the universe. Peacefully and without a 
 doubt he rests the conduct and interests of his life on the truth 
 of this belief. As in physical knowledge, he corrects errors and 
 supplies deficiencies ; but the great facts of the existence of a 
 divinity and a supernatural world, of moral law and retribution, 
 of the need of the divine favor and the necessity of worship per- 
 sist unchanged. 
 
 It follows that the common objections to theological thinking 
 are unreasonable and invalid. F. W. Robertson gives the fol- 
 lowing as a principle on which he had always taught : " Spiritual 
 truth is discerned by the spirit instead of intellectually in prop- 
 ositions ; and therefore truth should be taught suggestively, not 
 dogmatically." If what I have said is true this principle is not 
 correct. It may as properly be said : " Physical realities are 
 known in sense-perception and not intellectually in propositions ; 
 therefore the facts respecting them should be taught suggestively 
 and not scientifically." It is true that spiritual reality is known 
 in spiritual experience ; but it must also be known intellectually ; 
 just as physical realities are known by sense-perception, and also 
 are known intellectually. And in each case it is incumbent on 
 rational beings to attain the utmost possible precision and com- 
 pleteness of knowledge. So Bishop Butler says : " Reason is the 
 only faculty we have wherewith to judge of any thing, even Rev- 
 elation itself." 1 And Mr. Wace says : " We advance in faith 
 only so far as reason and conscience are allowed to accompany us, 
 but no further. Neither the prophets of the Old Testament, nor 
 our Lord, nor his apostles ask us for one moment to silence our 
 1 Analogy, part ii. chap. iii. 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 137 
 
 reason or our conscience. . . . Faith, like all other instincts of 
 our nature, requires to be checked by the exercise of reason." 1 
 
 And it is human reason, seeking and following the guidance of 
 God's Spirit, by which this synthesis must be made. By virtue 
 of his rationality man is a personal being and knows himself part 
 and participant of the rational and spiritual system. The realm 
 of spiritual and supernatural reality is not something foreign to 
 a man ; something which happens sometimes to glance and strike 
 on him and so arrests his curious attention. His knowledge of 
 it is not accidental and contingent as of a foreign realm, so that 
 it is not necessary for him to know it in order to realize his high- 
 est manhood, any" more than it is to visit Spitsbergen or Nova 
 Zembla. On the contrary his knowledge of it is the spontaneous 
 issue of his consciousness of himself, and is verified, corrected and 
 enlarged by his experience in doing the legitimate work of his 
 life and realizing the true development and perfection of his being. 
 
 7. The historical course of man's religious experience and the- 
 ological thought has been a gradual working out of this synthesis. 
 
 History discloses three stages in the progress of it. The first 
 is the stage of undefined religious experience and spontaneous be- 
 lief. The second is the stage of reflective thought, in which man 
 tests, and tries to verify, his religious belief. This sometimes 
 issues in doubt and skepticism. And through the tendency to the 
 isolation of the intellectual element, already considered, it may 
 lead to the entire suppression of belief in a God. This issue, 
 however, is abnormal and, as history shows, exceptional. It is a 
 regress and not a progress. The legitimate and reasonable issue, 
 which history shows to have been in fact the common one, is the 
 state of confirmed belief in God and purified and amplified knowl- 
 edge of him. This is the third 'stage in the progress of human 
 thought, in which man has tested and verified his religious expe- 
 rience and his spontaneous religious belief by reflective thought, 
 and has found the synthesis of the experiential, the historical 
 and the rational. Thus he has found religion to be a reasonable 
 service and his spontaneous religious beliefs are corrected, con- 
 firmed and enlarged into well considered knowledge. In the 
 childhood of the race, man projects outward from himself the 
 spiritual realities which he finds within, and peoples nature with 
 spiritual beings like himself. But these are no mere fictions of 
 the fancy. By a necessity of his rational constitution he must 
 know all phenomena as phenomena of a being, qualities as quali- 
 1 Wace, Bamp. Lect. 1879, pp. 207, 251. 
 
138 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ties of a substance, actions as actions of an agent, and changes as 
 effects of a cause. In his religious experience he finds himself 
 the subject of impressions which he cannot account for as caused 
 by himself or by natural objects or by other men. He must re- 
 fer them to some agent, and he refers them to an agent which 
 is neither a natural object nor a man, and yet is endowed with 
 invisible powers of thought, will and feeling like his own ; in 
 other words, to a divinity. In the second stage man has ad- 
 vanced in civilization and culture ; yet he is still in a state of 
 partial development, and speculation is still one-sided and imma- 
 ture. Then he may persuade himself that the realm of the spir- 
 itual and the supernatural is only an unreal figment of his own 
 brain, and that objects of sense are the only realities. He thus 
 puts nature in contradiction to reason, with a logical issue, which 
 he does not at once perceive, that a scientific knowledge of nature 
 is itself made impossible. In the third stage, he brings the primi- 
 tive experience and beliefs of the first stage into comparison with 
 the historical revelations of God and under the test and verifica- 
 tion of reflective thought. Thus he attains the synthesis of the 
 experiential, the historical and the intellectual, and returns to 
 the religious life with a confirmed belief in God, for which he can 
 now give a reason to every one who asks him. And the individ- 
 ual in his own private history passes through these same three 
 stages through which mankind passes in its history. He passes 
 from the simple experience and the unquestioning and spontane- 
 ous belief of childhood to the thoughtful scrutiny of the mature 
 man, often at the present day encountering doubts and difficulties 
 and sometimes making shipwreck of his faith ; but oftener pass- 
 ing through the investigation to an intelligent and confirmed be- 
 lief. In this third stage reason becomes distinctly conscious of 
 its supremacy and asserts it. Then the man recognizes himself 
 as participant in the realms both of the sensible. and the spiritual, 
 both of nature and the supernatural ; he finds the contradiction 
 between nature and spirit dissolved ; he sees nature in the bosom 
 of spirit, spirit manifesting itself in nature, and God in and over 
 all; he sees the physical system in harmony with the spiritual, 
 both expressing the thought and realizing the ends of the abso- 
 lute and supreme reason ; and he sees himself an agent and par- 
 ticipant in both under the government of God. Thus he returns 
 to the religious life now justified to the reason in the complete 
 synthesis of the experiential, the historical and the rational. 1 
 
 1 "Leben gab ihr die Fabel. die Schule hat sie entseelet, 
 
 Schaffendes Leben auf's Neu' giebt die Vernunft ihr zuriick." 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 139 
 
 And this historical course of man's religious belief and thought 
 is entirely analogous to that of physical science. The fancies 
 and fables of early cosmogonies belong to the science of their 
 time quite as much as to the religion. That all things came 
 from water or from fire, that the flat earth is surrounded by a 
 river of fire, that the sun. toils through the foundations of the 
 earth every night, that there cannot be antipodes, these are 
 fancies and fables of primitive science quite as much as of 
 primitive religion. And from these beginnings science has 
 floundered on through as many errors and as many fantastic 
 conceptions as have appeared in the history of religion. Let any 
 one read, for example, the medical prescriptions used in England 
 two hundred years ago. 
 
 8. The necessity of this synthesis of the experiential and his- 
 torical with the intellectual or rational and its influence in the 
 history of religion is the key to the current movement of thought 
 among Christian theists. 
 
 The lapse of Protestantism into dogmatism and rationalism 
 was a perversion of Protestantism, not its legitimate develop- 
 ment. It has often been said that Protestantism is essentially 
 rationalistic ; that rationalism is its legitimate issue ; that there 
 are but two roads now open to religious thought, of which one 
 leads to Rome, the other to complete rationalism. One of the 
 latest utterances of this kind is by Mr. Edwin D. Meade, in his 
 volume on Martin Luther : u Luther stands for rationalism. He 
 stands also for Intellectualism in religion. . . . Coming into the 
 science of our time with the same spirit with which he came 
 into the science of four centuries ago, Martin Luther would have 
 been, not Joseph Cook, nor Moody and Sankey, but Theodore 
 Parker." l 
 
 Protestantism powerfully asserted the rational element in reli- 
 gion and stimulated theological thought to intense action. But 
 the emphasis of the assertion was merely incidental to the reac- 
 tion against the suppression of the rights of the intellect under 
 
 1 It is often said also that the Protestant Reformation carried in its bosom 
 the political revolution. Certainly it waked men up to thought ; and in its 
 great doctrine of justification by faith it set forth the dignity and worth of a 
 man in the raw material of his manhood, admitted without human mediation 
 into the presence of God and accepted on condition of his own personal trust 
 in the God of grace ; and thus it set forth the sacredness of his rights. But in 
 its essence it was fitted to effect a peaceful progress in securing human rights. 
 Truth and love are not responsible for the convulsions of society occasioned 
 by the resistance of oppressors to their just and benignant influence. 
 
i40 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the authority of the hierarchy. Protestantism was equally a 
 revival of spiritual life, and an assertion of the personal religious; 
 experience and of the presence and influence of the Holy Spirit, 
 in distinction from the outwardness and formality of ecclesias- 
 ticism. The experiential, the historical and the intellectual or 
 rational were all powerful in the movement. Luther himself was 
 its representative in the combination in his character of spiritual 
 experience, reverence for the historical revelation in the Scrip- 
 tures, and intellectual freedom and daring, in connection with 
 the distinctively human characteristics of a true manhood in 
 contrast with the ghostliness and ghastliness of mediseval sanc- 
 tity. That Protestantism fell into dogmatism and rationalism 
 was not due to the intellectualism of the movement, but to the 
 imperfection and limitation of man, always swinging to one side. 
 On the other hand, Protestantism, in an equally one-sided way, 
 has sometimes issued in pietism, mysticism and even fanaticism, 
 showing that it was originally a revival of experiential religion 
 as well as the assertion of freedom of thought. 
 
 Christian thinking is now moving away from the abstract 
 to the concrete and realistic, from dogmatism and rationalism 
 to historical and spiritual conceptions of God and redemption, 
 through thought to life. This movement did not begin in our 
 day, but can be traced through several generations. The decline 
 of spiritual faith and life in Great Britain and America, deplored 
 in the writings of Bishop Butler and President Edwards, was a 
 result of the arid dogmatism to which I have referred. 1 Another 
 result of it was the English Deism. To the deist, Robert Boyle's 
 conception of the universe as a clock was all-sufficient ; God was 
 recognized as existing, but was conceived as a mechanician who 
 had made the clock and set it going, but remained outside of it, 
 having little to do with it except to watch its movement. Even 
 those who attempted to defend Christianity relied almost exclu- 
 sively on the external evidence of miracles ; if they appealed to 
 the Internal Evidences, the one argument was that of Soame 
 Jenyns, 2 that Christ taught a system of ethics original with him 
 and superior to any ever taught before an argument blown 
 away by the present conviction of scholars that the principles 
 of morality recognized by all nations are essentially the same. 
 After the beginning of this century Dugald Stewart and others 
 were discussing whether God's action in the universe would not 
 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, p. 341. 
 
 2 View of the Internal Evidences of the Christian Religion. 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 141 
 
 prove the imperfection of his workmanship, just as it would 
 prove the imperfection of a clock, if its maker were obliged to 
 stand by and keep it going with his fingers. 1 
 
 The reaction from this meagreness of spiritual thought and 
 life appeared in America in the revivals of religion in the life- 
 time of President Edwards, and in Great Britain in the Wes- 
 leyan movement, and in the evangelical movement in the estab- 
 lished church. It is now powerful in both countries in every 
 sphere of religious thought and activit}% stirring many minds 
 with discontent, who have never defined to themselves what is 
 the ground of their restlessness nor what is necessary in order to 
 remove it. In Germany, before rationalism had fully developed 
 itself, there was a reaction against dead dogmatism in Francke, 
 Spener and the so-called Pietism. This, however, did not avail 
 to stop the drift of thought into rationalism. After rationalism 
 had gained its sway over German theology, the first reaction 
 effective to check it was with Schleiermacher. He received from 
 his early training among the Moravians a spiritual influence 
 which followed him throughout his life. However defective we 
 find his system of Christian belief to be, in him theology at least 
 oriented itself ; it found its East ; it turned its face towards the 
 sunrising, and ever since has been advancing with the light of 
 the Sun of Righteousness on its brow. 
 
 Perhaps the latest distinctly marked epoch in this movement 
 was the publication of Strauss's Life of Jesus. In this, ration- 
 alism seemed to reach its highest achievement. It was an ap- 
 plication of the Hegelian philosophy to the life of Jesus ; it 
 claimed to demonstrate that after we have learned the truth or 
 thought expressed in the story of his life, the story itself is of no 
 value and its historical truth or falsehood a matter of indiffer- 
 ence ; it applied to the Gospels a criticism keen, learned and de- 
 structive, and commonly acknowledged at the time to be the 
 most formidable to which they had ever been subjected. It 
 caused a sort of consternation in the Christian world. But soon 
 after, Neander published his Life of Jesus Christ as a reply to 
 Strauss. And since then has followed that series of Lives of 
 Christ which have been appearing every year until now, and 
 which have been widely circulated and eagerly read. This is 
 a striking evidence of the power which Christ still has over 
 the minds and hearts of men. The question whether Homer 
 ever existed has been in dispute, but it would be impossible to 
 1 D. Stewart's Active and Moral Powers, bk. iii. chap. i. 
 
142 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 waken any popular interest in its discussion. Except Jesus, 
 there is no personage of antiquity who has such a hold on the 
 interests of men that so many biographies and investigations of 
 his life and work, popular and scholarly, could be written within 
 a single generation and be eagerly read and everywhere dis- 
 cussed. And this we owe to Strauss ; for before the publication 
 of his work, Lives of Christ were scarcely known. We are also 
 indebted to Strauss for more than this. He set out to show that 
 the historical narrative of the life of Jesus is of no account : 
 that the whole significance of his life is in the truth which it 
 expresses. Instead of accomplishing this he accomplished just 
 the contrary. He concentrated the thought of all Christendom 
 on the study of the story of Christ's life, on the study of Jesus 
 as an historical personage, and of his history, teaching and influ- 
 ence among men. And the result is that men are seeing, as. 
 they never saw before, that the great evidence of Christianity 
 is in Christ himself ; that his human life and influence can be 
 accounted for only by admitting that he is divine. They have 
 also come to understand more fully than ever before the profound 
 and far-reaching significance of the Incarnation, and the pecu- 
 liarity, richness and practical power of the revelation of God 
 made in the humiliation of the Logos and in the earthly life of 
 the Christ. 
 
 In our own country, when Strauss published his Life of Jesus, 
 the churches were just emerging from the Unitarian controversy. 
 They brought out of it with them the theological Christ, but 
 scarcely the historical Jesus. They believed that Christ was 
 God; they could marshal all the proof-texts which imply his 
 divinity. But he was to them scarcely anything but God. In 
 proving him to be divine they had obscured his humanity, in 
 and through which he revealed God and wrought the divine 
 work of redeeming man from sin. Stranss's Life of Jesus in its 
 results led the Christian people of America back to the human 
 life of Jesus and thus in him, as the exponent to us under human 
 limitations and conditions of what God is, they found God not 
 the less but the more. Professor Moyes Stuart, in lecturing to 
 his classes on messianic prophecy, used to select a few passages 
 from the Old Testament as messianic and give as the reason, 
 that they were quoted and applied to Christ in the New Tes- 
 tament ; with the result that many of the students thought 
 that the recognition of messianic prophecy was arbitrary and 
 forced, and were ready to doubt that the Old Testament fairly 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 143 
 
 interpreted contained any messianic prophecy. But the closer 
 study of the actual history of what God has done for man as 
 recorded in the Bible has led the scholarship of this day to 
 recognize the whole history of Israel as having a messianic out- 
 look and the messianic interpretation of prophecy as entirely un- 
 forced and natural, according to the strictest laws of interpre- 
 tation. Theology, occupied with doctrines and formulas, had 
 lost sight of the historical kingdom of Christ. But the study of 
 his life and teaching on earth brought it again to notice. At 
 that time the New England theology was about consummating 
 its work. It had rendered the great service of defining more 
 exactly the nature and limits of human responsibility and thus 
 opening the way for preaching the duty and obligation of repent- 
 ance. But necessarily in the very discussion of these questions, 
 it had occupied the mind with nice distinctions and definitions of 
 philosophy. Thus the mind was turned off from the richness of 
 thought and the power of motive in the life of Christ. The as- 
 sault of Strauss on the gospel histories forced Christian thinking 
 back upon these great themes. 
 
 Thus by turning the attention of all Christendom to the hu- 
 man life of Jesus, Strauss's assault on Christianity tended to cor- 
 rect the one-sidedness and deficiencies which had temporarily 
 enfeebled theology, and to turn Christian thinking back to the 
 historical Christ and to the treasures of wisdom and knowledge 
 hid in him. It summoned Christian theologians to recognize 
 anew the fact that the historical Christ is the true centre of all 
 theological thinking and systemizing, and Christian preachers to 
 renewed earnestness in saying with Paul : "I determined not to 
 know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." 
 Goethe once said that the devil was God's best gift to man. 
 Without endorsing this audacious assertion in its literal meaning, 
 we must be grateful to God, always 
 
 " From seeming evil still educing good 
 And better thence again, and better still, 
 In infinite progression," 
 
 for the evidence given, on occasion of this work of error, that 
 God still reveals himself to men and is still known by faithful 
 souls who seek him, and for the good which has come from the 
 reaction of Christian faith and scholarship against this assault. 
 
 Much is said nowadays of a " New movement in theology." 
 Such a movement is healthy, if it is toward the synthesis of the 
 
144 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 experiential, the historical and the rational in the knowledge of 
 God ; if it is from the abstract to the concrete, from the spec- 
 ulative to the historical, from the dead to the living, from stick- 
 ing in the letter to the strong grasp of reality ; if it is from dog- 
 matism and rationalism to the " God in Christ reconciling the 
 world unto himself," recognized as the centre of all theology, 
 known in experience so that men "acquaint themselves with him 
 and are at peace," preached by those who know him and who tes- 
 tify " what God has done for their souls; " if it is from an emo- 
 tional, one-sided, self-coddling " other-worldliness," to a recogni- 
 tion of Christ's kingdom advancing on earth, and the hearty con- 
 secration of ourselves, as " laborers together with God," to the 
 work of transforming human society into it. 
 
 It is necessary both to the clearest and fullest understanding 
 of truth and to its greatest practical power, that it be either 
 embodied or ensouled, that it be presented to our notice in some 
 thing, person or action. As George Eliot says : " Ideas are often 
 poor ghosts ; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them ; they pass 
 athwart us in their vapor and cannot make themselves felt. 
 But sometimes they are made flesh ; they breathe upon us with 
 warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they 
 look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing 
 tones; they are clothed in a living, human soul, with all its con- 
 flicts, its faith, its love. Then their presence is a power, then 
 they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with 
 gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame. ... It is one of 
 the secrets in the change of mental poise which has fitly been 
 named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor 
 earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with 
 a peculiar influence, subduing them to receptiveness." 1 It is in 
 adaptation to this trait of the human constitution that God has 
 embodied his revelation of himself in nature and ensouled it in 
 the lives of men ; that he has revealed himself in the great 
 courses of human history ; and especially that he has come to us 
 in the " one Mediator between God and men, himself man, Christ 
 Jesus." 
 
 So far then as the movement of theological thought is in this 
 direction, it is in the highest degree healthful, helpful and hope- 
 ful. But this is not a new movement. It is only a more ad- 
 vanced stage in the reaction from arid dogmatism and rational- 
 ism which in various forms has long been going on. We trace 
 1 Janet's Repentance, chap. xix. 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 145 
 
 in it the struggle to attain the synthesis of experience, history 
 and rational intelligence, in which alone the true and full-orbed 
 theology is possible. 
 
 Some have fled to Schleiermacher to escape from abstract 
 dogmas, philosophical speculations and destructive criticism, to 
 the experience of the presence and love of the living God. But 
 it is evident that his doctrine of the religious consciousness, what- 
 ever its truth and importance, is one-sided and defective, and 
 inadequate both for Christian truth and life. The movement in 
 this direction issues in pietism or mysticism, various types of 
 which are not uncommon among our religious people. 
 
 Others have fled from Schleiermacher to Hegel, because with 
 the former they seemed to find only a belief resting unstable on 
 the feelings and existing merely in the subjective consciousness 
 of the believer, while in the philosophy of the latter they have 
 hoped to find truth fixed and eternal, the Being that is absolute 
 and without change, and the reality and true significance of the 
 universe which all its changing phenomena reveal. Augustine 
 says: "The Christian claims as his Master's own possession every 
 fragment of truth, wherever it may be found." Christianity is 
 comprehensive of all spiritual truth. As the one absolute reli- 
 gion, it must be able to take up all spiritual truth and to accord 
 with all spiritual reality. The profound philosophy of Hegel 
 suggests truths, aspects of reality and lines of thought by which 
 our accepted theology may be broadened, deepened and enriched, 
 and the reasonableness of doctrines received on the authority of 
 revelation be found. I say suggests, for Hegel himself, beclouded 
 in his dialectics and his a priori methods, can scarcely be said 
 to have grasped and clearly enunciated the theistic and Christian 
 truths which his philosophy approaches and points to, but never 
 declares. It is legitimate for Christian theists to seek whatever 
 truth is suggested by it, and to use the same to support and 
 enrich the Christian faith. It must be said, however, of all the 
 recent writers who have looked to Hegelianism for help, that, 
 whatever of value they bring to Christian theology, they bring 
 it encompassed with the obscurity and the tenuous speculation 
 characteristic of the philosophy, and with forms of thought and 
 expression which easily lead to idealistic Pantheism and to the 
 mistaking of logical notions and processes for concrete beings and 
 their activities and relations. 
 
 In this country the rationalistic movement, where it has not 
 issued in the rejection even of theism, has found visible embodi- 
 
 10 
 
146 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ment in unitarianism. But even among those called evangelical, 
 in the ferment of theological thought rationalistic tendencies 
 come to light and rationalistic opinions are avowed, perhaps some- 
 times in unconsciousness of their distinctive character. In a re- 
 cently published book of an eminent and able evangelical author 
 we are told : " The exact facts of the gospels may escape us ; we 
 may easily cast on them endless doubts and raise with them end- 
 less difficulties. They are shrouded by the gathering mists of 
 centuries. Not so is it with the truths of the gospels. They 
 have lost nothing and have gained much by intervening years. 
 . . . No matter what we may establish about facts which have 
 now passed into the oblivion of nineteen centuries, we must still 
 ask, What are the controlling incentives of the present hour ? 
 No matter what we fail to prove concerning these facts, we may 
 still hold fast a spiritual faith, wholly defensible by virtue of the 
 living and potent principles present with us from that place and 
 that period which define the life of Christ." It is not easy to 
 distinguish this from the idea of Strauss in writing his first Life 
 of Jesus. The idea that the essential significance of Christ's 
 mission is in the truths and precepts which he taught, while the 
 facts of his personal history are a matter of indifference, is of the 
 essence of rationalism. The same appears in identifying religion 
 with " ethics lit up with emotion," as Matthew Arnold does and 
 in welcoming as a Christian fellow-worker, " the Agnostic who 
 wishes to do good," l as a clergyman of the Church of England 
 lias recently done ; for these offer us Christianity without Christ 
 and religion without God. Speculations like these show still 
 among us the old movement in theology from dogmatism on- 
 ward to rationalistic thought. They are lingering puffs from 
 the sand-storms of the great Sahara of rationalism, which the 
 church is leaving behind in its progress toward spiritual reality 
 and life. 
 
 It is evident, therefore, that whatever the movement of the- 
 ological thought may be, the isolation of experience in mysti- 
 cism, of historical study in unspiritual and arid criticism, and of 
 theological thought in dogmatism or in rationalism are all still 
 present in the religion and the theological thinking of the present 
 time. In speaking of the present movement in theology, men 
 commonly fail to discriminate between these, and group together 
 under that common name lines of religious life and thought which 
 are different and in opposite directions. The religion and the- 
 1 The Gospel of the Secular Life, by W. H. Fremantle, pp. 162, 163. 
 

 THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 147 
 
 ology of the time cannot be intelligently apprehended without 
 discriminating between these several directions of life and 
 thought. A navigator cannot determine his position by latitude 
 alone, but only by both latitude and longitude. So to determine 
 the position of theological thought, we must know it in reference 
 both to the experiential, the historical and the rational. The 
 direction of all healthy thinking is toward the synthesis of the 
 three. 
 
 This healthy direction to the synthesis of theological thought 
 with religious experience and historical revelation insures the 
 passage of the thought through the words to the realities signi- 
 fied, through the abstract to the concrete, through the intellect- 
 ual to the practical. Words and abstract ideas are necessary in 
 investigation. But true and effective thinking must pass through 
 the words and the abstract general notions to the concrete reali- 
 ties. And this is done just so far as we attain the synthesis of 
 theological thought with religious experience and historical rev- 
 elation. 
 
 There is nothing in these conclusions which disparages the- 
 ological investigation or discourages attempts to clarify, com- 
 plete and systemize our knowledge of God and of his relations 
 to us and the universe. It is true that religion has suffered from 
 over-definition in theology, in the effort to give an exact answer 
 to every question which can arise in all the finest and most com- 
 plicated ramifications of thought. It is true that on many points 
 which come into view in the study of God and his works, sug- 
 gestion reveals more than definition. It is true that the heart is 
 often wiser than the head ; that a true faith is consistent with 
 defective knowledge and with many intellectual errors ; that we 
 may welcome and love as Christians men " perplexed in faith 
 but pure in deed." But in all this there is no justification of 
 loose thinking, of a mysticism of the feelings unpurified and un- 
 verified by thought. Man by his rational constitution is impelled 
 to seek and is under moral obligation to seek the utmost attain- 
 able clearness, precision, completeness and unity of his knowl- 
 edge of God. 
 
 There are three points to be noticed here in reference to the 
 facts that what God reveals is himself as distinguished from doc- 
 trines, systems and religions, and that the best thinking of the 
 church is tending to bring back the abstract and the rationalistic 
 to its legitimate synthesis with the concrete spiritual reality re- 
 vealed in the Christian consciousness and in the historical Christ 
 and his kingdom. 
 
148 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The first point is, that it is precisely in this way that we gain 
 the clearest, most trustworthy and complete knowledge. This 
 is true of our knowledge of nature and of man not less than of 
 our knowledge of God. We find the knowledge of principles, 
 laws and systems in the observation and investigation of concrete 
 realities. In concrete forms the eternal principles of mathe- 
 matics are revealed. Nature presents us no astronomy. It is 
 only by observing and studying the earth and the stars that we 
 find our astronomical system ; and the system when found is 
 nothing in itself, but is of significance only because it is the in- 
 tellectual equivalent of what the universe really is. So in all 
 cases nature simply presents itself in its ongoing. It gives us no 
 physical science. The science is created only by observing and 
 studying nature and apprehending in thought the reality as it is. 
 So it is in the revelation of God. God gives us no theology, just 
 as nature gives us no science. He simply acts in and before us. 
 By the observation and study *of his works we learn what he is 
 and what are his relations to us and to the universe. The result 
 of these observations and reflections, expressed as clearly and 
 systematically as we can, is theology. A sparrow, if we would 
 learn all that is to be learned about it, reveals an encyclopaedia 
 of knowledge. A brief history may open an immense scope for 
 thought. The brief life of Christ reveals God. 
 
 Another point to be noticed is this. The difficulty with our 
 formulas and systems is not so much that they are erroneous 
 as that, however correct, we stop in the words and the abstract 
 propositions, instead of passing through them to the reality. No 
 science can be mastered from books alone. The astronomer must 
 observe the heavens, the chemist must experiment in the labora- 
 tory, the botanist and zoologist must study plants and animals. 
 One would have a very limited and incorrect knowledge of as- 
 tronomy who had never seen the sun, the moon or the stars ; or of 
 botany or zoology, who had never seen a plant or an animal. So 
 the doctrine is that we must know God in experience as he re- 
 veals himself in his action. We must pass through our formulas 
 and systems to the living God whom they declare. His revela- 
 tion of himself is broad and bright as the universe. We must 
 find him in it every day. We must freshen our old knowledge 
 with new communications of his grace. We must receive it anew 
 from day to day, as we receive the all-encompassing light by 
 which we live. In the Bible God as he reveals himself is com- 
 pared to the sun. Science discloses principles and laws accord- 
 
THE EXPERIENTIAL, HISTORICAL AND RATIONAL. 149 
 
 ing to which the light always acts, and which regulate our see- 
 ing ; yet the sun is pouring out its light without ceasing, and we 
 must receive it ever anew or we cannot see. So in studying God's 
 revelation of himself we find unchanging principles and laws 
 according to which he acts and which we are bound to obey ; 
 yet his revelation goes on without ceasing, in all nature, in the 
 experience of individuals, and in the history of man ; and we 
 must receive it ever anew or we cannot know him. And as in 
 the former case the necessity of receiving the light always anew 
 does not set aside the science of optics nor detract from its value, 
 so in the latter case the necessity of receiving God's revelation of 
 himself anew does not set aside theology nor detract from its 
 value. 
 
 It is to be noticed, further, that this knowledge of God is 
 necessary to realize the true Christian life. Knowledge is of 
 value as the guide, stimulus and strength of life. The Chris- 
 tian ideal of life is the true ideal of the life of man. It is 
 the life of faith in God and of love to God and man ; of self- 
 devotion and self-sacrifice, of truthfulness and courage. The 
 realization of this ideal in the kingdom of God on earth is 
 the end, so far as man is concerned, of all the revelation of 
 God. But for its realization the knowledge of God is necessary. 
 There must be not merely the knowledge of formulas, systems 
 and books, but a knowledge of God, so that the man shall live 
 as in his sight, in constant trust in him and confidential inti- 
 macy with him. 
 
PART II. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE AS THE ABSOLUTE 
 
 BEING. 
 
 "No thinking is in a position to deny an absolute, and even those, who have taken 
 the field most zealously against the conception of the absolute, have assumed an abso- 
 lute." Hartmann, Die Religion des Geistes, part B, p. 116. 
 
 "There ever remains with us a sense of that which exists persistently and indepen- 
 dently of conditions. . . . We are by the laws of thought prevented from ridding ourselves 
 of the consciousness of absolute existence, this consciousness being the obverse of our self- 
 consciousness. And since the only possible measure of relative validity among our beliefs 
 is the degree of their persistence in opposition to the efforts made to change them, it fol- 
 lows that this which persists at all times, under all circumstances, and cannot cease until 
 consciousness ceases, has the highest validity of any. . . . Asserting the persistence of 
 force, is but another mode of asserting an unconditioned reality without beginning or 
 end. . . . The axiomatic truths of physical science unavoidably postulate absolute Being 
 as their common basis. . . . Without this, religion has no subject-matter; and without this, 
 science, subjective and objective, lacks its indispensable datum. We cannot construct 
 a theory of internal phenomena without postulating absolute Being ; and unless we postu- 
 late absolute Being, or being that persists, we cannot construct a theory of external 
 phenomena. . . . Such is the foundation of any possible system of positive knowledge. 
 Deeper than demonstration deeper even than definite cognition deep as the very 
 nature of mind, is the postulate at which we have arrived. Its authority transcends all 
 other whatever; for not only is it given in the constitution of our own consciousness, 
 but it is impossible to imagine a consciousness so constituted as not to give it. ... Its 
 positive existence is a necessary datum of consciousness; so long as consciousness con- 
 tinues, we cannot for an instant rid it of this datum; and thus the belief which this 
 datum constitutes has a higher warrant than any other whatever." H. Spencer, First 
 Principles, pp. 96, 255, 256, 258, 98. 
 
 "The Mystery of the universe is a fact not a mere entity, but a something, a being 
 that is mysterious." Wilhelm Meyer, Wesen des Christenthums, p. 127. 
 
 "This idea of the unconditioned, rising irrepressible in the background of our conscious- 
 ness, is the first ground-premise from which all thought is set in action and driven on over 
 all conditioned and presented reality, to find rest only in the certainty of an Infinite and 
 All-conditioning." I. H. Fichte, Theistische Welt-ansicht, p. 3. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 
 
 WE are now to explore the universe, so far as open to our 
 investigation, to ascertain whether God reveals himself in it, 
 and if so, what he is as revealed ; and whether our spontaneous 
 belief in God as revealed in our own experience is verified by 
 these revelations. 
 
 In the outset we shall find that the absolute, unconditioned 
 and all-conditioning Being is revealed or manifested in the uni- 
 verse. Having established this, we shall proceed to ascertain 
 what the absolute Being is, so far as he has thus revealed or 
 manifested himself. We shall consider his revelation of himself 
 in the existence of the universe, in the constitution and course 
 of nature, and in the constitution and history of man. Then we 
 shall inquire whether he has further revealed himself in Christ 
 and in the establishment of his kingdom. This, as a part of 
 the revelation of God in human history, might be considered 
 under that general head. But, while thus it is brought into 
 unity with the whole historic revelation of God, its importance 
 as the culmination of the revelation, in the sphere of man's spir- 
 itual life and development, requires for it a place by itself in 
 our investigations. 
 
 Thus in the evidence of the existence of God and of what 
 he is we find a unity ; not several disconnected arguments, but 
 the development of one continuous and progressive revelation. 
 Beginning with God's revelation of himself in our own conscious- 
 ness, we proceed to test it in his revelation of himself in the 
 universe. We find in it one continuous revelation of God, first 
 as the absolute Being manifesting himself in all phenomena ; 
 then revealing himself as Reason energizing in the physical sys- 
 tem until in its evolution man appears. Then in the spiritual 
 system we find him revealing himself further as the absolute 
 Reason energizing in the moral government and education, and 
 in the spiritual development of man. Lastly, when man is pre- 
 pared for it, God in Christ and the Holy Spirit reveals himself 
 
154 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 as the Redeemer of men from sin, establishing among men his 
 kingdom of righteousness and good-will. Through all these rev- 
 elations we gain progressively a larger and clearer knowledge of 
 what the absolute Being is. 
 
 English and American writers on Natural Theology have not 
 been wont to insist on the origin of man's knowledge of God in 
 his revelation of himself in consciousness. And in examining 
 the further evidence in the universe of the existence of God, 
 they have not been wont to begin with recognizing the rational 
 intuition of the existence of the absolute Being as a necessary 
 principle of reason and law of thought. In fact they have not 
 recognized the idea of the absolute otherwise than as a First 
 Cause supposed to be proved to exist by the law of causation, 
 and have proceeded at once to examine the evidence in the uni- 
 verse of the personality of God. For these reasons their argu- 
 ments have been exposed to damaging criticism and their validity 
 has been denied. 
 
 In this investigation we find, first, that the absolute Being 
 exists. 
 
 By absolute Being I mean the being that exists not dependent 
 on or conditioned by any reality independent of or prerequisite 
 to itself. It is not dependent for its being on any cause ante- 
 cedent to or other than itself, nor conditioned in its existence 
 under any necessary limitation or relation independent of itself. 
 
 The grounds on which we believe in the existence of the abso- 
 lute Being are next to be considered. 
 
 That absolute Being exists is a necessary and ultimate prin- 
 ciple of reason, involved in the constitution of man as rational. 
 The belief is a rational intuition necessarily arising in its own 
 self-evidence in completing the process of thought in any line of 
 inquiry. 
 
 In the knowledge of being we know the existence of absolute 
 Being. If something exists now, something must have existed 
 eternally. An absolute, uncaused beginning is absurd and un- 
 thinkable. 
 
 In knowing anything which is caused, we necessarily know 
 that uncaused being must exist. If we admit the reality of force 
 or energy in the course of nature and believe that every begin- 
 ning or change of existence has a cause, then we necessarily 
 know that there is a power which is not itself an effect, which 
 persists in all changes, and is the unconditioned ground of the 
 entire series. Otherwise power or force disappears, the course of 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 155 
 
 nature ravels out, and all which is left is empty antecedence and 
 consequence with nothing which is antecedent and nothing which 
 is consequent. The same is implied in the scientific fact of the 
 persistence of force. As Mr. Spencer says : " The persistence of 
 the universe is the persistence of that Unknown Cause, Power or 
 Force which is manifested to us through all phenomena." 
 
 So in the knowledge of rationality, we necessarily postulate 
 absolute Reason. The possibility of concluding reasoning in an 
 inference which gives knowledge, rests on universal truths regu- 
 lative of all thinking. The validity of these universal truths 
 involves the existence of Reason unconditioned, universal and 
 supreme, the same everywhere and always. If absolute Reason 
 does not exist, no reason and no rational knowledge exist. 
 
 Also, in our endeavors to know the manifold in the unity of an 
 all-comprehending system, we find it only as the universe is the 
 manifestation of the absolute and unconditioned One. 
 
 Thus in every line of thought the knowledge rises self-evident 
 that there must be an absolute and unconditioned Being. We 
 properly recognize it as a primitive and universal truth, known 
 in rational intuition. The idea of absolute Being and the belief 
 of its existence are in the background of human consciousness, 
 and at the foundation of all knowledge through human thought. 
 The existence of absolute Being underlies the possibility of all 
 finite being, power, reasoning and rational knowledge. 
 
 In this rational intuition the absolute Being is revealed to us ; 
 and when we have come to know God we properly say that, in 
 this rational intuition and through our rational constitution, God 
 reveals himself in our consciousness as the absolute Being. We 
 find ourselves so constituted that the normal unfolding of our 
 own reason reveals to us the absolute Being. 
 
 We have here the knowledge that the absolute Being exists. 
 Whether we can know more about it we are not now inquiring. 
 In the Egyptian sanctuary of Isis at Sais is the inscription : " I 
 am that which is, that which was, and that which will be. No 
 mortal ever lifted my veil." If the worshiper could not lift the 
 veil, he at least read the proclamation that behind it was the 
 eternal Being. Such a sanctuary is the universe. In its laws 
 and processes the absolute Being is veiled ; but on this veil rea- 
 son, exploring it in its own clear light, reads the inscription pro- 
 claiming the reality and presence of the absolute Being. 
 
 An objection is urged here, that the existence of the absolute 
 Being is not a necessary postulate of the reason, because the uni- 
 
156 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 verse can be conceived as an eternal series of causal actions and 
 effects. To this the common answer is that the objection is self- 
 contradictory and absurd ; a series which at every point is a be- 
 ginning cannot be eternal ; a series which at every point is de- 
 pendent cannot be independent. But the answer goes deeper 
 than this. The essential idea of the series is that through all the 
 changes something persists unchanged. If not, then at each 
 change there is an absolute end and an absolute beginning ; all 
 that had been ends, and that which had not been begins. If there 
 is a series of causal actions and effects, there is something that 
 through all the changes persists unchanged. The something that 
 persists through all the beginnings and changes of the series is 
 that which is independent of the series and never began to be. 
 This is implied in the scientific law of the persistence of force, 
 which assumes that through all changes the sum of force poten- 
 tial and energetic in the universe is always the same. 
 
 Another objection is that the existence of the absolute Being 
 is not known by rational intuition as a primary principle or law 
 of thought, but is inferred from the principle of causation. But 
 this principle pertains only to phenomena in the universe, which 
 have a beginning ; it cannot reach the absolute ground of all 
 things. It arises in consciousness only in view of some observed 
 change or beginning ; and each change requires only a finite 
 cause. And if that cause in its turn is observed to have a be- 
 ginning, the principle of causation requires no more than a finite 
 cause for this. Thus the belief that every beginning has a cause 
 carries in it no imperative demand for an uncaused cause, but is 
 fully satisfied in the continuous regression through finite effects 
 and causes, and never carries us beyond it. On the contrary 
 the belief that absolute Being exists is an original principle of 
 reason which asserts itself in the consciousness on occasion of 
 the observed succession of effects, but is in no sense an inference 
 from it. 
 
 Many theists have held that the existence of God may be 
 proved from the existence of the universe by the law of causa- 
 tion. They thus expose themselves to objections : that the law 
 of causation demands a cause of God ; that it is not applicable 
 until it has first been proved that the universe had a beginning; 
 that, even if it had a beginning, it is a finite effect and demands 
 only a finite cause. And these theists cannot answer these ques- 
 tions by the idea of cause alone. Instead of a therefore to every 
 wherefore of the skeptic, which the true idea of God should give, 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 157 
 
 they have only the child's answer, " Because," which calls forth 
 the question anew ; their argument is a stone of Sisyphus which 
 always rolls back on them. But the existence of the absolute 
 Being is not an inference from causal sequences ; it is an ultimate 
 principle of reason, a necessary law of thought, which no think- 
 ing can transcend or escape. 
 
 It is further objected that the existence of the absolute in- 
 volves irreconcilable contradictions. Mr. Spencer says : " If we 
 admit that there can be something uncaused, there is no reason 
 to assume a cause for anything. If beyond that finite region over 
 which the First Cause extends, there lies a region which we are 
 compelled to regard as infinite, over which it does not extend 
 if we admit that there is an infinite uncaused surrounding the 
 finite caused we tacitly abandon the hypothesis of causation al- 
 together." l This and some other alleged contradictions involved 
 in the existence of the absolute arise from supposing that it is 
 inferred from the existence of the universe by the principle of 
 causation. There are here two ultimate laws of thought instead 
 of one. One refers to things that begin and declares that every 
 beginning must have a cause. The other affirms that there must 
 be something that never began to be, but is unconditioned and 
 absolute Being. There is no contradiction here. The assertion 
 that there must be something which never began, is no contradic- 
 tion of the assertion that whatever does begin has a cause. The 
 contradiction is Mr. Spencer's, who, in face of the objection cited 
 above, himself admits causation in nature, and yet affirms in the 
 strongest language the existence of absolute power which has no 
 antecedent cause. " The First Cause " cannot itself be caused. 
 
 Another objection is that the knowledge of the infinite or abso- 
 lute must be infinite or absolute knowledge. Feuerbach says : 
 " If thou thinkest the infinite, thou perceivest and affirmest the 
 infinitude of the power of thy thought ; if thou feelest the in- 
 finite, thou feelest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of 
 feeling." 2 
 
 By absolute knowledge I understand knowledge which depends 
 solely on the mind knowing, without any action on it of external 
 reality revealing itself. If this is what the objection means, then 
 indeed man has no such knowledge either of God or of finite 
 things. Such archetypal and independent knowledge is possible 
 in the absolute Reason alone. But no reason can be given why 
 
 1 First Principles, pp. 37, 38. 
 
 2 Wesen des Christenthums, chap. i. 1. 
 
158 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 man's knowledge of God must be absolute in this sense any more 
 than his knowledge of finite reality. The absolute Being re- 
 veals itself, through the constitution of man, in the ultimate and 
 necessary postulate of every line of thought ; and man's mind 
 reacting on it knows that the absolute Being exists. 
 
 If by absolute knowledge the objector means complete and 
 all-comprehending knowledge of the absolute, the same would 
 be an equally valid objection against all knowledge ; for there 
 is nothing of which man has such knowledge. Every object 
 to which he attends, if he continues to think of it, starts ques- 
 tions which no man can answer, and thus brings the abso- 
 lute to view. Everything in revealing itself reveals also to the 
 thought the absolute Being. The objection then is as valid 
 against all knowledge as against the knowledge of the absolute. 
 The limitation of knowledge does not preclude its reality. 
 
 It must be added that in man's implicit consciousness there 
 may be beliefs controlling thought and action, which as yet he 
 lias not definitely formulated nor even apprehended in thought. 
 Such in the minds of children and savages are the principles 
 that every change has a cause, that two straight lines cannot 
 inclose a space, and other first principles of reason. Such also 
 are many beliefs of common sense regulating a man's thought 
 and action, which he cannot state to others nor even define 
 to himself as reasons for his conclusions and actions. Yet in 
 all these cases the knowledge is real, though undefined. Such 
 knowledge Hamilton calls " the unpictured notions of intel- 
 ligence." Such in the beginning of human development are 
 man's religious beliefs and his idea of a divinity. Principles 
 and ideas thus originally unpictured and undefined in the im- 
 plicit consciousness, with the progressive development of man 
 are developed in civilizations and in great systems of empir- 
 ical, mathematical, philosophical and theological science. In the 
 mind of the writer of the first chapter of Genesis the idea was 
 present, however inadequately conceived, that God created man 
 in his own image. The whole history of man and the revela- 
 tion of God in Christ and in the establishing of his kingdom 
 through the ages, have been unfolding the significance of this 
 truth; and to this day it has not been fully developed in all 
 its significance and its practical applications. And it is equally 
 possible for man to have an unpictured notion of the absolute. 
 
 But whatever advance man may make in the knowledge of 
 God and of the universe in its relation to him, and in appre- 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 159 
 
 bending, formulating, systemizing and applying it, the absolute 
 Being must always transcend the man and his knowledge. He 
 can never be taken up completely and held in the forms of 
 human thought. Yet the knowledge is not for this less real. 
 
 Mr. Mansel objects : " To have a partial knowledge of an 
 object is to know a part of it but not the whole. But the 
 part of the infinite supposed to be known must be itself either 
 infinite or finite. If infinite, it presents the same difficulties as 
 before. If finite, the point in question is conceded, and our con- 
 sciousness is allowed to be limited to finite objects." 1 Hamil- 
 ton presents the objection in the same form. This is palpable 
 logomachy. It is possible to know an object in its individuality 
 and wholeness while the knowledge is partial and incomplete. 
 I have a slight acquaintance with the man who lives across the 
 street. My partial knowledge of him will increase on further 
 acquaintance. Now the objector says that because the knowl- 
 edge is partial, I do not know the man in his wholeness, but 
 only a part of him ; and he asks whether the part is the whole 
 man. If it is, then he says, You know the whole man, and 
 your knowledge is not partial. But if it is a part, then you 
 do not know the man. I answer to this paltering with words, 
 that I know the man in his personality as a whole, but my 
 knowledge of him is incomplete. So we know God, the one 
 absolute Spirit, but our knowledge of him is incomplete. So 
 Paul said : " Now I know in part." 
 
 An objection is sometimes urged, founded on the maxim that 
 like is known only by the like, and therefore the finite being 
 cannot know the absolute Being. This is a misapplication of 
 the maxim. Thus applied it would prove that God cannot know 
 man any more than man can know God. But man, as rational 
 spirit, is like God, the eternal Spirit. Therefore, in accordance 
 with this maxim he can know God in his positive attributes as 
 Spirit, though he can define God's infinitude only by negation. 
 I can know God because I am in his image as a rational spirit, 
 though I am finite and he is infinite. It does not need infini- 
 tude to know that some infinite being exists. 
 
 And if this maxim, Simile simili cognoscitur, is pushed with 
 rabbinical litoralness to the extreme, it becomes the childish 
 error, wide-spread even in systems of philosophy, which, over- 
 looking the fact that knowledge must be the intellectual equiv- 
 alent of its object, insists that no object can be known unless 
 1 Limits of Religious Thought, Lect. iii. pp. 9 7. 
 
160 THE SELF-KE,VELATION OF GOD. 
 
 itself, or at least its image, is actually present within the mind. 
 But a man's thought cannot be like a stone or a tree ; therefore 
 he can have no knowledge of a stone or a tree ; therefore he can 
 know nothing but ideas ; his knowledge does not reach beyond 
 his own self-consciousness. The Absolute itself becomes the uni- 
 versal ego ; and the issue is idealistic pantheism. 
 
 The objection that the knowledge of the absolute or infinite 
 must be absolute or infinite knowledge, in each of these forms, 
 implies that none but an absolute Being can know God; there- 
 fore, that God could not create a being capable of knowing him, 
 or even of knowing the fact that an absolute Being exists. God 
 then would no longer be the absolute Being, but would himself 
 be limited by incapacity to create a finite universe or to reveal 
 himself to rational beings in it, however great their power of 
 intelligence. 
 
 As a last resort, it is objected that the idea of the Absolute 
 is merely the gigantic shadow of the man himself. The objector 
 believes that man is so limited that he cannot know even that 
 absolute Being exists. What, then, is there in a being so lim- 
 ited to cast on his horizon a shadow so vast ? And what is 
 the light obstructed by this being, yet encompassing him, which 
 makes the shadow visible ? And if man is incapable of know- 
 ing the existence of an absolute being, how has this great idea 
 arisen in his mind, and how does it keep its steadfast hold on 
 him ? Savage tribes, before they come in contact with civilized 
 men, never have in their languages any word meaning savage. 
 So soon as they know themselves savages they are already in 
 the light of civilization, and have advanced at least one step 
 toward it. Man's knowledge of his own dependence and finite- 
 ness carries in it the idea of the infinite and the absolute. The 
 existence of the idea discloses the fact that he is already in 
 the light of the absolute Being, and competent to know it if 
 it exists and reveals itself to him. 
 
 This objection, then, is no more than a poetical expression 
 of the old and often refuted theory of the relativity of knowl- 
 edge, that because a man can know objects only through his 
 own powers of rational intelligence, therefore he cannot know 
 anything; but all which he looks on as objective reality is an 
 illusion, the projected shadows of his own subjective impressions. 
 It discredits all intuition, presentative and rational, all laws of 
 thought, all reasoning, all human intelligence and reason, be- 
 cause the supposed knowledge is relative to a mind knowing, 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 161 
 
 and man knows only through his powers of knowing. We are 
 under no obligation to spend our lives re-threshing threshed 
 straw because some, who do not believe in the existence of wheat, 
 continue to thrust the empty straw beneath our flails. 
 
 Thus it is evident that the objections to the reality of our 
 knowledge that the absolute Being exists are without force. 
 
 It remains to notice some further confirmations of our posi- 
 tion as to the reality and origin of this knowledge. 
 
 The denial of the possibility of knowing that absolute Being 
 exists involves the impossibility of knowing any being, and so 
 relapses into the complete Positivism of Comte or some form 
 of phenomenalism ; and this involves complete agnosticism or 
 universal skepticism. For, as Goethe puts the question : 
 
 " What show could be, unless of substance shown? 
 And what were substance, if not shown to be?" 
 
 If there is no absolute Being, there is no reality that persists ; 
 
 " That changed through all, and yet in all the same, 
 Great in the earth as in th' ethereal flame, 
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees; 
 Lives in all life, extends through all extent, 
 Spreads undivided, operates unspent." 
 
 Then the fundamental principle, not of philosophy and theol- 
 ogy only, but also of physical science, is subverted ; for science 
 rests on the postulate that the sum of matter and force is always 
 the same and exists eternal without anything added and without 
 anything annihilated. Then the continuity, the unity and the 
 reality of the universe are gone, and we find ourselves illusions 
 in a universe of illusions, and deluded with thinking that the 
 illusions are real. 
 
 It may be said that that which persists is only force. But it 
 is a necessary law of thought that there can be no action without 
 an agent, no motion without something that moves, no force 
 without a being. We may explain matter dynamically ; we 
 may speak of dynamids instead of atoms and molecules. But we 
 hypostasize the dynamids all the same ; for power persisting in 
 unity and identity is the essential quality of a being. 
 
 In fact those who now deny all knowledge of the existence of 
 the Absolute are only those who deny all knowledge of being 
 and limit knowledge to appearance or phenomena. Accordingly 
 physical science has left them behind. At the very time when 
 Comte was writing the Positive Philosophy, insisting that cause, 
 11 
 
162 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 force, atoms, molecules, ethers were metaphysical ideas to be 
 rigorously excluded from all science, scientists were already work- 
 ing ont the law of the correlation and conservation of force, 
 which has brought these proscribed ideas to the front in all 
 scientific discussion and stakes the very existence of physical 
 science on the reality of the objects of metaphysical ideas and 
 the truth of metaphysical principles. 
 
 Another confirmation may be noticed. History shows that 
 when once the human mind has begun to think scientifically, it 
 cannot rest in its thinking without the idea of the absolute Being 
 and the belief at least that it exists. So Feuerbach says : " It 
 is a general truth that we feel a blank, a void, a want in our- 
 selves and are consequently unhappy and unsatisfied, so long as 
 we have not come to the last degree of a power, to that than 
 which nothing greater can be thought." And Zeller says : 
 " The spirit of man cannot be satisfied, till it finds in every force 
 the manifestation of an original force and in all beings the prod- 
 uct of an original being, till the checkered manifoldness of par- 
 ticular laws is brought back to a highest unity. The same is 
 the inmost and, as it were, the insouling power in the things." 1 
 
 This is evident from the earnestness with which the absolute 
 Being has been studied by the greatest thinkers, and the large 
 place which it has held in the whole history of philosophical 
 thought. Ravaisson says: "That at the foundation of all knowl- 
 edge is an absolute to which the relative corresponds as its 
 opposite, is what was established more than twenty centuries 
 ago, against a doctrine then already prevalent of universal rela- 
 tivity and mobility, by the Platonic dialectic, which broke the 
 way to metaphysics. It did more ; it showed that by this abso- 
 lute, relations are intelligible, because it is the measure by which 
 alone we estimate them. Metaphysics in the hands of its im- 
 mortal founder did more ; it showed that this absolute, by which 
 intelligence measures the relative, is the intelligence itself." 
 Sir William Hamilton tells us : u From Xenophanes to Leibnitz, 
 ihe infinite, the absolute, the unconditioned, formed the highest 
 principle of speculation." During all this long period the great- 
 est minds and the most profound thinkers were occupied with 
 questions pertaining to the absolute. Hamilton says : " Kant 
 accomplished much. The result of his examination was the 
 abolition of the metaphysical sciences; all that is not finite, rela- 
 
 1 Quoted by Fliigel, Die Spekulative Theologie der Gegenwart, p. 103. 
 
 2 Rapport, p. 66, quoted by Rev. W. Jackson, Modern Skepticism, p. 532. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 163 
 
 tive and phenomenal is beyond the verge of knowledge." But 
 in fact, far from abolishing metaphysical science, Kant's writings 
 stimulated metaphysical inquiry, especially as to the existence of 
 the absolute, to intense activity which all the political convul- 
 sions of the time could not interrupt. And this was not confined 
 to Germany. Cousin's lecturing on philosophy in Paris was the 
 occasion of Hamilton's Essay on the Philosophy of the Condi- 
 tioned. As he himself says : " Two thousand auditors listened, 
 all with admiration, many with enthusiasm, to the eloquent ex- 
 position of doctrine intelligible only to the few; and the oral 
 discussion of philosophy awakened in Paris and in France an 
 interest unexampled since the days of Abelard." In this dis- 
 cussion of the absolute Hamilton himself took no inconsider- 
 able part, but with the design to show that the discussion was 
 fruitless and that the expenditure of thought on it through the 
 whole history of civilization had been a waste of intellect. He 
 attempts to prove this by arguments the fallacies already ex- 
 posed. He also resorts to ridicule, applying to these thinkers 
 the line, 
 
 " Gens ratione ferox et mentem pasta chimseris; " l 
 
 feeding themselves to fierceness on chimasras as the ancient 
 heroes did on the marrow of bears. 
 
 But Hamilton has failed to suppress these questionings as 
 completely as Kant. The generation which has followed him, 
 with its Spencerian agnosticism and its theory of evolution, with 
 the cry, " Back to Kant," and the revival of Hegelianism, has 
 been thinking as earnestly and as universally on the nature of 
 spirit and matter and force, on the ultimate ground and origin 
 of all that is, and on all the questions pertaining to the being of 
 God, as any that preceded it ; and with the result that only an 
 inconsiderable minority remains denying the knowledge that 
 some absolute Being exists. 
 
 And this is true of those who hold non-theistic theories of the 
 universe in various forms. Spencerian agnostics, pantheists of 
 all types, materialists and deists all agree with theists in affirm- 
 ing the knowledge that absolute Being exists, and that we know 
 it as a first principle of reason and law of thought. Only the 
 few extreme positivists, holding a sensational theory of knowl- 
 edge like that of Comte, deny it. 
 
 It is evident therefore that the human mind cannot rid itself 
 
 1 Philosophy of Hamilton, Wight's ed. Phil, of the Conditioned, pp. 458, 
 442, 446. 
 
164 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of the idea of the absolute. It persists in the implicit conscious- 
 ness, regulating thought, even when theoretically disclaimed. It 
 is evident that without the assumption, explicit or implicit, that 
 the absolute Being exists, the reason of man cannot solve its 
 necessary problems, nor rest satisfied with any intellectual at- 
 tainment, nor hold steadfastly to the reality of its knowledge, 
 nor know the continuity, the unity and the reality of the uni- 
 verse. The necessary conclusion is that the principle that the 
 absolute Being exists is a primitive and necessary law of thought, 
 a constituent element of reason, and a necessary postulate in all 
 thinking about being. 
 
 In this exposition of the origin of the idea of the absolute 
 Being and our belief of its existence, I have set forth the so- 
 called a priori argument for the existence of God in its true 
 significance. This is an argument from the idea of the absolute 
 or perfect Being to its existence. In order to the conclusiveness 
 of this argument it must be shown both that the idea of the 
 absolute Being is a necessary idea of reason, and that the exist- 
 ence of the Being is necessarily included in the idea ; that is, 
 its existence must be as necessary to the reason as the idea of it. 
 This is what has been shown. That the absolute Being exists 
 is a necessary principle of reason, self-evident to rational intui- 
 tion ; it is the necessary presupposition in all knowledge of be- 
 ing and appears as regulative of all thinking so soon as being 
 is known. Kant also presents the a priori argument. In the 
 Critique of Pure Reason he finds the idea of God to be a neces- 
 sary idea of the reason. And it is not merely the idea, but also 
 the existence of God which is necessary to reason in order that 
 it may solve its necessary problems and attain a rational com- 
 prehension of the universe in scientific knowledge. That abso- 
 lute Being exists would be acknowledged by Kant as a primitive 
 principle or constituent element of reason, not needing to be 
 accounted for or proved otherwise. But on account of his phe- 
 nomenalism the absolute remains to the pure reason an unknow- 
 able ; it exists, but what it is we know not. He afterwards finds 
 in the practical reason, that is, in the sphere of moral conscious- 
 ness, contents for knowing what the absolute is. 
 
 Such is the so-called a priori argument in its true significance. 
 
 We find here in a first principle of reason the starting-point 
 for the whole course of evidence of the existence of God as 
 found by reflective thought. And because this principle asserts 
 itself in consciousness on occasion of our knowing that some 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING. 165 
 
 being exists, and presents as self-evident the existence of absolute 
 Being, we see the significance of its name as the ontological ar- 
 gument. But it is not an argument, it is a necessary principle 
 or law of thought. 
 
 The absolute Being is known to the reason as the ground of 
 the universe and manifesting itself in it. Therefore we know 
 that there are in the absolute all the potencies which account 
 for the universe and manifest themselves in it. Thus by ex- 
 ploring the universe, physical and spiritual, we can know what 
 the absolute is as continuously revealing itself in it. And this 
 Kant also recognizes as a principle of reason : "If the con- 
 ditioned is given, the whole of the conditions, and consequently 
 the absolutely unconditioned is also given, whereby alone the for- 
 mer was possible." * 
 
 The true philosophy of human knowledge teaches that knowl- 
 edge is ontological in its beginning, that is, it begins as the 
 knowledge of being ; and it is always the knowledge of being. 
 
 When we know, in the universe, being, we necessarily know 
 absolute Being, the ground of it and revealed in it. 
 
 When we know, in the universe, power or causal energy, we 
 necessarily know the absolute Being as Power, the original and 
 continuous source of all finite power. 
 
 When we know, in the universe, cause, we necessarily know 
 the absolute Being as first and all-originating Cause. 
 
 When we know, in the constitution and course of the universe, 
 physical and spiritual, the manifestation of reason, we know the 
 absolute Being as absolute Reason, the Light that lighteth every 
 man. 2 
 
 At last when we find in the universe Christ and his kingdom, 
 we know the absolute Being as universal Love, the Redeemer of 
 men from sin. 
 
 But before we can proceed in this search after God, the vari- 
 ous non-theistic theories of the universe must be noticed. 
 
 1 Critique of Pure Reason, Antinomy of Pure Reason, sects, i., vii. 
 
 2 Anaxagoras introduced into Greek philosophy the truth that the universe 
 is grounded in reason and that its constitution and order can be explained only 
 on the assumption of eternal Reason energizing in it. This was accepted by 
 Socrates and elaborated into the argument from final causes which we find in 
 Xenophon's Memorabilia. Plato and Aristotle also accepted and taught this 
 conception of the universe. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 
 
 IT is to the credit of humanity that men are ashamed to be 
 called atheists. At present positivists, agnostics and nearly all 
 schools of non-theistic thought claim to have a religion and an 
 object of worship, and refuse and resent the name of atheist. In 
 view of this Heinrich Heine calls the pantheist " a bashful athe- 
 ist." This objection to the name is the outcry of the human soul 
 shrinking from being thought to be and even from thinking it- 
 self to be without God in the world. 
 
 Etymologically atheist means simply not a theist. If I use the 
 word atheism, it will be in this comprehensive sense, as includ- 
 ing all non-theistic theories of the universe ; and I use it because 
 there is no other word which so exactly expresses this meaning. 
 
 Atheism is not commonly the assertion of positive knowledge 
 that God does not exist. The positive assertion that there is no 
 God is commonly the atheism of passion and hatred. Such was 
 the atheism of the French revolutionists of the last century and 
 such is that of the Nihilists and many of the Socialists now. 
 Atheism may rest on immoral character rather than on intellect- 
 ual conviction, and thus may arise because the belief in God 
 stands in the way of plans of wickedness or of anarchical destruc- 
 tion of society. It m:iy have been occasioned by the oppression 
 of a hierarchy or a despotism in the name of religion, or by gross 
 misrepresentations of theism in whatever way caused. In a re- 
 cent article in the Independent by Courtlandt Palmer, President 
 of the Nineteenth Century Club, the following is presented, not 
 as his own belief, but as the argument of the atheist : " Only 
 in the denial of a personal God can morality exist, since, given 
 a God, obedience to his commands becomes obligatory ; such 
 obedience, being obligatory, degenerates into slavery, and slavery 
 negatives morality, since morality consists in freedom ; that is, 
 in the freedom of the individual to choose for himself, without 
 compulsion, the better part. Not only is such submission to 
 the will of God a divine thraldom, it is a human thraldom also, 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 167 
 
 since the will of God can only be made known to men by men 
 like in all respects to themselves ; therefore to submit to God is 
 only to submit to fallible ecclesiastics who assume to construe 
 him." This implies that the enforcement of just law under the 
 authority of any government is slavery ; that all authority of 
 government is necessarily despotism to be resisted and destroyed; 
 that subjection to law, however just, is slavery; that submission 
 to God, the absolute Reason, administering the universe accord- 
 ing to the eternal principles of wisdom and love, is slavery. 
 This reasoning, if so it may be called, can issue only in uni- 
 versal anarchy and the disorganization of all society. It is pre- 
 cisely the principle declaimed by Bakunin and the Nihilists. If 
 this is the argument on which the defense of atheism must rest, 
 its defense is its sufficient refutation. 1 
 
 Atheism is commonly the denial that man has any knowledge 
 of God or any reasonable grounds for believing that any God 
 exists. 
 
 God is the absolute Spirit, with whom the worshiper may come 
 into communication. Kant is right in saying : " The conception 
 of God involves not merely a blindly operating Nature as the 
 eternal root of things, but a Supreme Being that must be the 
 author of all things by free and understanding action ; and it is 
 this conception which alone has any interest for us." 
 
 The polytheism and fetichism of ruder peoples are not properly 
 called atheism, for they recognize supernatural and superhuman 
 divinities corresponding with the highest idea of the absolute 
 Spirit attained by them. In our modern civilization intelligent 
 people will not fall back into these errors. The atheism of our 
 time will be the denial of all knowledge of the one supreme God, 
 the absolute Spirit, and will fall back on some theory of the uni- 
 verse which excludes a divinity of conscious intelligence, wisdom 
 and love. 
 
 The non-theistic theories may be included in two classes, ac- 
 cording to their position in respect to the knowledge of the abso- 
 lute Being. 
 
 I. Theories denying all knowledge of the existence of the abso- 
 lute Being. 
 
 II. Theories asserting knowledge of the existence of the abso- 
 lute Being. 
 
 1. Agnosticism. 
 
 2. Monism. 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 486, 482. 
 
168 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 (a) Pantheistic Monism. 
 
 Ontological Pantheism. 
 Idealistic Pantheism. 
 
 (b) Materialistic Monism. 
 
 Agnosticism affirms that man has knowledge of the existence 
 of the absolute Being, but cannot know what it is, further than 
 that it is the Power everywhere present and manifesting itself in 
 all phenomena. 
 
 Monism affirms that man has knowledge of the existence of 
 the absolute Being and is able also to define what it is. This 
 it does in affirming that the absolute Being, that is the ultimate 
 ground of the universe, is identical with the universe itself. 
 
 Theism regards the universe as the whole of finite realities ex- 
 isting in a unity by their common and continuous relations to 
 God, the absolute Spirit. Thus theism distinguishes the universe 
 from God on whom it is always dependent. 
 
 Monism annuls this distinction and teaches that the universe 
 and the absolute are one and the same being in two different 
 aspects. 
 
 According to theism the unity of all finite beings with one an- 
 other and with God is rational, dynamical and moral. Accord- 
 ing to monism it is identity of substance or being. 
 
 Pantheistic monism recognizes the absolute Being, as evolving 
 continuously into the universe and thus identical with it. The 
 universe evolving and the universe evolved in identity are the 
 one absolute Being. The necessary inference is that the only 
 real being is the absolute ; in the finite universe are no real be- 
 ings, but only phenomena or manifestations of the one only abso- 
 lute Being. 
 
 Ontological pantheism defines the absolute Being as the one 
 only substance evolving in the universe. Idealistic pantheism 
 supposes the absolute to be unconscious thought or will or reason 
 evolving into all that is. J. G. Fichte proposed to show that 
 4i the one original only substance is the Ego ; in this one sub- 
 stance are posited all possible accidents and consequently all 
 possible realities." But the universal Ego, as he develops it, is 
 essentially the unconscious moral order of the universe. 
 
 The conception of unconscious and impersonal thought or rea- 
 son or spirit evolving in the universe may be illustrated by the 
 analogy of the mysterious principle of life, the vital force, what- 
 ever it may be, evolving in an organism and thus revealing itself. 
 And the evolution of the physical universe has a closer analogy 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 169 
 
 with organic growth than with mechanism. Hence the concep- 
 tion of some of the Greek philosophers that the universe is a liv- 
 ing organism is not so strange as at first it seems. From this it 
 was an easy transition to the conception of God as the vitalizing 
 energy or soul of the world. This type of thought is allied to 
 idealistic pantheism. 
 
 Materialistic monism is the theory that matter with the force 
 essential in it is eternal and that all the realities in the universe 
 are matter and force in different modes of existence ; that thus 
 the universe contains no rational spirit and is transcended by no 
 absolute Being; its ongoing is only " the redistribution of matter 
 and force." 
 
 Pantheism recognizes the absolute Being and denies the real 
 being of the finite universe. It has therefore been called acosmic 
 pantheism. 
 
 Materialistic monism affirms the eternity of matter and denies 
 the existence of any absolute Being transcending it. It has 
 therefore been called atheistic pancosmism. 
 
 It must be noticed, however, that materialistic monists un- 
 consciously change the essential meaning of matter. They no 
 longer treat it as that which is contained in and occupies space, 
 but as something which transcends both matter and mind, as 
 we know them, and is the common ground of both. Noire*, in 
 expounding his cosmogony of evolution from the originative mat- 
 ter (Stoff), predicates of it two attributes, mobility and sensi- 
 tivity. Thus he abandons pure materialism and identifies matter 
 essentially with the one only substance of ontological pantheism. 
 The same is true of Professor Clifford, who says: "A moving 
 molecule of inorganic matter possesses a small piece of mind- 
 stuff." 
 
 Agnosticism agrees with theism in affirming that the absolute 
 Being exists. Monism in both forms agrees with theism in this, 
 and also in affirming that man has knowledge of what it is. In 
 their conception of what the absolute Being is, many of the pan- 
 theists agree in important particulars with theists. 
 
 Monism in both its forms denies of the absolute Being all in- 
 telligent and conscious action and purpose, except as it comes to 
 consciousness in man. 
 
 These four non-theistic theories of the universe will be sev- 
 erally examined more particularly. 
 
 " Physicus," in A Candid Examination of Theism, says : 
 "A favorite piece of apologetic juggling is that of first demolish- 
 
170 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ing atheism, pantheism, materialism, etc., by successively calling 
 on them to explain the mystery of self-existence, and then tacitly 
 assuming that the need of such an explanation is absent in the 
 case of theism as though the attribute in question were more 
 conceivable when posited in a Deity than when posited else- 
 where." This gross misrepresentation at the beginning of the 
 book augurs ill for the candor announced in the title. Theists 
 never attempt to explain the mystery of self-existence. In com- 
 mon with agnostics, pantheists and materialists, theists assume 
 the existence of some self-existent Being as a necessary principle 
 of reason and law of thought. What they attempt to explain is 
 the universe. In doing this they seek to ascertain all which may 
 be known of the absolute Being acknowledged to be everywhere 
 manifesting itself in the universe. The disproof of the non- 
 theistic theories is found in the positive evidence of the existence 
 of God, the absolute Spirit, and in the impossibility of account- 
 ing for and explaining the universe or even of attaining a sci- 
 entific knowledge of it without the recognition of God. The 
 non-theistic theories are considered first in order clearly to appre- 
 hend what they are, to point out the difficulties and contra- 
 dictions in them and to show that they entirely fail to account 
 for or explain the universe. 
 
 I. THE DENIAL OF ALL KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXISTENCE 
 OF ABSOLUTE BEING. Atheism in this form is represented by 
 Comte. It affirms that there is no rational necessity of form- 
 ing a theory of the universe. It belongs to human thought 
 and intelligence only to observe, classify and coordinate phe- 
 nomena, without attempting to go behind them to any reality 
 that acts or appears or is manifested in them. The phenomena 
 are sufficient of and for themselves, and it is not legitimate for 
 scientific thought to attempt to refer them to any deeper reality, 
 to find for them any all-comprehending unity, or any ultimate 
 ground, or any rational end. There is no reasonableness objec- 
 tive in the universe and no reason manifested in its constitution 
 or course of action and development. As Chauncey Wright ex- 
 pressed it, all the shifting and drifting phenomena are nothing 
 but "cosmical weather." 
 
 This form of atheism is incompatible with the knowledge of 
 the universe or of any being in it, as really as with the knowl- 
 edge of God. It implies that real knowledge of anything is im- 
 possible to man. 1 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 428-434. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 171 
 
 And it is only on this supposition that atheism in this form is 
 possible. Comte could consistently refuse to consider the prob- 
 lem of forming a theory of the universe, because he denied all 
 knowledge of being and rejected as unscientific the ideas of force, 
 cause, molecules and ethers. These ideas are metaphysical, but 
 not unscientific. Physical science itself acknowledges their real- 
 ity, and has therefore rejected Comte's positivism as inadequate 
 for the purposes of science. The continuous use of metaphys- 
 ical ideas and principles is essential to the progress, and even 
 to the existence, of physical science. And all who believe that 
 in every act there is an agent, in every motion something that 
 moves and something that caused the motion, all who believe 
 that force is other than motion and cause more than an ante- 
 cedent, all who believe that they have real knowledge of beings 
 and not merely of a phantasmagoria of subjective impressions, 
 all these must also believe that absolute Being exists. If some- 
 thing exists now, something must have existed always. And 
 all who believe that something has existed always have already 
 accepted the problem of finding a theory of the universe and are 
 seeking its solution. Comte was right in saying that if we admit 
 any cause we must also admit God, the first cause. 
 
 Thus the existence of the absolute Being forces itself on human 
 thought. Man cannot rid himself of it. It underlies his think- 
 ing whether he recognizes it or not. 
 
 It may be added that it is a necessity of human reason to seek 
 to find a theory of the universe. The positivist objection to it is 
 an objection in the name of science against reason itself. It is 
 the fatal mistake of pitting science against reason. Whatever 
 reality is brought to the notice of man, the necessary and always 
 urgent problem of the reason is to find its relation to other real- 
 ity in the unity of a scientific system ; dynamically, by finding a 
 cause of all beginning and change ; rationally, by ascertaining 
 what rational idea or truth it expresses, under what rational law 
 it acts, and what rational end it is tending to realize. It is this 
 necessary demand of reason which in all ages has stimulated to 
 scientific inquiry. The irrepressible demand of reason for the 
 comprehension of particular things in dynamic and rational unity 
 in a system, pushes the thought onward to find the unity of ail 
 things in one all-comprehending system. The attempt to con- 
 struct a theory of the universe is, therefore, reasonable and legit- 
 imate. And if so, the theistic theory is scientifically as legitimate 
 as any other. 1 
 
 1 Professor Clifford says: "This world which I perceive is my perception 
 
172 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 II. SPENCERIAN AGNOSTICISM. In opposition to Spencerian 
 agnosticism, theism affirms that man has positive, though inade- 
 quate knowledge of what the absolute Being is. Mr. Spencer's 
 theory of the universe is not properly called agnosticism. Ag- 
 nosticism etymologically means the denial of all knowledge. 
 Thus it is properly equivalent to universal skepticism. The 
 Spencerian agnosticism not only recognizes man's knowledge of 
 the universe, but also of the absolute Being itself as existing, as 
 omnipresent Power, and as manifesting or revealing itself in all 
 the phenomena of the universe. Hence it is only a partial 
 agnosticism. 
 
 This agnosticism may arise from attempting to develop what 
 the absolute is from its a priori idea. In this way we get only 
 negations; the absolute is the unconditioned, the unlimited, the 
 independent. Thus the word remains void of positive contents, 
 a mere adjective without a substantive, negation with no reality 
 of which it can be predicated. Sir William Hamilton and Mr. 
 Mansel are recent representatives of this type of thought. 
 
 The other and the only true way, in which what the absolute 
 is can be known, is by studying its manifestation of itself in the 
 universe. All Spencerian agnostics and all monists agree with 
 theists that the absolute is the omnipresent Power which is man- 
 ifested or revealed in the universe. Then in the absolute Being 
 must be all the potencies which are necessary to account for the 
 universe ; and these are revealed in it and may be known. This 
 is the theistic method ; and as inferring from an effect the nature 
 of a cause whose existence is acknowledged, it is legitimate and 
 
 and nothing more." This theory of knowledge is humorously alluded to in 
 Through the Looking Glass. Alice went with Tweedledum and Tweedledee 
 to see the Red King. He was asleep, and Tweedledee asked her, "What 
 do you suppose he is dreaming about?" "Nobody can guess that," replied 
 Alice. " Why, about you," Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands tri- 
 umphantly; " and if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose 
 you'd be? " " Where I am now, of course," said Alice. " Not you," Twee- 
 dledee retorted contemptuously; "you'd be nowhere. Why you're only a 
 sort of thing in his dream." "If that there king was to awake," added he, 
 "you'd go out bang just like a candle." "I shouldn't," exclaimed 
 Alice indignantly; "besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what 
 are you, I should like to know?" "Hush" cried she, " you '11 be waking 
 him, I 'm afraid, if you make so much noise." " Well, it 's no use your talk- 
 ing about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the 
 things in his dream. You know very well that you 're not real." "I am 
 real," Alice said, and began to cry; " if I wasn't real I shouldn't be able to 
 cry/' 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 173 
 
 accordant with the method of science. No finite mind, beginning 
 with the a priori idea of the absolute, can ascertain what it is by 
 an analysis of the idea or deduction from it ; that would imply 
 that the finite mind had a priori the idea of the absolute com- 
 prehending all its contents and significance. Human reason, by 
 the law of its own being as reason, knows that some uncondi- 
 tioned Being exists. It can know what it is only by knowing 
 what it has revealed of itself in the universe. 
 
 The very fact that the absolute manifests itself in the universe 
 implies that it is not unknowable in itself. It is unknowable 
 only so far as it has not revealed itself, or as our minds are not 
 great enough to take in all the facts and significance of the rev- 
 elation. If the absolute Being is manifested in all the ongoing 
 of the universe, then with every enlargement of knowledge and 
 capacity the finite mind, so long as it exists, may continue to 
 advance in the knowledge of God. It is only the absurd, it is 
 only that which contradicts the necessary principles of reason, 
 which is unknowable in itself and constitutes an absolute bar to 
 knowledge. If the absolute exists and manifests itself in the 
 finite, then it cannot be unknowable in itself but must be essen- 
 tially intelligible. Also, there can be no contradiction between 
 the absolute and the finite. The finite is the medium originating 
 from and ever dependent on the absolute, through which the 
 absolute is forever manifesting or revealing itself. 
 
 A second source of agnosticism is that the a priori idea of the 
 absolute, with which the inquirer starts and which he attempts 
 to develop, is itself a false idea. Then, as developed, it is found 
 to be unthinkable and in itself unknowable. 
 
 The absolute is falsely defined to be that which exists out 
 of all relations. Whereas it is that which exists unconditioned 
 by relations independent of itself. The universe which is in 
 relation to the absolute is always dependent on it for its own 
 existence. It is conditioned by the absolute, but the absolute is 
 n >t conditioned by it in any necessary relation. Closely allied to 
 this is the conception of the absolute as the thing in itself, out 
 of all relation to our rational faculties. In attempting to deduce 
 from this idea what the absolute is, it is found to be in itself un- 
 intelligible and unthinkable, a mere symbol of the cessation of 
 thought; and any revelation of it to a rational mind is there- 
 fore impossible. 
 
 The idea of the absolute has also been falsely identified with 
 the idea of the All, the mathematical sum total of all that is. 
 
174 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Thus conceived it would be the sum of all things ; it would be 
 composed of parts; it would be limited. The absolute Being, 
 thus falsely conceived, would involve contradiction and absurdity; 
 it would be in itself unintelligible and unthinkable. Hamilton 
 exemplifies this: "Does not the infinite contain the finite? If it 
 does, then it contains what has parts and is divisible ; if it does 
 not, then it is exclusive ; the finite is out of the infinite ; and the 
 infinite is conditioned, limited, restricted, finite." l 
 
 Another false idea of the absolute is that it is the universal, 
 which resolves itself into the indeterminate. In forming a gen- 
 eral notion by resemblance, as we enlarge the extent of the no- 
 tion we exclude, more and more qualities from its content. The 
 notion, animal, has fewer essential qualities than the notion, 
 horse. If we continue to enlarge the extent, the ultimate notion 
 would exclude all distinctive qualities; it would have no essence 
 and would be entirely indeterminate. It would be the same as 
 nothing. If it is called Pure Being it is not the less indetermi- 
 nate. We simply hypostasize the copula is. Here again the 
 absolute must be unknowable and unthinkable in itself, a mere 
 symbol of the cessation of thought. Thus we have the error, 
 common both in theology and philosophy, of mistaking the pro- 
 cesses and creations of logical thought for concrete beings, their 
 actions and relations ; of shutting the mind within abstract 
 thought, the objects of which are general notions, and neglecting 
 concrete thinking, the objects of which are real beings and their 
 real interactions. 
 
 A third source of agnosticism is, that in developing the idea of 
 the absolute the reasoning rests on the false maxim that all defi- 
 nition limits. 2 
 
 This maxim sweeps the whole board. In applying it, it is 
 said that the absolute cannot be a personal being, because per- 
 sonality would distinguish it from the impersonal, and therefore 
 would limit it. But the same would be true of every attribute 
 and every act and every mode of existence. The absolute can- 
 not be a power, nor a being, nor even absolute, because these 
 predications define and therefore limit it. 
 
 And to this length some agnostics actually carry the applica- 
 tion of the maxim. They insist that the absolute Being is lim- 
 ited and ceases to be the absolute, if it has any known attributes, 
 if it acts in producing any finite being or any effects in time, if 
 
 1 Letter to H. Calclerwood, Metaphysics, p. 685. 
 8 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 1 76-1 78. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 175 
 
 it coexists with finite beings, if finite beings have real existence, 
 if the absolute is not both the finite and the infinite, the good 
 and the evil, the holy and the sinful, the subject of all incompat- 
 ible qualities, if it is in any relation to anything, or distinct from 
 anything, if it can be in any way defined. It is then divested of 
 every quality, power and attribute of a being, it is the subject 
 of all qualities and yet of none, the unity of all contradictions. 
 In developing this application of the maxim Mr. Mansel says : 
 kt lt is obvious that the infinite cannot be distinguished as such 
 from the finite, by the absence of any quality which the finite 
 possesses ; for such absence would be a limitation." But as 
 finiteness means limitation we have here the grave assertion that 
 the absence of limitation from the infinite would be a limitation 
 of the infinite. And the whole argument founded on this maxim 
 is on a level with this logomachy. Thus the absolute becomes 
 a zero, a symbol of the cessation of thought. Hamilton himself 
 says : " A negative notion is only the negation of a notion ; we 
 think only by the attribution of certain qualities, and the nega- 
 tion of these qualities and of this attribution is simply in so far a 
 denial of our thinking at all. . . . The infinite is conceived only 
 by the thinking away of every character by which the finite was 
 conceived ; in other words, we conceive it only as inconceivable." 
 Hamilton tells us that we have a negative knowledge of the 
 absolute and that a negative knowledge is no knowledge ; yet 
 he defines the absolute and subdivides it, and argues at length 
 what it must be and what it cannot be, in order to prove that we 
 can have no knowledge whatever of what it is. Thus agnostics, 
 while making the strongest affirmations that the absolute Being 
 exists, resort to arguments to prove that we do not know what it 
 is, which equally prove that it is not known to exist ; and more 
 than this, which not merely prove that the absolute, as these 
 arguments assume it to be, does not exist, but also that it is a 
 mere symbol of the cessation of all thought and intelligence. 
 
 The maxim that all definition limits is pertinent to a log- 
 ical general notion or a mathematical sum total, not to a con- 
 crete being. The arguments of agnostics are conclusive as to 
 the false ideas of the absolute which they hold, but have no 
 force against our knowledge of the real absolute or uncon- 
 ditioned being, whose existence the universe reveals as its ulti- 
 mate ground. The more powers a being manifests, the more 
 reality of being it reveals. But the more powers it reveals, the 
 more determinate it is. There are fewer beings like it ; fewer 
 
176 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 in the class designated by the general name. The increased 
 determinateness, which restricts the logical general notion to 
 fewer beings, greatens the beings. And when we come to the 
 absolute Being, which is one and reveals itself in all the powers 
 of the universe, it is the Being at once the most determinate 
 and the greatest of all. It is not necessary that the absolute be 
 everything to prevent its being limited by that which it is not. 
 The existence of finite beings dependent on the absolute Being 
 is no limitation of the absolute. On the contrary, if the abso- 
 lute Being could not manifest itself in finite beings dependent on 
 itself, that inability would be a limitation of it. 
 
 It follows from what has been said that this agnosticism, in 
 denying the possibility of knowing what the absolute is, involves 
 the denial of the possibility of knowing any being. If thought 
 vanishes into zero at the absolute it is impotent to give real 
 knowledge either of the absolute or of the finite. If there is no 
 absolute Being, there is nothing which gives reality, power, unity 
 and continuity to the universe, and the universe itself is an illu- 
 sion, an endlessly shifting phantasmagoria which effects nothing, 
 means nothing, is nothing. Thus this agnosticism, if it is not 
 allowed to contradict and nullify itself by ascribing power and 
 other attributes to the so-called unknowable, as Mr. Spencer 
 does, must contradict itself and nullify all knowledge by affirm- 
 ing the existence of a being of which it knows nothing, a 
 continuous revelation of that being which reveals nothing, and 
 the existence of a being which is annulled if we ascribe to it 
 any essential quality of a being. Thus this partial agnosticism 
 by logical necessity passes over into a complete agnosticism or 
 universal skepticism. It starts with assuming that rational intu- 
 ition arises merely from mental impotence ; it proceeds to the 
 assumption that the knowledge of the absolute is merely the 
 negation of knowledge ; and it issues in the necessity of infer- 
 ring mental impotence to know anything. It is the Nirvana of 
 the intellect, by absorption into which it realizes its highest pos- 
 sibilities by the cessation of all thought in the negative knowl- 
 edge of absolute Being. 
 
 Mr. Huxley boasts that he "invented the word agnostic." 
 It was an ill-omened invention ; for the word etymological! y 
 denotes the negation of all knowledge, and is synonymous with 
 universal skepticism. Perhaps he builded better than he knew ; 
 for the way of thinking to which he applied this name, neces- 
 sarily involves universal skepticism a?s its ultimate logical issue. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 177 
 
 Professor Huxley, in his volume on Hume, claims him " as the 
 protagonist of that more modern way of thinking which has been 
 called agnosticism." He seems to imagine that the agnostics 
 are teaching Hume's philosophy and may avail themselves of his 
 arguments in affirming the knowledge of the physical world and 
 of the existence of the absolute Being, while denying all knowl- 
 edge of what that being is. But this is a misapprehension. 
 Hume's teaching was that if through the senses we know only 
 impressions, then the ideas of the mind are equally destitute of 
 substantial reality, and all knowledge disappears. His theory 
 of knowledge coincides with the complete positivism of Comte 
 rather than with agnosticism as expounded by Mr. Spencer. 
 The latter in his exposition of agnosticism though in his other 
 writings often inconsistent with it gives us a theory of positive 
 knowledge of finite beings, and of the absolute Being as existing 
 and manifesting itself in the universe. In this he is more in 
 harmony with theism than with any theory of phenomenalism. 
 If the arguments for phenomenalism are also arguments for mod- 
 ern agnosticism, it is because Hamilton, Mansel and others, and 
 sometimes Mr. Spencer himself, assume principles which logically 
 lead to it. 
 
 Mr. Spencer's own principle that the absolute is omnipresent 
 Power manifesting itself in the universe in all phenomena, as 
 well as his habit of reasoning from facts, should have led him 
 to adopt the theistic method, and study what the absolute is by 
 observing what it has manifested or revealed of itself in the 
 universe. So far as he has failed to do so he is inconsistent with 
 himself. But in this principle he affirms a real knowledge of 
 what the absolute is, declaring that it is omnipresent Power. 
 Thus he contradicts his agnosticism and takes a position which 
 fully justifies the theist in his further conclusion that the absolute 
 is the absolute omnipresent Spirit as well as the absolute omni- 
 present Power. While Mr. Spencer approves the agnosticism of 
 Hamilton and Mansel and adopts large extracts from them as 
 expressing his own views, he criticises and rejects their position 
 that we have only a negative knowledge of the absolute Being ; 
 he insists that the knowledge of it is positive, and declares in 
 various particulars what is positively known of it. He says, in 
 further criticism of Hamilton's agnosticism : " If the non-relative 
 or absolute is present in thought only as a mere negation, then 
 the relation between it and the relative becomes unthinkable. 
 . . . And if this relation is unthinkable, then the relative itself 
 12 
 
178 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 is unthinkable, for want of its antithesis ; whence results the dis- 
 appearance of all thought whatever." 1 
 
 The possession of the idea of the absolute is in itself proof 
 that man is competent to know what the absolute is. The idea 
 has been prominent in human thought ever since philosophy 
 began. No mind that thinks far can avoid coming in sight of it. 
 It is present not only in human thought, but more or less dis- 
 tinctly in all religions, and thus has been a powerful factor in 
 human history. And in face of all speculations that it can be 
 known only negatively, the fact is that it has been held as a dis- 
 tinctively positive idea, involved in the idea of God. I do not 
 urge this here as proof that absolute Being exists, for this the 
 agnostic affirms. But it is proof that if it exists the human mind 
 is competent to know positively, though not completely, what it 
 is. If it does not thus know it, it must be because the absolute 
 Being has not revealed itself within the range of man's knowl- 
 edge, not because man is incompetent to know it if revealed. 
 And if the finiteness of man makes it impossible for him to 
 know what the absolute Being is, then so long as he is finite 
 it is equally impossible for any revelation to introduce into that 
 finite mind either the idea of the absolute Being or the knowl- 
 edge of its existence. Yet these agnostics, while holding that 
 man's finiteness precludes all knowledge of what the absolute 
 Being is, affirm both that he has the idea of it and the knowl- 
 edge that it exists, and that it is revealed in all the phenomena, 
 powers and processes of the universe. 
 
 It must also be noticed that the absolute, the existence of 
 which is declared by the agnostics to be known, carries in it the 
 idea of being. Existence implies a being that exists. The power 
 in which it manifests itself cannot be separated from the being; 
 it is the phenomenon in which the being appears. Therefore 
 the assertion of the existence of absolute Being carries in it the 
 assertion of positive knowledge of what the absolute Being is. 
 Being implies at least power that persists in unity and identity ; 
 -so much of positive knowledge of the absolute Being is implied 
 in the assertion that it is known to exist. 
 
 These agnostics go further than the recognition of the abso- 
 lute as Being. Hamilton, while declaring that we have no posi- 
 tive knowledge of the unconditioned, proceeds to classify it as a 
 genus having two species, the absolute and the infinite. He also 
 teaches that " in the very consciousness of our inability to con- 
 1 First Principles, 13, 20, 24, 26. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 179 
 
 ceive aught above the relative and the finite, we are inspired 
 with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned." l 
 This unknowable unconditioned he presents as the object of 
 faith and of religion. Mr. Mansel, in The Limits of Religious 
 Thought, carried out Hamilton's conclusion as a basis of reli- 
 gious belief and a defense of Christian faith against the objec- 
 tions of skeptics. He thus exposed himself to the severe but 
 merited rebuke of John Stuart Mill : " A view of religion which 
 I hold to be profoundly immoral that it is our duty to worship 
 a being whose moral attributes are affirmed, to be unknowable 
 by us and to be perhaps extremely different from those which, 
 whenever speaking of our fellow-creatures, we call by the same 
 name." " If, instead of the glad tidings that there exists a Be- 
 ing in whom all the excellences of which the highest human 
 mind' can conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am in- 
 formed that the world is ruled by a Being whose attributes are 
 infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the 
 principles of his government, except that 'the highest human 
 morality which we are capable of conceiving ' does not sanc- 
 tion them ; convince me of it and I will bear my fate as I may. 
 But when I am told that I must believe this and at the same 
 time call this Being by the names which express and affirm the 
 highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. 
 Whatever power such a Being may have over me, there is one 
 thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship 
 him." 2 
 
 Both Hamilton and Mansel fall into further inconsistency in 
 affirming that in the future life men will know God ; as Ham- 
 ilton says, " without limitation ; " as Mansel says, " the light 
 which now gleams in restless flashes from the ruffled waters 
 of the human soul will settle into the steadfast image of God's 
 face shining on its unbroken surface." But their philosophy 
 rests on the supposition that the finite is shut out, because it is 
 finite, from knowing what the infinite or unconditioned is. God 
 then must continue unknowable, as really as now, in the future 
 life and so long as God is infinite and man is finite. Here 
 the deeper reason breaks through their subtle logomachy and 
 unawares they take a position inconsistent with their philosophy 
 and implying that the absolute is not in itself unknowable by a 
 
 1 Philosophy of the Conditioned, Wight's Hamilton, p. 457. 
 
 2 Mill's Autobiography, p. 375. Examination of Hamilton, vol. i. pp. 
 130, 131. 
 
180 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 finite mind, but may be known more and more with the pro- 
 gressive development of the mind. In fact their position here 
 seems to imply, what must be forever impossible, that a finite 
 mind in the life after death may comprehend completely what 
 the absolute Being is. 
 
 Mr. Fiske, in liis Cosmic Philosophy, says of the absolute : 
 " There exists a POWER to which no limit in time or space is 
 conceivable, of which all phenomena, as presented in conscious- 
 ness, are manifestations, but which we can only know through 
 these manifestations." This doctrine he calls" Cosmic Theism." 
 In a more recent volume he says : " The term Unknowable I 
 have carefully refrained from using." In presenting his view 
 of the absolute he says that it is not sufficient to regard it as 
 physical power, but we must also recognize it as psychical ; that 
 an anthropomorphic element is indispensable ; that " the total 
 elimination of anthropomorphism from the idea of God abol- 
 ishes the idea itself ; " that a teleology must be recognized in 
 the universe; that "the glorious consummation toward which 
 organic evolution is tending is the production of the highest 
 and most perfect psychical life ; " and that " always bearing in 
 mind the symbolic character of the words, we may say that God 
 is Spirit." i 
 
 Mr. Spencer has been emphatic in affirming that the Absolute 
 is the Unknowable, and that the question what it is cannot be 
 answered ; it is, as Mr. Harrison put it, " an ever present conun- 
 drum to be everlastingly given up." But in evident inconsistency 
 with this, he has always declared the absolute Unknowable to be 
 omnipresent Power, manifesting itself in all the phenomena of 
 the universe. In a recent article in reply to a criticism by Mr. 
 Harrison, he has expressed himself anew with great explicitness. 2 
 He cites passages from his published works in which he main- 
 tains against Hamilton and Mansel that " our consciousness of 
 the absolute is not negative but positive, and is the one inde- 
 structible element of consciousness ' which persists at all times, 
 under all circumstances, and cannot cease until consciousness 
 ceases.' " He cites passages in which he has refused to accept 
 the Comtian positivism, " and in the most emphatic way declined 
 thus to commit intellectual suicide ; " and, in opposition to Comte, 
 he adds, " So far from regarding that which transcends phenom- 
 
 1 The Idea of God, pp. xvii., xxv. , 135, 138, 160, 111-116. See also Tho 
 Destiny of Man. 
 
 2 Retrogressive Religion, Nineteenth Century, July, 1884. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 181 
 
 ena as ' The All-Nothingness,' I regard it as the All-Being." He 
 defends his definition of the Unknowable, as " an Infinite and 
 Eternal Energy from which all things proceed ; " and says that 
 he originally wrote, " an Infinite and Eternal Energy by which 
 all things are created and sustained ; " and that though, to pre- 
 vent misunderstanding, he changed the last clause in correcting 
 the proof, " the words did not express more than I meant." Mr. 
 Spencer says : " The final outcome of that speculation commenced 
 by the primitive man is that the Power manifested throughout 
 the Universe distinguished as material is the same power which 
 in ourselves wells up in the form of consciousness. . . . This 
 necessity we are under, to think of external energy in terms of 
 the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a material- 
 istic aspect to the Universe." 
 
 Mr. Spencer avows that he has positive knowledge of the 
 absolute, that he knows it as Being, and as a Power ever present 
 and ever manifested in the universe, both in nature and in the 
 form of consciousness. He might legitimately go much farther ; 
 with logical consistency he might be a theist rather than an 
 agnostic. A cause or power manifested in its action and effects 
 cannot be unknown. In whatever particulars we may be ignorant 
 of what it is, we must at least know what it manifests in the 
 specific actions and effects. And if the absolute is an ever pres- 
 ent Being manifesting its power in the universe, it must be a 
 oause adequate to the effects produced, and thus must be contin- 
 uously revealing what it is. Instead of stopping in agnosticism, 
 Mr. Spencer might with more logical consistency unite with the 
 theist in his adoring exclamation: "The heavens declare the glory 
 of God, and the firmament showeth the work of his hands." 
 
 The theist holds that man's knowledge of the absolute Being 
 is always inadequate. But studying the constitution and course 
 of nature and the constitution and history of man, he finds the 
 absolute Being revealed as the absolute Spirit, the God of wisdom 
 and love. And in this way we may find a true meaning even in 
 Cousin's position, that the absolute is cognizable and conceiva- 
 ble by consciousness and reflection under relation, difference and 
 plurality ; that is, that it may be apprehended in thought, dis- 
 tinguished from the universe and known in unity with the uni- 
 verse, constituting it a dynamic, rational and moral system. 
 
 The conclusion is obvious. The absolute Being is not unknow- 
 able in itself. There are no reasonable grounds for any agnosti- 
 cism other than this, that man, knowing that the absolute Being 
 
182 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 exists, has also a real knowledge of what it is, a knowledge which 
 may be forever progressive bat must be forever incomplete. This 
 theism always recognizes and the Christian Scriptures sublimely 
 declare. God is known, the absolute Spirit, perfect in wisdom 
 and love, yet always transcending us. " Clouds and darkness 
 are round about him ; righteousness and judgment are the foun- 
 dation of his throne. Mercy and truth go before his face. Mercy 
 and truth are met together ; righteousness and peace have kissed 
 each other." (Psalms xcvii. 2, Ixxxix. 14, Ixxxv. 10.) 
 
 III. PANTHEISM. The refutation of pantheism, as of all 
 forms of atheism, is found in the positive evidence 'of the existence 
 of God, which will be considered hereafter. A full examination 
 of pantheism within the limits of this chapter is impossible and 
 will not be attempted. 
 
 1. Pantheism is the theory that the absolute is the one and 
 only substance, never as transitive cause creating or causing any 
 effect, but within itself evolving and evolved, and without con- 
 sciousness or personality. 
 
 Other names of the absolute have been substituted for sub- 
 stance, and thus pantheism appears in different forms. But in 
 all its forms it is unchanged in its essential principles and the 
 argument is essentially the same. 
 
 Spinoza recognizes as underlying the universe but one nou- 
 menon or thing in itself, the one only substance, the same in all 
 plu-nomena ; of this, thought and extension are the attributes, 
 and all finite beings are the modes in which that one substance 
 exists and is manifested. And this is what constitutes the re- 
 ality of the universe. 
 
 " No essence into nought resolveth ; 
 The Eternal through all forms revolveth ; 
 In Being hold thyself well blessed. 
 For Being is eternal ; deep 
 And everlasting laws do keep 
 The treasures whence the All comes dressed." Goethe. 
 
 In pantheism the transitive cause is not recognized. The one 
 Being can cause no effect ad extra. Nothing has been created, 
 nothing has been caused. The action of the universe is a per- 
 petual evolving of the absolute substance into its various modes 
 of existence, but never exerting any power or producing any 
 effect beyond itself. It is an eternal and absolute evolving or 
 becoming. But its efficiency is always immanent, never tran- 
 sitive. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 183 
 
 " To recreate the old creation, 
 All things work on in fastjotation, 
 Lest aught grow fixed and change resist; 
 And what was not shall spring to birth, 
 As purest sun or painted earth 
 God's universe can know no rest. 
 It must go on creating, changing, 
 Through endless shapes forever ranging, 
 And rest we only seem to see. 
 The Eternal lives through all revolving ; 
 For all must ever keep dissolving 
 Would it continue still to be." Goethe, Eins und Alhs. 
 
 Accordingly Spinoza teaches that the universe evolving and 
 the universe evolved in identity is God. " Natura naturans et 
 natura naturata in identitate est Dens." And these cannot be 
 separated. As a quality is nothing apart from the substance of 
 which it is a quality, the universe is nothing apart from the abso- 
 lute Being which is its substance. The same is true of all things 
 in the universe. Spinoza says : " Individual things are nothing 
 more than affections of the attributes of God or modes by which 
 the attributes of God are expressed in certain determinate man- 
 ners." 1 Finite things are not real beings. They are merely 
 modes into which the absolute evolves and in which for the time 
 being it is revealed. So soon as the absolute Being evolves into 
 another mode, the finite person or thing ceases to be, as a shadow 
 ceases to be when the body which cast it is no more. On the 
 other hand the absolute, apart from its manifestation in the uni- 
 verse, is, like a substance without qualities, entirely indetermi- 
 nate, a mere zero. It is only in and through the universe that 
 God is. 2 
 
 Hence pantheists properly insist that they are misrepresented 
 when they are charged with teaching that everything is God. 
 Everything and even the phenomenal universe itself apart from 
 the one only substance that is evolving, is not God ; it is not 
 anything. The whole only is God, and it is the only being. So 
 the Indian Brahmans argue : " The Ganges is navigable by ships ; 
 but a portion of Ganges water in a wash-basin is not navigable 
 by ships." 
 
 This world-process, this evolving of the one only substance 
 into its various modes, goes on in impersonality and entire uncon^ 
 
 1 Ethics, part i., Corollary to Prop. xxv. 
 
 2 " Est-ne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aer 
 
 Et ccelum et virtus ? Superos quid quaerimus ultra ? 
 Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris." 
 
184 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 sciousness. Spinoza ascribes to the one substance the two attri- 
 butes of thought and extension. But he takes pains to tell us 
 and to repeat the saying, that the thought or intelligence of God 
 has no more in common with human intelligence, than the celes- 
 tial constellation, the Dog, has in common with a barking dog 
 on earth, and perhaps even much less. 1 In the entire evolution 
 there is neither conscious intelligence nor will. Intelligence may 
 be ascribed to the absolute in this process, as it is ascribed to 
 a circle or a steam-engine; it evinces intelligence, but it is not 
 itself intelligent. In the world-process the absolute comes to 
 conscious intelligence first in man. So Schelling says: "Nature 
 sleeps in the plant, dreams in the animal, awakes in man." The 
 pantheistic absolute, therefore, is a substance wholly indetermi- 
 nate, a zero to the thought. It is eternally circling within it- 
 self and evolving into the universe, without consciousness, with- 
 out plan or purpose or freedom, without causal efficiency or tran- 
 sitive power. 
 
 2. Pantheism rests on no reasonable grounds and the arguments 
 in support of it are invalid. 
 
 First, it rests on a false theory of knowledge. It assumes that 
 knowledge begins as the knowledge of the universal, not of the 
 particular. And because it assumes that the absolute is the one 
 only being, it necessarily denies the real being of finite persons 
 and things. Thus it contradicts the fundamental fact that hu- 
 man knowledge begins as the knowledge of self and of an outward 
 object presented in consciousness and perceived in one and the 
 same mental action, and thus is in its beginning the knowledge 
 of being. Herein pantheism also contradicts all human conscious- 
 ness. The concrete, determinate, individual being is the ulti- 
 m ite unit of all thought; as such it is present in all knowledge, 
 is implied in all laws of thought and all ideas of reason, and is 
 essential in all reality. It is known immediately in the knowl- 
 edge of self and is necessarily postulated in the knowledge of 
 bodies, as the atom, molecule, or the ultimate unit of matter by 
 whatever name it may be called. 
 
 Pantheism is thus in direct contradiction to science, which be- 
 gins with observing particulars, ascertains their real relations and 
 unities, and thus proceeds to the general and universal as con- 
 crete systems of real beings in the unity of dynamic and rational 
 relations. Pantheism, on the contrary, beginning with the uni- 
 versal, finds the unity of all things in the absolute and only One, 
 1 CogUata Mctaphysica, part ii. 3. Ethics, part i., Prop. xvii. Scholium. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 185 
 
 of whose existence finite beings are but modes. It finds the unity 
 of the universe only by the crude and clumsy expedient of iden- 
 tifying the absolute and the finite, the All and the One. The 
 roots of pantheism in all its forms are cat through by every sci- 
 ence which recognizes men as personal beings in a moral system, 
 or atoms or any ultimate units of matter in a physical system, or 
 which discovers many beings in any system in unity through dy- 
 namic and rational relations. 
 
 A necessary logical inference from pantheism is that real 
 knowledge is impossible to man. The knowledge of being begins 
 in the knowledge of self in the perception of an outward reality. 
 Beginning thus, it is the knowledge of being through all its pro- 
 cesses and progress. But if, as pantheism teaches, the knowledge 
 of self, and of external things in which knowledge begins, is un- 
 real and illusive, then knowledge in all its processes and progress 
 is equally unreal and illusive, and universal skepticism is the 
 necessary issue. 
 
 Thus pantheism rests on a totally false theory of human knowl- 
 edge. It is in direct contradiction to physical science and to the 
 natural realism on which it rests; and also to the rational real- 
 ism which explains and justifies the reality of human knowledge 
 and is the basis of all sound philosophy. Extremes meet. Pan- 
 theism, which at the outset seems at the farthest remove from 
 positivism and all phenomenalism, is, through its own essential 
 errors, brought round by logical necessity to identity with them. 
 
 A second criticism is that pantheism assumes a purely a priori 
 idea of what the absolute is, and its argument is only an analysis 
 or unfolding of the contents of that idea, or inferences from what 
 is implied in it. That the absolute Being exists as the ultimate 
 ground of the universe and is manifested in it, is a self-evident 
 and ultimate law of thought. What it is can be known only by 
 studying its self-revelation in the universe. The pantheist, on 
 the contrary, creates a priori an idea of what the absolute is. In 
 his argument he merely takes out what he himself had put in. 
 The different forms of pantheism are characterized by different 
 ideas of the absolute ; but in all it is open to this criticism. 
 
 Spinoza, for example, assumes that the absolute Being is the 
 one only Substance. He says : " By substance I mean that which 
 is in itself and is conceived per se ; that is, the conception of 
 which does not require the conception of anything else antece- 
 dent to it." * Here he defines substance as the absolute Being. 
 1 Ethics, part i., Definition 3. 
 
186 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 His argument becomes a mere begging of the question. Having 
 defined substance as the absolute Being, he proceeds to argue that 
 the absolute Being is the one only substance. 
 
 Pantheism assumes that the absolute is the one only being and 
 there can be no other. This contradicts all human consciousness. 
 Ifc has no warrant in reason. The existence of one being is 110 
 contradiction to the existence of another. For what reason does 
 the pantheist affirm that there can be no other? He includes 
 self-existence in his definition of a being. Then he presents his 
 definition in the form of an inference and affirms that only one 
 being can exist and there cannot be another. He argues, further, 
 that there can be but one being, because, if there were two coex- 
 istent beings, they could not act on each other ; each would be 
 shut up within its own separate being and could not act on the 
 other nor in any way come into communication with it. Here 
 again pantheism contradicts the common consciousness of man- 
 kind as well as all science ; for both affirm the knowledge of be- 
 ings coexisting and interacting. The pantheist is driven to this 
 contradiction only by his own preconceived definition of being. 
 
 Spinoza argues from the maxim that if things have nothing in 
 common, one of them cannot exert any causal energy on the 
 other. 1 From this it is inferred that, because the absolute or in- 
 finite and the finite have nothing in common, neither can act on 
 the other. The maxim is true and important in its legitimate 
 application. Motor-force in the cause must be motor-force in the 
 effect ; it cannot be transformed into thought ; thought cannot 
 lift weights nor be measured by foot-pounds ; likeness of rational 
 constitution is necessary to rational intercommunication. But in 
 these cases the unlikeness is of positive power and quality, not a 
 mere inequality of quantity. But the unlikeness of the infinite 
 and the finite is rather an inequality of quantity than an' nnlike- 
 ness of positive quality or power. Man as a rational, free, moral 
 being is like God in positive powers and qualities, however de- 
 pendent on God or inferior by limitation in time and space, and 
 in quantity or degree of intelligence and power. The inference 
 that this is impossible, is drawn only from some a priori and false 
 idea of the absolute Being. 
 
 A third criticism is that, in developing his a priori idea of the 
 absolute, the pantheist's argument is commonly vitiated by sub- 
 stituting logical general notions for actual beings and logical pro- 
 cesses of thought for the dynamic energies and orderly processes 
 1 Ethics, part i., Prop. iii. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 187 
 
 of the universe. Hence the reasoning assumes as a maxim that 
 all definition or determinateness limits. For this, as we have 
 seen, is true of mathematical totals and of logical general notions, 
 but not of real beings. On the contrary the more determinate 
 and definite a being is by multiplied powers and increased com- 
 plexity of constitution, the higher it is in the order of being. 
 The determinateness does not limit the being, but makes it 
 greater. 
 
 Sometimes the pantheistic idea of the absolute is that of a 
 mathematical total of all things. Oftener the absolute is thought 
 as the largest logical general notion, and therefore indeterminate. 
 
 This fallacy is exempli'fied in the thinking of Hartmann ; he 
 says that God is not identical with every individual thing, as the 
 individual sheep is not the flock ; still the universe as a whole is 
 God. As the flock is nothing without the sheep, so God is noth- 
 ing without the world. That is, God sustains the same relation 
 to the world that .the idea of the flock sustains to the individual 
 sheep. Others, describing the relation of God to the world, have 
 said, as the general notion, tree, is nothing for itself, but has 
 reality only in the individual trees, so God has being only in the 
 world, and is existent only as the world. 1 Plainly here God is 
 to the world only what a logical general notion is to the indi- 
 viduals included under it. Pantheists appeal to the fact that 
 the mind necessarily seeks the unity of the manifold ; this they 
 exemplify in the tendency to logical generalization, in which 
 individuals are thought in a general notion under a common 
 name. Man, they say, can never be satisfied in his thinking 
 till for all thought a highest unity is found, which is the most 
 general idea and includes all individuals. Thought as thus built 
 up to unity in a general idea they sometimes compare to a pyra- 
 mid, the common idea, which includes all the individuals in a 
 unity, being the apex. And the All in this unity of the ultimate 
 general notion is the All in One, or the absolute Being. The 
 same is exemplified in Hegel's Universal. This is not a resting- 
 place for thought, satisfied in finding the solution of the ultimate 
 problem of reason, but a cessation of thought through its impo- 
 tence to generalize any further ; its necessary problem as to the 
 reality and unity of the universe remains unsolved, thought is 
 balked rather than satisfied and continues restless in a fruitless 
 activity, finding no final explanation of anything. But the 
 necessary problem of reason is solved in the unity of the universe 
 1 Fliigel, Die Spekulative Theologie der Gegenwart, pp. 60, 120. 
 
188 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 as a concrete system dependent on God, the absolute Reason, 
 progressively realizing the truths, laws, ideals and ends of his 
 perfect wisdom and love. Thought cannot penetrate behind the 
 absolute Reason and comprehend it. Yet in its light human 
 reason finds the solution of its ultimate and necessary problems, 
 and is enabled to make continual advance in the knowledge of 
 
 o 
 
 God, and of the universe in its relations to him. Though God 
 is the greatest of mysteries, he is the solution of all. The dark- 
 ness and clouds which are round about him are gathered from 
 the face of the universe, leaving it in light. If God is lost to 
 thought, the mystery that had enshrouded him spreads over all 
 things, and again to human view the universe is chaos, and dark- 
 ness is on the face of the deep. 
 
 Thus pantheistic reasoning is little more than an analysis and 
 distribution of the contents of a general notion already formed. 
 To it is applicable the sneer sometimes applied to all philosoph- 
 ical reasoning, that it only takes out what it had first put in. 
 With whatever satisfaction the conclusion is reached, it is like 
 the gusto with which one relishes the stuffing of a roasted fowl ; 
 he has only taken out what he had previously put in. 1 Some- 
 times the reasoning implies that the universal has caused or pro- 
 duced the particular, the genus the species, and the species the 
 individual. Accordingly we find writers arguing against pan- 
 theism that the universal cannot be the cause of the particular, 
 the genus of the species, the tree of the birch, beech and linden, 
 because the distinctive qualities of the species are not contained 
 in the genus. And these writers themselves seem entirely un- 
 aware that the real fallacy is the substitution of a logical, general 
 notion for God. 
 
 3. Pantheism involves contradictions. Contradiction is often 
 involved in its assumed idea of what the absolute is. It is 
 thought without a thinker; an Ego or Reason or Spirit without 
 consciousness or personality ; being identical with nothing ; pure 
 action with no being that acts. 
 
 Contradiction is involved in its maxims. It cannot be the sub- 
 ject of any attribute ; for to attribute to it any quality or power 
 would define and limit it. It cannot be a cause, because that 
 would distinguish it from the effect ; it cannot create a finite 
 being and thus reveal itself in a finite universe of real beings, 
 
 1 " Ein philosophischer Begriff gebratener Gans entspricht; 
 Dass sie von selber Aepfel frass', gesehen hab' ich's nicht. 
 Doch. jeder freut des Inhalts sich, wenn man sie bringt zum Sckmaus ; 
 Das, was man hat hineingethan, nimmt wieder man heraus." 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 189 
 
 physical and spiritual, because it would be limited by the exist- 
 ence of any being other than itself. But in thus guarding the 
 absolute, the pantheist limits it ; the absolute is shut up within 
 itself and cannot cause any effect external to itself. Should it 
 cause the least effect external to itself, should it give being to a 
 single grain of sand or a single rational person, it would annul 
 its own absoluteness, it would destroy itself. 
 
 Another contradiction in pantheism is that it affirms that the 
 same being is at once absolute and finite, unconditioned and con- 
 ditioned. But this is unthinkable. The actual issue is that, 
 while the pantheist speaks of the two as really one, he has to de- 
 termine which of the two is the one. He may think of the Ab- 
 solute as the One that is the All. Or the universe may be re- 
 garded as the All that is the One. In the latter case, the One 
 of Parmenides and the Eleatics, fixed and unchanging through 
 all changes, is found to resolve itself into the never-ceasing flux 
 of Heraclitus ; the doctrine that something eternal stands resolves 
 itself into the doctrine that everything flows. Some pantheists 
 even affirm an absolute becoming (das absolut Werden). But 
 an absolute becoming is precisely the ceaseless flux of Heraclitus, 
 in which nothing persists and therefore nothing subsists. The 
 absolute itself as the absolute becoming, is not the eternal Being, 
 but the eternally transient and phenomenal ; and this is unthink- 
 able and absurd. 
 
 A further contradiction arises in. the attempt to think the pan- 
 theistic evolution of the absolute into the universe. If the 
 absolute is perfect, then the evolution is of the perfect into the 
 imperfect. According to Spinoza's pantheism, if the absolute is 
 the one only substance, then as substance it is wholly indeter- 
 minate. Then by evolution into the finite it becomes determi- 
 nate and therefore, as the pantheist always assumes, imperfect. 
 This is what is sometimes called "the fall of the absolute." If, 
 on the other hand, determinateness is a perfection and the evolu- 
 tion, which at last reaches conscious intelligence and freedom, is 
 a progressive realization of the higher and the better, then the 
 primitive substance was imperfect and is being gradually devel- 
 oped to perfection. This Litter is the type of German panthe- 
 ism. Its God is at the end of the process not at its beginning. 
 The absolute comes to consciousness in man ; man is the highest 
 being in the universe. The philosopher who is expounding pan- 
 theism is a person conscious and intelligent ; the absolute Being 
 is not. The finite then is of a higher order and nearer to perfec- 
 tion than the absolute. 
 
190 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Spinoza says that the absolute without attributes would be en- 
 tirely indeterminate ; he therefore ascribes to it the two attributes 
 of extension and thought. But this only reveals the contradic- 
 tion in a new form. He affirms that extension is an attribute of 
 God, yet God is incorporeal ; and thought is an attribute of God, 
 yet God is not an intelligent being, not a rational personal Spirit. 
 Moreover bodies are said to be modes of extension, while exten- 
 sion has no significance except as a property of a body ; and 
 thought is an attribute of God, yet it has no likeness to anything 
 which we know as thought and is therefore a mere zero. Then 
 God's two attributes are extension which makes him limited in 
 space, and a zero. All then which we know of God is that he is 
 extended in space. 
 
 Pantheism, therefore, issues in complete agnosticism ; as we 
 push out upon the vast and misty wild we find ourselves driven 
 up and down in 
 
 " a dark 
 
 Illimitable ocean, without bound, 
 
 Without dimension, where length, breadth and height, 
 
 And time and place are lost.'' 
 
 4. As a theory of the universe, pantheism proves itself inade- 
 quate to account for it or to solve the necessary problems of rea- 
 son arising in the investigation of it. 
 
 Pantheism not only assumes an a priori idea of the absolute, 
 but the idea thus assumed is false. It is either substance alone, 
 leaving out both causal energy and rational personality ; or it is 
 an idea alone, an unconscious abstraction of thought, without sub- 
 stance, or causal energy, or personal reason. 
 
 Recourse is had to pantheism to escape certain metaphysical 
 difficulties in conceiving the creation of the universe. True phi- 
 losophy however accepts the fact that a finite mind can never 
 conceive or picture the mode in which God creates. To create is 
 the prerogative of God alone. Finite beings can never know it in 
 experience. Theism accepts this limitation of human knowledge. 
 It accepts the fact that the universe is always dependent for its 
 being on the absolute Being, that transcends it and yet always 
 manifests itself in it. It accepts the transcendence and the im- 
 manence of the absolute as facts fully substantiated to the rea- 
 son, though the mode of the creation cannot be conceived or 
 pictured by a finite mind. 
 
 Pantheism does not explain or remove any of these difficulties. 
 It arbitrarily denies the fact of creation and the reality of any 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEOEIES. 191 
 
 transitive cause ; that is, of any causal efficiency producing effects 
 external to the being exerting it. It denies both the transcend- 
 ence and the immanence of the absolute by asserting its identity 
 with the universe. It does not solve the problem ; it simply sets 
 it aside by an arbitrary assertion of identity. And when it has 
 done this, all the old difficulties remain and, as already shown, 
 new difficulties and contradictions are created. 
 
 If now we consider pantheism as a theory of the existing uni- 
 verse, we find it entirely inadequate. The bare idea of substance 
 starts the mind on no regress to find a beginning, arouses it to no 
 question as to the origin of things. An atom in solid singleness, 
 as Lucretius conceived it, when considered by itself, suggests no be- 
 ginning or change and demands no cause. In this idea of it there 
 is suggested no impossibility of its having existed forever. Hence 
 the pantheist rests on his one only substance and thinks he has 
 solved the problem of the universe, and forever silenced all ques- 
 tions as to origin and cause. But when he looks out from his 
 own abstractions into the universe as it actually exists, he finds 
 the stubborn fact that it is not a mere substance suggesting no 
 beginning and demanding no cause. Every being in it is ener- 
 gizing in intense activity. Everything carries the thought back 
 demanding a cause and a reason. The atoms themselves are no 
 longer conceived in solid singleness, but intensely energizing, per- 
 haps themselves complicated systems. Pantheism cannot ac- 
 count for the universe as it actually exists. When we ask how its 
 existence is accounted for, pantheism only reiterates, It exists. 
 When asked why it is as it is, with its mighty causal energies, 
 its order and laws, its progressive realization of ideals, its com- 
 plex systems, its scientific constitution, its rationality, wisdom, 
 love and religion, pantheism mumbles, It is the one only sub- 
 stance. If asked how the never-ceasing energizing is accounted 
 for, pantheism answers that it is the absolute and unconditioned 
 becoming of the one substance. It cannot account for the intel- 
 ligent direction of the universe, for the order and law pervading 
 it, nor for its existence in a scientific system comprehending in- 
 numerable beings in unity by dynamic arid rational relations. It 
 cannot tell why the realities in the universe can be apprehended 
 in their intellectual equivalents, nor why, when so apprehended, 
 they constitute science, nor why in all thinking we assume that 
 the universe in all its parts is intelligible, capable of being taken 
 up in the forms of reason and expounded in reasonable and scien- 
 tific thought. Thus pantheism, when it comes out from its closed 
 
192 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 closets of speculation to face the actual universe is found to be 
 utterly inadequate. 
 
 Theism is the only theory of the universe which harmonizes 
 with the fact that it is a rational and scientifically intelligible 
 system, and explains why it must be so. Mr. John Fiske says 
 truly : " Our reason demands that there shall be a reasonableness 
 in the constitution of things. . . . No ingenuity of argument can 
 bring us to believe that the infinite Sustainer of the universe will 
 put us to permanent intellectual confusion. . . . Our belief in 
 what we call the evidence of our senses is less strong than our 
 faitli that in the orderly sequence of events there is a meaning 
 which our minds could fathom were they only vast enough." 1 
 For explaining the universe as a reasonable and scientifically in- 
 telligible system pantheism is helpless, and equally so in all its 
 forms. 
 
 The question whether the absolute One can coexist with the 
 many appeared early in Greek philosophy. The Eleatics held 
 to the existence of the absolute One and maintained that this ex- 
 cluded the existence of the many. Plato discusses the question 
 in the Parmenides, maintaining the reality both of the absolute 
 One and of the finite many, and aiming to point out what truth 
 there was in the Eleatic doctrine. He teaches that behind the 
 phenomenal world is the world of ideas. In these ideas Plato 
 found the essential reality and the essential intelligibility of all 
 finite beings. The later Platonists recognized these ideas as the 
 archetypal thoughts of God. So Plutarch says : " An idea is 
 incorporeal and has no subsistence of itself, but gives figure and 
 form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its mani- 
 festation. Socrates and Plato conjecture that these ideas are es- 
 sences separate from matter, having their existence in the reason 
 and imagination of the Deity, that is, of mind or reason." The 
 New Platonists of Alexandria developed this thought more fully. 
 And when the conflict of Christianity began, to attain a philosoph- 
 ical basis for Christian theism amid the earnest philosophical 
 thinking of the time and against the assaults of unchristian phi- 
 losophy, Christian thinkers found one basis for it in this Platonic 
 philosophy. As Plato says : " The universe is the finite image 
 of real perfection." Therefore its evolution must be the progres- 
 sive realization of the perfection which it images, and a progres- 
 sive expression and revelation of the perfect archetype in the 
 
 1 The Idea of God, p. 138. 
 
 2 Sentiments of Nature with which Philosophers were delighted, bk. i.ch. x. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEOEIES. 193 
 
 eternal Reason. Here is a true realism and a true idealism com- 
 bined in the theory of the universe. Here is a philosophical 
 basis for modern science, which is intensely realistic and also rests 
 on the assumption of the essential intelligibility or reasonableness 
 of the universe. As resting on this rational realism, science is in 
 harmony with theism. For theism not only assumes the reality 
 and the intelligibility or reasonableness of the universe, but dis- 
 closes the reason why it is so. 
 
 In opposition to this rational realism of theism and of modern 
 science, the pantheists still perpetuate the ancient error, that only 
 one being can exist and that finite persons and things are not real 
 beings but mere modes in which the absolute one exists. The 
 Eleatic philosophy began as a pronounced ontology. But it be- 
 came more and more abstract and dialectical. In Zeno it reached 
 its legitimate issue and became little more than logical abstrac- 
 tions and even logical puzzles, and the processes of the universe 
 were confounded with processes of logic. Modern pantheism re- 
 veals the same tendency. 
 
 It is evident that the universe cannot be accounted for and ex- 
 plained by an absolute that is substance only, nor by an absolute 
 that is substance and cause only. It must be also Reason. The 
 universe can be accounted for and understood only by its relation 
 to an absolute Being that is the three in one : Substance, that is, 
 being persisting in unity and identity ; Cause, that is, being en- 
 dowed with power and energizing efficiently, the First Cause ; 
 and Reason, that is, being energizing in rational intelligence and 
 freedom. The universe, therefore, as theism theoretically con- 
 structs it. is a rational system in which a multitude of individual, 
 determinate beings are united in common dependence on God for 
 their being and powers, and which in its constitution and evolu- 
 tion is the expression of the archetypal ideas of God, the absolute 
 Reason, and the progressive realization of the ends of his wisdom 
 and love. 
 
 5. Pantheism is incompatible with free will, with moral respon- 
 sibility and obligation, and with religion. 
 
 Spinoza, it is true, uses the word freedom ; he defines it: u That 
 is said to be free which exists by the sole necessity of its nature, 
 and is determined to action by itself alone. That is necessary, 
 or rather constrained, which is determined to exist and to act in 
 a certain determinate manner by something else." Freedom as 
 thus defined can be predicated of the self-existent Being alone. 
 And even as predicated of the absolute Being, it affirms only 
 
 13 
 
194 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 that it acts according to the necessity of its nature, not by a 
 rational free choice. Freedom of the will in its proper sense, 
 as freedom to determine in the light of reason the exertion and 
 direction of energy, he explicitly denies both of God and man. 
 While he says " God alone is a free cause " in the sense of his 
 definition, he says also : " Will cannot be called a free cause,'* 
 and u God does not act from freedom of will," and " In the mind 
 there is no such thing as absolute or free will, but the mind is 
 determined to will this or that by a cause which is determined 
 by another cause, and so on to infinity." This results necessarily 
 from the pantheistic conception that the finite has no real being, 
 but consists of modes of the absolute. A man is not a per- 
 son ; his mind is only a " collection of ideas ; " u will and under- 
 standing are nothing but particular ideas and volitions." Hence 
 he is careful to explain that the common belief in free will is 
 an illusion : " Men believe they are free because they are con- 
 scious of their volitions and inclinations, and ignorant of the 
 causes by which they are disposed to desire and will." We are 
 truly free, according to his teaching, only when we affirm some- 
 thing self-evident or demonstratively certain, as that two and 
 two make four. The series of ideas and volitions which consti- 
 tute the mind of man is determined as resistlessly by the power 
 of the absolute in its unconscious and necessary evolution as 
 is the motion of the planets or the flowing of water. Spinoza 
 says that he conceives of " the soul acting under fixed laws, 
 and, as it were, a sort of spiritual automaton." 1 And here again 
 in this conception of the mind as a series of states of conscious- 
 ness, we see pantheism, which would have the knowledge of 
 being begin with the knowledge of the absolute, coming out 
 into agreement with Spencer, Mill and Comte, and teaching a 
 doctrine which involves phenomenalism and universal skepti- 
 cism. Thus it is evident that pantheism excludes all free will 
 both from man and God. 
 
 But if there is in the universe no rational free choice, no 
 power of determining in the. light of reason the exertion and 
 direction of energy, then there is in the universe no basis of 
 moral obligation, law and character ; the words are entirely 
 without meaning. Spinoza has written a treatise on ethics, and 
 was himself a careful observer of moral law. This, however, 
 
 1 Spinoza, Ethics, part i. Def. 7; Prop. 17, Cor. 2; Prop 32 and Cor. 1; 
 part ii. Prop. 48, Prop. 15, Prop. 49; part i. Appendix ; Letter 34, to Blyen- 
 bergh; De Intell. Emend, cap. xi. 85. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 195 
 
 was a merely factual recognition of man's moral constitution, 
 which no philosopher can overlook. But there is in his philos- 
 ophy no basis for the distinctively ethical ideas. 
 
 As it gives no basis for moral ideas, so it gives no scope for 
 moral action. Christianity has revealed the worth of a man in 
 his individual personality and the sacredness of his rights. It 
 reveals him as a personal spirit in the likeness of God, as a 
 child of the heavenly Father, the subject of God's law ; as, after 
 he had sinned, the object of God's redeeming love, accepted and 
 justified on condition of his own personal return to God in peni- 
 tential trust, admitted to communion with him, destined to be 
 glorified with him forever. Pantheism takes all this away. Man 
 is no longer a personal spirit, a child of God ; he is only a tran- 
 sient mode in which for the time being the unconscious sub- 
 stance of the universe exists ; and this substance knows him not, 
 for it has no knowledge of itself. Hence pantheism knows no 
 personal immortality. Its old comparison is always true ; man 
 is like a bottle of water in the ocean. The water is separated 
 for a little time in its inclosure ; but when the glass is broken, it 
 is lost again in the ocean whence it came and part of which it 
 was. Spinoza, it is true, holds to a certain immortality. But as 
 the soul is but a collection of ideas, the immortality is the con- 
 tinued existence of the ideas as truths, not in the least the con- 
 scious existence of a personal spirit. 
 
 Pantheism also gives no basis for recognizing the dependence 
 of society on the action of man to make it better ; it knows no 
 kingdom of God rising by the prayers and labors of self-denying 
 men and women. The world cannot be made better than it is, 
 for it is the necessary unfolding of the absolute Being. Even if 
 it is unfolding to better conditions, a man can do nothing to 
 hasten the evolution, which rolls on its fixed course made neces- 
 sary by the nature of the absolute Being. And here again pan- 
 theism comes into agreement with the current agnostic and 
 materialistic speculations respecting evolution. 
 
 Pantheism cannot satisfy the religious needs of man. It re- 
 veals no personal, intelligent God, no heavenly Father who has 
 either knowledge or care of men, no God with whom communion 
 is possible or the worship of whom can have any significance. 
 Religion is needed for the very purpose of lifting man from ex- 
 clusive dependence on the blind and resistless forces of nature to 
 the consciousness of dependence on and trust in the God of per- 
 fect wisdom and love. Pantheism intensifies this conscious need 
 
196 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 into despair, by revealing God himself as only the insensate sub- 
 stance of the universe which holds us helpless in its blind and 
 resistless mechanism. 
 
 As to sin against God it does not exist. What we call sin is 
 simply the necessary action of man in accordance with his na- 
 ture, as the absolute substance resistlessly unrolls itself in him. 
 On this basis Spinoza constructs a theodicy : " This necessary 
 substance is obliged to modify itself according to all reality pos- 
 sible, so that error, crime, pain and sorrow, being modes of exist- 
 ence as really as virtue, truth and happiness, the universe must 
 contain all these." " The original principle of things having 
 power to produce evil and good and doing all that it has power 
 to do, there must be both good and evil in the universe." 
 
 Since pantheism gives no basis either for moral law, obligation 
 and character or for religion, it is obliged to fall back for the 
 guidance of life on the principle, " Follow nature." This, 
 though with varying meanings, was the maxim of Stoicism, 
 which in its original form was pantheistic. This is the legitimate 
 outcome of pantheism. All the action in the universe is the 
 necessary unrolling or evolving of the one absolute substance 
 according to its nature, and all finite things are the modes in 
 which that necessary evolution goes on and is manifested. Hence 
 every being must act according to its nature. As to avoiding 
 sin and evil by obedience to any moral law, it is idle to attempt 
 it ; one cannot escape his own nature. So Goethe puts it, and 
 Carlyle quotes it with admiration : 
 
 "What wilt thou teach me the foremost thing? 
 Wilt teach me from off my own shadow to spring? " 
 
 Ralph W. Emerson, who seemed in one period of his life to be 
 tinctured with pantheistic sentiments, often falls into this line of 
 moral teaching. u Nature is no saint. The lights of the church, 
 the ascetics, Gentoos, Grahamites, she does not distinguish by 
 any favor ; she comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her 
 darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of 
 our law ; do not come out of the Sunday-school ; nor weigh their 
 food ; nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be 
 strong with her strength we must not harbor such disconsolate 
 consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. 
 We must set up the strong present tense against the rumors of 
 wrath past or to come." In Self-reliance he says : " My friend 
 suggested, These impulses may be from below not from above. 
 I replied, They do not seem to me to be such ; but if I am the 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 197 
 
 devil's child, I will live then for the devil ; no law can be sacred 
 to me but that of my own nature ; good and bad are but names 
 readily transferable to that or this. The only right is that which 
 is after my constitution ; the only wrong what is against it. ... 
 My life is not an apology but a life ; it is for itself and not for a 
 spectacle. I much prefer it should be of a lower strain, so it be 
 genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and un- 
 steady. ... I know that for myself it makes no difference whether 
 I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent ; I can- 
 not consent to pay for a privilege when I have intrinsic right." 
 In the Nominalist and Realist he says : " All the universe over 
 there is but one thing this old two-face, Creator-creature, mind- 
 matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed 
 or denied." 
 
 In like manner this philosophy explains all human history as 
 the necessary development of nature. The cruelties of the In- 
 quisition, the corruption of imperial Rome, the rise and fall of 
 religions are necessary results of the development of nature in 
 human history. In Hare's Life of Sterling the latter is reported 
 as saying : " All beliefs have followed each other according to a 
 fixed law, and are connected by the same with all the circum- 
 stances of each generation ; in obedience to this law they emerge, 
 unfold themselves, pass away, or are transmuted into other modes 
 of faith." And Emerson says in Representative Men: "Our 
 colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahomet- 
 anism are the necessary and structural action of the human 
 mind." 
 
 Pantheism in its practical application has a peculiar fascina- 
 tion for many minds. In the maxim, " Follow nature," a side 
 of truth is presented which is overlooked in the conception of 
 right living founded exclusively on law and duty and tending to 
 perfunctory obedience, morbid self -scrutiny in conscious con- 
 straint and restraint, and ascetic service. Christianity abun- 
 dantly supplies this deficiency, while supplementing also the 
 much greater one-sidedness and deficiencies of pantheism. It 
 quickens man's spiritual powers and susceptibilities, and in the 
 life of Christian faith and love realizes all the spontaneity and 
 much more than all the power of a life energized merely by the 
 impulses of nature; these it also corrects and purifies, develops 
 them to their normal activity, regulates and directs them in 
 righteousness, and realizes the spontaneous, full and harmonious 
 action of all the powers in the life of Christian faith and love. 
 
198 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 For many persons, in whom the aesthetic predominates over 
 the moral and makes the imperative of the law irksome, there is 
 a fascination in the pantheistic conception of God as present in 
 all the ongoing of the universe and revealing himself in all its 
 beauty and sublimity. This, however, can repel only from a 
 deistic idea of God as the first cause, whom nature hides rather 
 than reveals, and who is separated from us by the whole series 
 of events in the course of nature ; a period of duration, as evolu- 
 tion now presents it, so inconceivably long as practically to ex- 
 clude God from the universe. But theism rightly apprehended 
 gives, as really as pantheism, the God present and revealing him- 
 self in all the ongoing of the universe. And it gives far more 
 than pantheism ; for in the theistic conception it is no longer the 
 presence and revelation of unconscious indeterminate substance 
 or pure being or the unconscious absolute, by whatever name it 
 may be called; but it is the presence and revelation of the living 
 God, the absolute Reason, energizing in perfect wisdom and love, 
 the heavenly Father whom all his children may trust, love and 
 obey, and with whom they may work for the establishment over 
 all the earth of the reign of righteousness and good-will. Feuer- 
 bach sneers at theism: " To enrich God, man must become poor; 
 that God may be all, man must be nothing." This is entirely 
 true of pantheism. The very contrary is true of theism. The 
 greatness of God reveals the greatness of man, who is the object 
 of God's moral government and paternal love, who can know 
 God, commune with him and serve him. 
 
 6. Pantheism has appeared in various forms differing primarily 
 in the idea of what the absolute is. For the sake of definiteriess 
 of thought I have principally kept in view, in this brief discus- 
 sion, Spinoza's pantheism, which is perhaps the most intelligible 
 and the most completely and consistently wrought out of all the 
 forms of the doctrine. In another form of it, the Ego has been 
 assumed as the " original one and only substance, and in this one 
 substance all possible accidents and all possible realities are pos- 
 ited ; " and c> the living and active moral order is God ; we need 
 no other God, and can comprehend no other." The absolute One 
 has also been assumed to be the subject and object in identity, 
 the absolute subject-object taking the place of Spinoza's one and 
 only substance. It has been assumed to be pure being which is 
 wholly indeterminate and identical with nothing; it is a think- 
 ing process, an "immanent infinite negativity;" thought is 
 identical with being, and the processes of the universe are iden- 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 199 
 
 tical with processes of logic; the absolute becomes a logical 
 order, as in another form it had become a moral order, and the 
 issue is absolute idealism. It has been called the Unconscious 
 and described as reason existing without personality, conscious- 
 ness or freedom. It has appeared in mysticism in which the soul 
 rapt in devotion passes into abnegation of itself and loses itself 
 and all things in God. But in all these types Spinozism takes 
 on new forms "but remains unchanged in its essential principles ; 
 and the arguments which refute it are applicable without essen- 
 tial change to pantheism in all its forms. Their authors some- 
 times reject the name of pantheism ; but it is as a savage, when 
 his child is ill, thinks that by changing its name the evil disease 
 will be deceived and misled and the child will escape its assaults. 
 These several theosophies all imply that the universe and its 
 ultimate ground are one and the same; that finite beings are 
 only modes in which the absolute exists, and have no real being 
 themselves ; that the unity of the universe is not in causal de- 
 pendence, that its ongoing is not by the energizing of a transitive 
 cause, but is an everlasting becoming, the unrolling or evolution 
 of the absolute Being into its varying modes of existence; that 
 this evolution goes on in unconsciousness and necessity, without 
 intelligence or freedom ; that the absolute Being first comes to 
 consciousness in man; that there is no individual immortality; 
 that there is no free agency either in God or man ; and the legiti- 
 mate inference is that there is no basis for moral responsibility, 
 obligation and law. They all present an unconscious and imper- 
 sonal absolute, by faith in which man cannot be lifted from his 
 conscious dependence on the necessary arid resistless forces of 
 nature ; which can no more be the object of trust, worship, com- 
 munion and love than a log of wood or a block of marble ; which 
 is fashioned into a god by the imagination as an idol is by the 
 hand ; and which, should it come to consciousness, would be as 
 much astonished at finding itself a god as was the wooden gar- 
 den-god of Horace : 
 
 " Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum ; 
 Cum faber incertus scamnum, faceretne Priapum, 
 Maluit esse Deum. Deus inde ego." Sat. lib. i. viii. 1-3. 
 
 7. These profound speculations are not to be dismissed as idle 
 and worthless. They have brought to notice aspects of truth 
 which in the dogmatizing, rationalistic and deistic tendencies 
 of thought had fallen into obscurity, and which Christian theism 
 cannot safely overlook. Among these may be mentioned the 
 
200 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 immanence of God in nature and his presence with the spirit of 
 man and his action on it ; the idea of the absolute as the su- 
 preme and universal Reason energizing and expressing its arche- 
 typal thoughts in the universe, and with which the reason of 
 man in its constituent elements and essential principles is in 
 harmony ; the intimations of God in the constitution of man, so 
 that the man, in unfolding his consciousness of himself, finds it 
 inseparably interwoven with the consciousness of God; the con- 
 tinuity of the world-process and the true relations and harmony 
 of matter and spirit ; the participation of man in the sphere of 
 the spiritual and the supernatural, so that he finds himself "at 
 home " in it and in the presence of God and in fellowship with 
 him " in whom we live and move and have our being." It will 
 be a fatal mistake if Christian teachers heedlessly think that 
 these important truths are inseparable from pantheism, and for 
 their support begin to put under them distinctive elements of 
 pantheistic monism and to declare that Christian theism requires 
 pantheism for its full development and vindication. The Chris- 
 tian doctrine that God is the eternal and personal spirit, the 
 heavenly Father, the gracious Redeemer in Christ, carries in it 
 all these truths, and presents them with a clearness, self-consist- 
 ency, fulness and power which pantheism can never attain. To 
 present them effectually is one great work to which Christian 
 theologians of this day are called. And no one is a pantheist 
 who recognizes the conscious personality of God, the absolute 
 Reason or Spirit energizing in freedom, and man in God's like- 
 ness as a rational and free personal being. 
 
 It is specially claimed in behalf of idealistic pantheism that it, 
 more than theism, recognizes deity as immanent in nature, and 
 realizes the demand of religion for a continuous consciousness of 
 his presence. 
 
 In reading Hegel one is impressed with the immediacy of the 
 divine presence. Every energy acting in nature is presented as 
 the immediate energy of God acting before and on and in us. 
 When believers in God have practically fallen into deistic con- 
 ceptions and think of him only as outside of the mechanism of 
 the universe and removed far away into the past at the begin- 
 ning of things, then the pantheistic teaching may practically re- 
 call the thought to the immediate presence of God in all that 
 is. But when we think farther we see that this excellent prac- 
 tical influence is inconsistent with pantheism itself. The whole 
 conception of nearness to God becomes an illusion when we re- 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 201 
 
 gard him as the only being and men but modes in which the 
 being exists. The absolute is no longer a personal being with 
 whom man can commune, and the man is not a personal being 
 to commune with him. The conception, which seemed at first so 
 grand and so inspiring, sinks into the clammy conception of God 
 as the one only substance, or as pure or indeterminate being 
 necessarily evolving unconscious and insensate into all that is; 
 and of man, not as a personal individual with reason, free will, 
 personal obligation and responsibility, but only as a mode in 
 which the absolute in its helpless and resistless evolving appears 
 for the time being. It is theism, not pantheism, which gives 
 us God, the eternal Spirit, immanent in the universe, directing 
 all its energies to the ends of wisdom and love and revealing 
 himself in all its ongoing ; and which gives us man, the personal 
 spirit in the image of God, receiving God's continuous revelation, 
 conscious of his own responsibility and obligation to him, accept- 
 ing his grace and living in his immediate presence the spirit of 
 man face to face with the Spirit of God. 
 
 IV. MATERIALISM. Materialism is the doctrine that matter 
 with the force essential in it is eternal and that all the realities 
 in the universe are merely matter and force in different modes 
 of existence. It excludes spirit, personality, the supernatural, 
 whether in God or man. 
 
 Materialism is monism in the sense that the absolute ground 
 of the universe and the universe itself are the same ; also as 
 Haeckel says, it assumes " the inseparable connection of matter, 
 form and force. . . . Nowhere in the whole domain of knowl- 
 edge does it recognize real metaphysics, but only physics." l It 
 declares that physical nature is all. 
 
 But materialism is not monism in the strictest sense, because 
 it recognizes an eternal plurality of beings, the atoms. Matter 
 is only a general term for this innumerable multitude of individ- 
 uals ; their unity is not that of one only being, like that of the 
 pantheistic monism, but a dynamic unity of the many in a sys- 
 tem, acting in invariable uniformity under fixed causal laws. In 
 strict propriety monism is the name only of the pantheistic doc- 
 trine that the absolute is the one and only being. On the con- 
 trary the atomic theory of the universe has been inherent in ma- 
 terialism from the days of Democritus and Lucretius until now. 
 
 Whatever the likeness in the practical issues of pantheism and 
 materialism, they belong genetically, from the root up, to two in- 
 1 Creation, vol. i. pp. 35, 37, Trans. 
 
202 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 compatible theories of knowledge and types of thought. Pan- 
 theism begins with the universal of which all particulars are only 
 the manifestation, having no individual and real being of them- 
 selves. Materialism begins with individuals, each known as a 
 concrete being, and proceeds to a unity of these in dynamic rela- 
 tions and under fixed laws in a system capable of being known 
 scientifically. They differ also in method. The former proceeds 
 by the a priori method. It starts with the idea of the absolute 
 Being and deduces from it what the absolute Being must be and 
 what the universe must be in which the absolute must manifest 
 itself. By this a priori method it deduces, not only what the 
 absolute Being is, but also the very process by which it evolves 
 itself into the finite and returns into itself again enriched by the 
 evolution ; in the same way is determined what the course of the 
 world's history must be. Hence pantheism asks no evidences of 
 the existence of its so-called God and admits none. It is not 
 surprising therefore that pantheists ridicule the proofs that God 
 exists, as worthless to cultivated minds, and that one of them, 
 quoted by Ulrici, said that they are only " sweetened water for 
 sloppy girls." The advocates of materialism, on the contrary, 
 are generally loud in claiming that all knowledge proceeds slowly 
 and cautiously by observing particulars and individuals and by 
 the induction of general laws. 
 
 It is evident that physical science belongs to the latter of these 
 two types of thought ; and to a sedulous adherence to its prin- 
 ciples and methods physical science owes its great progress. To 
 this type of thought theism also belongs. It proceeds from the 
 individual to the universal, from the many to the unity of all. 
 It is evident that the only unity possible in this type of thought 
 is a unity of the many in a scientific system, a unity of beings in 
 dynamic relations under rational principles and laws and directed 
 to rational ideals and ends. And it is evident, further, that, in 
 this type of thought, the only ultimate unity conceivable rests on 
 perfect Reason, as the ultimate ground of the universe, express- 
 ing therein its archetypal thought and progressively realizing 
 the ends of its wisdom and love. 
 
 It seems strange that materialists, claiming above all things to 
 be scientific, appropriate to their doctrine the pantheistic name 
 of monism and try to put themselves on the " high priori road " 
 which belongs to a totally different type of thought. And yet 
 perhaps we need not wonder. If with physical science and theism 
 we begin with the particular and the individual and proceed to 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 203 
 
 the general and the universal, the only unity of all things which 
 is possible is in a rational system of interaction under law ; and 
 this is possible only in the recognition of God, the absolute Rea- 
 son. If the scientist will deny God he must abandon the princi- 
 ples and methods of scientific investigation and transport himself 
 to the false metaphysics and methods of pantheism. Evidently, 
 then, the two systems, the pantheistic and the materialistic, are 
 different in principle and origin and totally incompatible. Sci- 
 ence and its methods can never lead to pantheistic monism, the 
 unity of the all in one only being. According to the true theory 
 of knowledge and the principle and methods of scientific investi- 
 gation, pantheism is impossible. And according to the same, 
 materialism has no standing ground ; for the existence of God is 
 necessary to solving the problem of the reason and reaching the 
 unity of the many in a rational system. 
 
 Materialism is, more than pantheism, in accord with theism, 
 in that it begins with the knowledge of particular beings, and 
 proceeds from the individual to the general, from the finite and 
 conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned ; also in that it 
 necessitates a unity, not of one substance and one being, but of 
 many beings in a rational system. On the other hand it is, less 
 than pantheism, in accord with theism in that it practically fails 
 to recognize the true absolute and leaves us shut up within the 
 finite. 
 
 And this leads to another criticism of materialism. It does 
 not give the real absolute. Matter cannot be the absolute or 
 unconditioned being. In its essence it is dependent and lim- 
 ited. By its definition it is contained in and occupies space, 
 is composed of parts, is divisible ; its parts are in continual mo- 
 tion and change ; and materialism assumes a definite quantity 
 of matter and force, never increased or diminished, conceivably 
 measurable in bulk as occupying so many cubic miles, in weight 
 as so many tons, in foot-pounds as doing so much work. Pro- 
 fessor Clerk- Max well says of the atoms : " Though in the course 
 of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the 
 heavens, though ancient systems be dissolved and new systems 
 evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these sys- 
 tems are built, the foundation stones of the material universe, 
 remain unbroken and unworn." But when we consider more 
 closely the atoms as science now regards them, we find that even 
 these are not ultimate, but point back unmistakably to a cause 
 beyond all the course of nature and beyond themselves. Materi- 
 
204 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 alism still leaves also the dualism of matter and force. Plainly 
 materialism gives us no real absolute or unconditioned, and no 
 real monism. We must go beyond and behind matter to find the 
 ultimate ground and unity of the universe. Accordingly Mr. 
 Huxley says : " The man of science, who forgetting the limits of 
 philosophical inquiry slides from these (physical) formulas and 
 symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems 
 to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who 
 should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems 
 for real entities and with this disadvantage as compared with 
 the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no 
 practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism 
 may paralyze the energies and destroy the beauty of a life." 1 
 
 Another criticism is that materialism rests on the unwarranted 
 assumption that man has knowledge only through the senses. 
 This is the subjective side of materialism to which the corre- 
 sponding objective side is that nothing exists but matter and 
 force. For this theory there is no positive argument, while the 
 evidence of consciousness and of reason is against it. The argu- 
 ment for materialism, so far as it rests on this theory, resolves 
 itself into the puerile remark of Laplace, that he had searched the 
 heavens with his telescope but had found no God. This is sim- 
 ply saying that nothing exists which the senses cannot perceive. 
 If he had found with his telescope what he took for God, the fact 
 that he found it with a telescope would prove that it was not 
 God. This argument was well parodied by the farmer who said 
 he had searched his sack of meal through and through and could 
 find no miller. Virchow says : " Of all kinds of dogmatism, the 
 materialistic is the most dangerous, because it denies its own dog- 
 matism and appears in the garb of science ; because it professes 
 to rest on fact when it is but speculation ; and because it at- 
 tempts to annex territories to natural science before they have 
 been fairly conquered." 2 
 
 Materialism, while denying personality, cannot account for the 
 facts of personality. And in denying it, it departs from the meth- 
 ods of scientific reasoning. Crookes discovered a new metal, 
 Thallium, from a sharp brilliant green line differing essentially 
 from any one before observed. If he had reasoned as the mate- 
 rialist does, he would have said, " As there are but sixty-four ele- 
 ments, this must be one of them." But he did reason scien- 
 tifically and said, " This is a new line never before seen in the 
 1 Lay Sermons, p. 160. 2 Nature, Nov. 1874. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND NON-THEISTIC THEORIES. 205 
 
 spectrum ; it must reveal a new element never known before. ' v 
 The scientific method, applied in like manner to the facts of per- 
 sonality observed in man, requires the inference that there must 
 be something which transcends the mechanism of physics and is 
 not included in matter and its forces. 
 
 It is equally true that materialism cannot account for the phys- 
 ical phenomena of the universe. Chemical affinity, heat, light 
 and electricity, gravitation, the persistence of force make clear 
 the course of physical action within certain limits, but each fails 
 to be in its own sphere the ultimate explanation, and brings us 
 face to face with the mysterious power beyond. This is contin- 
 ually appearing in the speculations of scientists. In discussing 
 the supposed dissipation of heat and the consequent loss of en- 
 ergy from the universe, Rankine suggests that the interstellar 
 medium may be bounded on all sides by empty space. On reach- 
 ing these bounds the radiant heat would be turned back and as 
 it were piled up around the edges of the universe, and at last 
 would be accumulated in foci. Then if any dead world moving 
 through space should come into one of these foci, it would be 
 vaporized and resolved into its elements, and thus its energies 
 would be liberated from their equilibrium and restored to activity 
 in the universe. Claudius, who quotes this hypothesis, proceeds 
 to demonstrate that it is mathematically impossible. 1 The same 
 is exemplified in speculations respecting the ether, so tenuous that 
 it passes through all substances and is not known to retard the 
 motion of any planet, yet elastic and as solid as adamant. It 
 revives in a new form the old idea of a crystalline sphere. So in 
 all scientific speculation from age to age we are brought back to 
 the questions which the mind must ask, but which physical sci- 
 ence with its matter and force cannot answer. And the larger 
 and clearer our scientific knowledge of matter and force, the more 
 vividly do we feel ourselves confronted by the mystery that is 
 behind them. 
 
 Materialism is a congeries of contradictions. Perhaps no doc- 
 trine which has had any considerable currency has been marked 
 ly this characteristic to an equal degree. Subjective material- 
 ism, that we know only what is perceived through the senses, 
 involves phenomenalism and complete agnosticism ; objective 
 materialism, that matter is eternal, implies that knowledge tran- 
 scends the senses, is ontological in its beginning, and is the knowl- 
 edge of eternal, indestructible, absolute Being. It propounds, as 
 1 Mechanical Theory of Heat (8th Memoir), p. 291. 
 
206 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 this eternal Being, matter, which in its essence is finite and lim- 
 ited. It holds that motor-force is transformed into thought. It 
 holds that mind is a product and manifestation of matter ; and at 
 the same time that matter is merely a perception or idea of mind ; 
 and while holding the latter, also holds that matter existed ages 
 before there was a perceiving mind. By thus predicating men- 
 tal phenomena of matter, as well as by propounding it as abso- 
 lute Being, it changes the essential meaning of matter, and yet 
 continues to use it in both senses without discrimination. It 
 teaches that matter and force are the ultimate ground of the 
 universe and the ultimate explanation of all that exists, and that 
 the whole history of the universe is the history of their evolu- 
 tion; at the same time it holds to the scientific theory which 
 implies that the evolution must have an end and must have had 
 a beginning; if so it must have had an absolute beginning, that 
 is, a beginning without a cause, and it will have an absolute end, 
 that is, it will issue in an effect void of all causative energy to 
 produce any subsequent change or effect. 1 
 
 The necessary conclusion is that materialism, as a theory of 
 the universe, is not only inadequate to account for it and to in- 
 terpret its significance, but on account of its contradictions is 
 impossible to human thought, except by essentially changing the 
 accepted meaning of matter. 
 
 1 In the Philosophical Basis of Theism, chap. xvi. the impossibility of ac- 
 counting for the phenomena either of personality or of the physical universe by 
 matter and force is shown ; and in chap. xvii. the more important materialistic 
 objections to personality are fully considered. It would be repetition to pur- 
 sue the discussion further here. Pages 408-554. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 
 
 THE words polytheism and monotheism imply that theism is 
 the genus of which these are species. But in fact the word the- 
 ism is commonly used as a synonym of monotheism ; leaving us 
 with no generic name for the two. 
 
 The different forms of belief in a divinity may be classified in 
 four classes : 
 
 Polytheism, the belief in a plurality of divinities. In this may 
 be included animism, the primitive belief of men that natural 
 things were animated by minds or souls like their own ; and the 
 consequent fetichism, the belief that any thing might be the 
 shrine of a divinity to be worshiped. 
 
 Ditheism, the belief in two Gods, each self-existent and eternal, 
 one the author of all good, the other of all evil. This appears in 
 the ancient religion of Persia and in Manicheism. 
 
 Monotheism, the belief in the one only God, the energizing 
 Reason, the eternal Spirit, the personal God. 
 
 Christian monotheism, the belief in the one personal God, the 
 Redeemer of the world from sin, revealed in Jesus the Christ, as 
 recorded in the Christian Scriptures. 
 
 These are classed together as forms of religious or, in its broad- 
 est meaning, theistic belief, because they all recognize a divinity 
 as the object of worship and service. The four forms of atheism 
 are excluded because they recognize no divinity. For it is of 
 the essence of religion that it lifts man above his dependence on 
 the unconscious and necessary forces of nature into relation with 
 a personal divinity to whom he may come for guidance and help. 
 
 It is objected that the ideas of the divinity in these four types 
 of religious belief have nothing in common but the name ; that 
 in the lower forms of polytheism is no trace of the absolute Spirit 
 whom Christians worship. The answer is that the same objec- 
 tion may be made against the identity of the objects of physical 
 science which are differently conceived in different ages. There 
 have been great changes in man's idea of the sun ; yet it is the 
 
208 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 same sun which has been shining before the eyes of men through 
 all the ages ; and in certain particulars men's conceptions of it 
 have always been the same. So it is the same absolute Spirit 
 that has been shining on the minds of men through all the ages ; 
 and different as their conceptions of him have been, in certain 
 particulars they have been always the same. In them all we find 
 clear traces of the absolute Spirit. The divinity is always con- 
 ceived more or less clearly as an intelligent free person, like man, 
 and therein supernatural ; and as beyond and above man and 
 above the world as man knows it ; and therein a shadow of the 
 absolute lies on the spirit of man. 
 
 To this it is objected that this explanation is inconsistent with 
 the doctrine that God reveals himself to man and is known by 
 man in his experience of the revelation. If so, it is asked, why 
 are there atheists ? Why any need of exhorting to piety more 
 than to believe in things seen and felt ? Why so many different 
 ideas of God ? Does any one think the sun black or square ? 
 But we remember that Anaxagoras once suggested that the sun 
 might be as large as the Peloponnesus, and was arrested for the 
 bold assertion on the charge of contravening the established dog- 
 mas of religion ; for was not Apollo a god and the sun his char- 
 iot ? and should it be turned into a blazing mass of metal as big 
 as the Peloponnesus ? Here the scientific conception of the sun 
 was as really imperfect as the conception of the divinity. The 
 conception of Anaxagoras marked an advance in science towards 
 a truer conception of the sun, which history has always commem- 
 orated. And he himself made a notable advance in the concep- 
 tion of God as Reason energizing in the universe and arranging 
 and ordering it, an advance carried still further by Plato and 
 Aristotle. If men have always known that the sun is round and 
 luminous and other facts respecting it, the recognition of which 
 has persisted in all the progress of astronomy, so every worshiper 
 of a divinity has regarded it as an intelligent Power transcending 
 him and all that he could touch or control, all that constituted to 
 him the world in which he could act, and has believed truths re- 
 specting God which have persisted through all the progress of 
 the human mind. The revelation of God in this respect is like 
 the revelation of the universe. Neither the one nor the other is 
 revealed independently of the faculties of man or so as to leave 
 no need of human investigation and thought. If the universe 
 had been so revealed, man would have missed the means of edu- 
 cation, discipline and development, and would have remained al- 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 209 
 
 ways but a grown up child. And if God had been so revealed 
 man would have missed the means of spiritual discipline and 
 development. So Kant says : " If such an enlightenment were 
 given us as we desire and some think they have found, that God 
 and eternity with their awful majesty lie open unceasingly be- 
 fore the eyes, then the moral conduct of man, so long as his 
 nature is what it is, would be changed into mere mechanism, 
 in which as in a play of puppets all gesticulate well, but in the 
 tigures there is no life." 1 
 
 Having now the knowledge that the absolute Being exists and 
 may be truly though partially known, the next step in our in- 
 vestigation must be to show that the absolute Being is absolute 
 Reason energizing in the universe, the eternal Spirit, the one 
 personal God. 
 
 It is often assumed that it is difficult or even impossible to 
 show that the absolute Being of philosophy is the personal God 
 whom we worship. Jacobi says that one may be in his head a 
 heathen, in his metaphysical speculations an atheist, and in his 
 heart a Christian. Fliigel cites Schleiermacher as an example, 
 kt who, with a theory which is the death of religion, was still 
 an honest and hearty confessor and defender of Christianity." 2 
 Some Christian thinkers accept without inquiry this alleged in- 
 compatibility of the absolute of philosophy and the God of 
 theism, and affirm that in philosophical thought and theoretical 
 knowledge there is no basis for any knowledge of the existence 
 of God or of what he is ; but that religious belief must rest on 
 the ethical and spiritual feelings alone and on the word of God 
 in the Bible attested by the witness of the Spirit. Professor 
 Charles Hodge says : " If the philosophical notion of the abso- 
 lute is to decide every question concerning the divine nature, we 
 m.ist give up all confidence in our apprehensions of God as an 
 object of knowledge ; " and he quotes the words of Strauss : 
 ^ The ideas of the absolute and of the holy are incompatible. 
 He who holds to the former must give up the latter, since 
 holiness implies relation ; and he who holds the idea of God as 
 \\o\y must renounce the idea of his being absolute." 3 Professor 
 W. D. Wilson regards it as not essential to the defense of the- 
 ism to challenge or contradict the doctrine of the eternal self- 
 existence of matter, and asserts that "if the present order of 
 
 1 Werke von Rosenkranz herausgegeben, viii. 293. 
 
 2 Die Spekulative Theologie der Gegenwart, pp. 230, 232. 
 8 System of Theology, vol. i. p. 414. 
 
 14 
 
210 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 things had no beginning, Evolution must have produced a Su- 
 preme Being long before this time." l 
 
 We are to consider hereafter the evidence that the absolute 
 Being is personal Spirit or Reason, the one only living and true 
 God. Here I only call attention to some points which it is im- 
 portant to notice before examining the evidence of the person- 
 ality of God. 
 
 1. The difficulty of identifying the absolute Being of philoso- 
 phy with the personal God of theism arises in part from the 
 falsity of the philosophy with which theism is compared ; it pro- 
 pounds a false idea of the absolute and a false method of ascer- 
 taining what it is. These errors have already been exposed. Ifc 
 is with a similar false philosophy that Professor Royce holds that 
 if the absolute Being should create, it must be a perfect universe 
 completed at a stroke ; that once thus created, any progressive 
 development would be impossible ; that the conception of a pro- 
 gressive revelation of the absolute in the evolution of a finite uni- 
 verse is incompatible with the idea of the absolute. This in- 
 volves a dilemma between two absurdities : Either the absolute 
 Being must create another absolute and unconditioned Being, or 
 he cannot create anything and thus is himself limited and inca- 
 pable. His argument also implies that we cannot know that the 
 absolute Being creates unless we know how he does it; that be- 
 cause we cannot show how a mind can know an object that is not 
 within itself and not identical with the mind's idea, therefore we 
 cannot know the object ; also that if we cannot prove the reality 
 of knowledge we cannot know any thing: 2 It is not surprising 
 that theism cannot be reconciled with a philosophy like this. It 
 is impossible to reconcile true theism with false philosophy. The 
 assumed metaphysical ideas and principles on which the German 
 pantheism is founded are not only irreconcilable with the knowl- 
 edge that the absolute is the personal God, but, as has been 
 shown, they are equally irreconcilable with the knowledge of 
 any thing. If the New-Kantians teach that the knowledge of God 
 must be held on the ground of moral feelings and independent 
 of metaphysics, it is equally true that all knowledge, popular and 
 scientific, must be held in equal independence of the false and 
 pantheistic metaphysics to which the New-Kantians refer. 
 
 With metaphysics and philosophy vitiated by these and similar 
 errors, it is impossible to attain the knowledge that the absolute, 
 
 1 Foundations of Religious Belief, pp. 62-65. 
 
 2 Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 258, 263, 274, 275, 303. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. . 211 
 
 as thus falsely conceived, is the personal God. The absolute is 
 thus an illusion in which all reality and all knowledge are swal- 
 lowed up. In these and similar cases, we cannot identify the 
 God of theism with the absolute Being of philosophy, because 
 we compare true theism with false philosophy. 
 
 But if we begin with the ideas and principles of a true phi- 
 losophy, there is no a priori impossibility that the absolute be a 
 personal Spirit or Reason energizing, and nothing to invalidate 
 the evidence that it is so. 
 
 2. The difficulty in identifying the absolute of philosophy with 
 the God of theism arises in part from false conceptions of what 
 the God of theism is. Non-theistic thinkers commonly assume 
 that the theistic conception is that God created the universe, 
 complete and finished, at a stroke, and, ever since, his action in 
 it and his revelation of himself have been only in capricious and 
 miraculous interference with its laws; as Carlyle puts it: "An 
 absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first sabbath at the out- 
 side of the universe and seeing it go." Whereas in truth theism 
 recognizes the absolute Being as at once distinguished from and 
 transcending the universe and immanent in it. It solves the 
 great problem of the transcendence and the immanence by rec- 
 ognizing the absolute Being as the absolute Reason energizing 
 in the universe and progressively realizing in the finite the ideal 
 of all that is true, right, perfect and good as it is archetypal and 
 eternal in the divine mind. Thus the absolute Spirit is evermore 
 revealing himself by expressing the thought of his eternal wis- 
 dom and love in the finite creation. And the revelation must be 
 ever progressive, and never complete and finished at any point 
 of time. The infinite can never be fully expressed and revealed 
 in the finite. 
 
 The difficulty, however, does not arise wholly from erroneous 
 conceptions of theism on the part of its opponents, but also in 
 part from errors on tne part of theists. Theologians have con- 
 ceived of the universe as completed and finished at the time of 
 its creation. This in fact became a common conception of Chris- 
 tian theology. It is noticeable that from time to time in the 
 history of the Church a pantheistic type of thought has made its 
 appearance. In many of these cases, what Dr. Hunt and others 
 call pantheism is no more than an attempt to break away from 
 the conception of the universe as a rigid and finished mechanism 
 with God outside of it, and to return to the conception of God as 
 immanent in it and progressively .revealing himself in the realiza- 
 
212 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tion of the archetypal ideas of the eternal and universal Reason, 
 both in the physical system and in. the spiritual ; in the latter 
 by the presence of his Spirit and the progressive growth of his 
 kingdom of righteousness through the redemption in Christ. 
 Even now in the general return to the conception of God as at 
 once transcendent and ; minanent, some theologians, mistaking 
 the significance of the movement, are losing their way and are 
 moving towards pantheistic ideas. It is important to guard 
 against this error. On the other hand, it is not less important 
 to know that the doctrine of God's transcendence of the universe 
 and his immanence in it is a distinctive doctrine of theism. To 
 call it Christian pantheism is a gross misrepresentation. So far 
 is it from pantheism that it is incompatible with pantheism. 
 The latter, by identifying the absolute with the universe, ex- 
 cludes both the transcendence and the immanence, and reduces 
 the absolute and the universe in their identity to a blind and 
 unknowable somewhat, evolving necessarily without freedom or 
 personality, without conscious intelligence or reasonable end or 
 aim. 
 
 Theism, while claiming a positive knowledge of the absolute 
 Being and of what it is, affirms that the knowledge is not ade- 
 quate and complete. Mystery must always lie all along the line 
 where the absolute energizes in the finite, and the revelation of 
 the absolute therein must at every point of time be incomplete. 
 Hence theists do not profess to define how God creates the uni- 
 verse or energizes in it. And different minds may picture or 
 symbolize the action in different ways. But this must not be 
 confounded with pantheism. The thought remains theistic and 
 excludes pantheism, so long as it recognizes men as rational, free, 
 personal beings ; and also recognizes the absolute Being as dis- 
 tinct from and transcending the universe, as conscious personal 
 Spirit known positively though inadequately, as in the likeness 
 of human reason, however transcending it, and as progressively 
 realizing in the universe rational ideals and ends. 
 
 It may be added that agnosticism, pantheism and materialism 
 arise in part from unwarrantably limiting knowledge to the 
 conceivable and denying creation and God's transcendence and 
 immanence because they cannot be pictured in the imagination. 
 
 3. A third source of the difficulty in identifying the God of 
 theism with the absolute of philosophy is found in false ideas of 
 personality. 
 
 The objection is that personality, if predicated of the absolute 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 213 
 
 Being, would imply limitation. It has already been shown that 
 this objection is founded on a false idea of the absolute ; that if 
 valid it would equally prove that the absolute, as thus falsely 
 conceived, would be limited by predicating of it power or any 
 other attribute, by affirming that it is being, and even by affirm- 
 ing that it is the absolute or unconditioned and thus distinguish- 
 ing it from the finite. It assumes that determinateness is in its 
 essence limitation. But we have seen that determinateness is of 
 the essence of being ; that the indeterminate is no being ; it is 
 not even nothing as distinguished from being, nor being as dis- 
 tinguished from nothing. And we have seen that the more de- 
 terminate a being is, that is, the more the powers and attributes 
 characterizing it, the greater the being. If God is indeterminate 
 he is void of every attribute by which it is possible to think of 
 him. The objection implies that he is entirely unknowable. It 
 would require that the absolute be at once infinite and finite, 
 conditioned and unconditioned, perfect and imperfect, good and 
 evil, mind and matter, personal and impersonal, being and noth- 
 ing. The absolute thus becomes a mere zero or symbol of the 
 cessation of thought. It is no longer the ground of all things 
 but, as the Germans would say, the Abgrund, the abyss in which 
 all thought, all intelligence and all reality are swallowed up. 
 The fact that God is the absolute implies that he is the fulness 
 of all perfection. As the unconditioned he must be the all-con- 
 ditioning; as such in him must be all the potencies which ac- 
 count for the universe. 
 
 In addition to this, the objection that the absolute cannot be 
 a person rests on a false idea of personality. 
 
 It falsely assumes that the self or ego as known in conscious- 
 ness is merely a series of sensations or impressions ; or it assumes 
 that the consciousness of self is the consciousness only of a nega- 
 tion ; or it gives some other definition which leaves out the es- 
 sence of personality. As thus falsely defined personality cannot 
 be predicated of the absolute Being. But a person is a rational 
 free being conscious of self as persisting, one and the same, 
 through all changes. Personality thus defined is not incompat- 
 ible with the true absolute. Persistence in unity and identity 
 through all changes is central in the idea of the absolute Being. 
 Here in the finite person is an element not only compatible with 
 the absolute but essential to it. The centre of a circle remains 
 unchanged so long as the circle remains, however the circum- 
 ference may be enlarged. This central element of personality 
 
214 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 must remain unchanged whatever limitations are removed. 
 Otherwise all substantiality of being disappears, and the abso- 
 lute is totally lost in nonentity. 
 
 In the next place, the attributes of personality are in their 
 essence such as may be positive attributes of the absolute Be- 
 ing. The principles and laws of reason are universal and un- 
 conditioned ; they condition everything, they are conditioned by 
 nothing ; they are unlimited in time and space, immeasurable 
 in quantity ; the same in all times and all places ; power can 
 neither create nor annul them. The will is free in the sense 
 that it is a power which determines itself in the light of rea- 
 son, and is thus self -directive and self-exertive. Freedom in its 
 essence is exemption from conditions and limitations. In his 
 rational free will man is above nature, a supernatural being; 
 and so far he is exempt from necessary conditions and limita- 
 tions and is free. The absolute Being, exempt from all neces- 
 sary conditions and limitations, must be himself the absolute 
 and universal Reason ; and luminous with its light, must be 
 self-directive, self-exertive and free. And a person's conscious- 
 ness of self is not a limitation. On the contrary, consciousness 
 marks a superior order of beings, and its absence would be a 
 limitation and an imperfection. It has been already shown that 
 if the absolute Being first comes to consciousness in man, then 
 it is itself developed in time from the less to the greater, and 
 man is superior to the absolute previously unconscious and unde- 
 veloped. A babe is unconscious of its spiritual capacities and 
 is gradually developed to the knowledge of itself and the world. 
 But here is propounded, as philosophy, the absurdity that the 
 absolute Being, like the finite babe, is gradually developed in 
 time till it attains to its highest in man, and then continues 
 to acquire knowledge of itself and of the world as the years 
 roll on. 
 
 Thus it is evident that personality in its true significance is 
 compatible with the true absolute, and that its essential attri- 
 butes must be attributes of the absolute Bein. 
 
 O 
 
 Accordingly, in the exercise of man's personal powers are inti- 
 mations and shadowings that he is in the likeness of God. In 
 his self-consciousness he is at once the subject and object of his 
 own knowledge ; in his free will he determines his action and 
 character, and is at once the subject and object of his own free 
 energy. He. can complete within himself the circle of object 
 and subject both in intellectual and efficient action. Thus in 
 his personality he is self-contained. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 215 
 
 Another false assumption is that the finiteness of the human 
 person is of the essence of personality. 
 
 Hartmann, Pfleiderer and others hold that God is Spirit or 
 Reason, but is not a person. Here they change the essential 
 meaning of personality. They call the absolute Being Spirit 
 and predicate of it rationality and freedom, essential attributes 
 of personality ; they then deny its conscious personality, be- 
 cause, as they think, this would be a limitation. This implies 
 that personality essentially consists of dependence and of lim- 
 itation in time, space and quantity. They fail to distinguish 
 between personality and its limitations. The limitation is not 
 of the essence of personality, but its accident. The objection 
 confounds quality or power with quantity. The predication of 
 personality carries over to the absolute only the positive prop- 
 erties of a person, conscious reason, self-determining power, 
 unity and identity, not his accidental limitations. It must be 
 added that consciousness is essential to intelligence and free- 
 dom. Where there is no consciousness there can be no knowl- 
 edge, therefore no energy intelligently and freely exerted and 
 directed. Thus we have the absolute Being acting in the uni- 
 verse blindly and necessarily, without intelligence or freedom, 
 without wisdom or love. And here again the absolute Being is 
 recognized as undeveloped and imperfect ; and this conception 
 of God is found to be undistinguishable from pantheism. 
 
 Kant and J. G. Fichte object that we cannot predicate person- 
 ality of the Absolute, because we know personality only under 
 the limitations of the finite. This objection is equally valid 
 against predicating power, existence or any reality of the abso- 
 lute, since, in the same sense, we know these also only under 
 the limits of the finite. In fact, in the very idea of the finite, 
 man has already the idea of the infinite, and in the idea of de- 
 pendence he has the idea of the independent and absolute. In 
 these ideas his thought is already active in that transcendent 
 sphere. And in our consciousness of self we have conscious- 
 ness of reason participating in the principles of Reason supreme 
 and universal, and consciousness of free will acting under law 
 of supreme and universal obligation. 
 
 Spencer and the agnostics who follow him push their objection 
 farther. Because there can be but one absolute Being, it can- 
 not be classed with any other ; therefore it cannot be known ; 
 and because it cannot be known it cannot be a person. This 
 reasoning is only an example of the common error substituting 
 
216 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 general notions and abstractions for real concrete beings. It 
 belongs to that type of thought which proceeds from the univer- 
 sal to the particular, and consists in analyzing general notions. 
 It is a survival of mediaeval scholasticism, instances of which are 
 occasionally found in Mr. Spencer's writings. It is only in such 
 a type of thought that this objection has force. Scientific knowl- 
 edge begins with the individual and proceeds to the class. Of 
 course it must know the individual before it can know the class. 
 In classifying, as individuals are found to be more and more 
 determinate, the number included in a species becomes less. 
 When we come to God, as the absolute Being, he stands alone. 
 But in passing from a finite or limited reality to the unlim- 
 ited, we do not drop out the reality and retain only the empty 
 denial of limitation. An unlimited power does not cease to 
 be a power; it is power unlimited. No more does personality 
 cease if it is unconditioned personality. So J. S. Mill says : 
 , " Any thing carried to the infinite must have all the proper- 
 ties of the same thing as finite, except such as depend on the 
 finiteness." He exemplifies by infinite space that it does not 
 cease to be space, and infinite goodness that it does not cease 
 to be goodness. 1 
 
 4. Man's knowledge of the absolute Being as the personal 
 God is real and positive, but incomplete. 
 
 Theism makes no pretension to the complete knowledge of 
 God ; but it rightly insists that, though the knowledge of him 
 is incomplete, it is real and positive ; not of a part of God, 
 for God has no parts, but of him, the one only living arid per- 
 sonal God. 
 
 Accordingly it concedes to the agnostic that in some respects 
 the knowledge of God can be expressed only as a negation. 
 This is plain from the distinction already pointed out between 
 the positive powers of a being and their limitation. In a steam- 
 engine of forty horse-power the power is one thing, the limita- 
 tion of the quantity of that power is an entirely different thing. 
 The power is the positive quality in which the engine is re- 
 vealed ; the limitation is a mere indication of quantity, which 
 aside from the power is empty of all significance, an empty 
 form of thought. In like manner we know God as a personal 
 being endowed with rational, self-determining power energizing 
 always in harmony with reason ; and we know him as absolute 
 being unconditioned by dependence on any other, and his powers 
 1 Exam, of Hamilton, vol. i. p. 129. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 217 
 
 unlimited in time, space or quantity. The former are the posi- 
 tive attributes of his being; the latter are merely the denial 
 of dependence and limitation, empty forms of thought except as 
 they refer to the positive powers. Of the former our knowledge 
 is positive, because we know reason, free will, personality in our- 
 selves ; of the latter our knowledge may be called negative, be- 
 cause it can be expressed only by a negation. The knowledge 
 of the absolute Being and its powers is positive ; it is negative 
 only in form. Hence the attributes of God are properly classified 
 as positive, or the attributes included in personality, and nega- 
 tive, or the attributes defined by the negation of dependence, and 
 of limitation in time, space and quantity. Thus our knowledge 
 of God, the absolute Being, is positive and real, although it is in- 
 complete. 
 
 Sir William Hamilton, on the contrary, objects that because 
 our knowledge of infinitude or illimitation can be expressed only 
 by negation, therefore all our knowledge of God is negative, or, 
 what is the same, no knowledge. Malebranche comes to a sim- 
 ilar conclusion as to the spiritual attributes of God : " We ought 
 not to call God a Spirit to express positively what he is, but 
 rather to signify only that he is not matter. . . . His true name 
 is He that is ; or, in other words, being without restriction, All- 
 being, the being infinite and universal." 1 The error arises from 
 overlooking the distinction of the positive powers of a being and 
 their limitation. The denial of dependence and limitation does 
 not annul the being and powers which are independent and 
 unlimited. Fenelon insists that it is the finite which implies 
 negation ; that the infinite implies affirmation. 2 And Trendelen- 
 burg says the same : " The Absolute is not a negative notion. 
 We reach it by a negative process ; we remove everything which 
 limits it. But the notion itself is positive, and if it is correctly 
 thought is the most positive of all notions, because not limited." 3 
 
 1 Kecherche de la Verite, bk. iii. chap. 9. 
 
 2 De I'Existence et des Attributs de Dieu, part ii. preuve ii. 
 
 8 Professor Max Miiller says : " The true idea of the infinite is not a nega- 
 tion nor a modification of any other idea. The finite, on the contrary, is in 
 reality the limitation or modification of the infinite, nor is it possible, if we 
 reason in good earnest, to conceive of the finite in any other sense than as 
 the shadow of the infinite." He adds a quotation from Roger Bacon : "It is 
 called infinite not by negation of limits of quantity, but by negation of imper- 
 fection and non- being." Lect. on Language, Second Series, pp. 596, 597. 
 
 Descartes denies that the infinite is a negative idea made up by negation 
 of finiteness : " The idea of the infinite is very clear and very distinct, since 
 
218 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 And it is true that if one affirms a limitation he denies the ex- 
 istence of the power beyond the limit. On the contrary, if he 
 affirms illimitation he denies limitation, and this denial is the 
 negation of a negation, and affirms the existence of the power 
 beyond all limits. So immortality is in form a negative, but in 
 fact it is the affirmation of life that never ends ; and indepen- 
 dence is negative in form, but in fact it is the affirmation of self- 
 sustaining power. 
 
 Another error often implied in the objection to a positive but 
 incomplete knowledge of the absolute, consists in hypostasiziug 
 the words finite and infinite, conditioned and unconditioned, as if 
 they meant beings instead of mere limitation or illimitation of a 
 being. The agnostic speaks of the absolute as if it were God, 
 instead of being a mere adjective which denies all conditions and 
 limitations. Of an absolute abstracted from being we certainly 
 have no positive conception ; we define it by negation. When 
 this abstraction of absoluteness is substituted for the absolute 
 Being, it is found to be only a tangle of negations and contra- 
 dictions. 
 
 The objection is valid also against the false idea of the abso- 
 lute as the subject of all contradictory attributes. So Hegel asks, 
 " What kind of an absolute is that which does not contain in it- 
 self all that is actual, even evil included ? " And Mansel ac- 
 cepts the conclusion as supported by unassailable reasoning. 1 But 
 the reasoning rests on the false and even absurd idea that the 
 absolute is simply the sum total of all things. They who accept 
 this conclusion and yet believe that the absolute exists, must as- 
 sume that the law that two contradictory principles cannot both 
 be true of the same object, is not applicable to the absolute. 
 Thus, as J. S. Mill rightly infers, they extinguish all reasoning 
 respecting the absolute by a reduction ad absurdissimum? Such 
 an absolute would be not only unknowable, but a congeries of 
 contradictions. Of such a God we may adopt the words of a 
 philosopher a thousand years ago : " Deus ipse nescit se, quid 
 est, quia non est quid." 
 
 We therefore conclude that the absolute Being cannot be known 
 
 all which my mind clearly and distinctly conceives as true and real is wholly 
 wrapped up and contained in this idea. ... I plainly see that there is more 
 reality in an infinite substance than in a finite one, since to conceive the latter 
 we must take away something from our idea of the former and so far limit 
 and restrict it. Hence in some way my mind must conceive the infinite before 
 it can have any notion of the finite." 
 
 1 Limits of Religious Thought, p. 76. 
 
 2 Exam, of Hamilton, vol. i. pp. 60, 61. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AN 7 D THEISM. 219 
 
 completely by the finite mind, whether man or angel, whether in 
 this life or through everlasting ages in the life to come. On the 
 other hand we affirm with equal decisiveness that the finite mind 
 has positive and real knowledge of God. And the finite spirit 
 may be " increasing in the knowledge of God " forever. Chris- 
 tian writers sometimes make admissions in which unawares they 
 affirm sheer agnosticism. Richard Hooker says : u Though to 
 know him be life, and joy to make mention of his name, yet our 
 .soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as indeed 
 he is, neither can know him ; and our safest eloquence is our 
 silence, whereby we confess without confession that his glory is 
 inexplicable, his greatness beyond our capacity and reach." With 
 all its affluence of diction this is a denial that man has any 
 knowledge of God as he is. 1 
 
 Christian poetry and devotion may say with Thomson : 
 
 "But Hose 
 
 Myself in him, in Light ineffable ; 
 Come then expressive silence, muse his praise." 
 
 But it is said, not by logic and philosophy, not in conscious igno- 
 rance of God, but at the summit of knowledge of him already 
 attained, in the vision of his perfections already revealed, in the 
 loftiest flight of devotion looking beyond the revealed perfection 
 on the glory that is unspeakable, that dazzles and blinds with 
 excess of light. 
 
 5. Theism claims that the absolute Being is the all-condition- 
 ing as well as the unconditioned. If the absolute is a being and 
 not a mere abstraction of a negation, the fact that it is uncondi- 
 tioned implies that it is the all-conditioning. The absolute Being, 
 as the ultimate ground of the universe and accounting for it and 
 all that is in it, cannot be included in the universe and must con- 
 dition it and all in it. And theism insists that the unconditioned 
 and all-conditioning Being must be the absolute, personal, ener- 
 gizing Reason, because no other can fill the positive idea of the 
 absolute as the all-conditioning and account for the universe. 
 
 Thus we have the idea of the absolute as the original, eternal 
 Power that has given being to the universe, and the immanent 
 Power that sustains, energizes and directs its ongoing ; the source 
 of life which subordinates the energies of all the parts to the 
 realizing of the end of the whole ; the eternal and universal Rea- 
 
 1 Augustine says : " Deus . . . sine qualitate bonus, sine quantitate mag- 
 nus, sine indigentia creator, sine situ praesens, sine habitu omnia continens, 
 sine loco ubique totus, sine tempore sempiternus, sine ulla mutatione muta- 
 bilia faciens, nihilque patiens." De Trinitate, v. i. 2. 
 
220 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 son, in which the universe lies eternal and archetypal in its prin- 
 ciples, laws, ideals and ends ; the absolute Will in harmony with 
 reason and ever progressively realizing its eternal and archetypal 
 ideas and expressing in finite things its perfect wisdom and love ; 
 and yet not plural, but the one indivisible Spirit, at once Reason 
 and Will, living and energizing in wisdom and love. Thus 
 theism explains the possibility of apprehending the universe in 
 thought because it is the expression of archetypal thought, and 
 so can be translated back into thought arid the things in it 
 apprehended in their intellectual equivalents. Hence it exists as 
 a cosmos and may be known in systems of science. Hence it is 
 progressively realizing higher ends and we find in it the strata of 
 its progress in the past. We find in the universe a sphere of 
 force ; and because a stronger force must always prevail over a 
 weaker, we find in this sphere the law of the survival of the 
 fittest, the strong overpowers and crowds out the weak. We 
 find in it also the organic sphere, vegetable and animal, in which 
 is the higher law that all the parts must act in subordination to 
 realizing the idea of the whole homologous with the law of 
 love. We find in it personal beings in a rational system under 
 the law of love. The unity of these wondrous spheres of mech- 
 anism, life and spirit in one reasonable, scientific and harmonious 
 system is thinkable only in their common relation to God, the 
 absolute Reason, the ground and support of the universe, ener- 
 gizing and directing in all. In him alone the antitheses of 
 knowledge and being, thought and things, spirit and matter, infi- 
 nite and finite find their synthesis and unity in the two systems of 
 nature and spirit in one all-comprehending system, progressively 
 realizing in finite beings the truths, laws, ideals and ends of per- 
 fect wisdom and love. In this alone do we find the explanation 
 of man. The contradictions in his being have been the theme of 
 both philosophers and poets. Pascal's vivid presentation of them 
 is famous and familiar. Pope has set them forth in verse : 
 " Chaos of thought and passion all confused, 
 
 Still by himself abused or disabused; 
 
 In doubt his mind or body to prefer, 
 
 Born but to die and reasoning but to err; 
 
 Created half to rise and half to fall, 
 
 Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; 
 
 Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; 
 
 The glory, jest and riddle of the world." 
 
 The explanation is found only when we know man as participat- 
 ing in the systems both of nature and of spirit, the object of 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 221 
 
 God's care, redeeming him from sin and from submersion in the 
 life of nature to the spiritual life of faith in God and communion 
 with him, and to participation in the divine life of love and in 
 the divine work of delivering men from sin and evil. 
 
 Agnosticism fixes an impassable gulf between the absolute and 
 the finite. We see the gulf and know that there is a somewhat 
 beyond it ; but thought itself cannot pass over to get even a 
 glimpse of what the somewhat is. Pantheism attempts to bridge 
 the gulf by the one only substance, or the all, or the universal, 
 or some other entity. But all its attempts fail. Either the finite 
 is lost in the absolute, or the absolute is lost in the finite, or the 
 bridge proves to be a bridge of words which breaks down under, 
 the first reality which attempts to cross on it, and the gulf between 
 the two is left impassable ; the Spirit of God cannot come to 
 the spirit of man, nor the spirit of man to the Spirit of God. 
 The synthesis of the two in a unity satisfying all the demands of 
 thought is found only when the absolute Being is known as the 
 energizing Reason, the eternal Spirit revealing himself, through 
 all his works and in the human consciousness, to the kindred spirit 
 of man. 
 
 6. Atheism is not in agreement with itself, and in each of its 
 forms is in some particulars in agreement with theism. 
 
 Atheism is not a self-consistent unity. Its four forms are not 
 a solid phalanx against theism, but are in conflict with each other. 
 Each rejects the conclusions and refutes the arguments of each of 
 the others. Hence in controversy with theism the same objector 
 cannot in consistency with himself use indiscriminately the objec- 
 tions of all the four ; although this is often done. Each of them 
 also fails to give any reasonable explanation of the universe or 
 any satisfactory answer to the necessary and ultimate questions 
 of the reason. To each also we may apply Mr. Huxley's warn- 
 ing as to his own speculations in the Physical Basis of Life : 
 u I bid you beware that in accepting these conclusions you are 
 placing your feet on the first rung of a ladder which in most peo- 
 ple's estimation is the reverse of that of Jacob and leads to the 
 antipodes of heaven." They agree only in erring from the truth 
 and in their failure to satisfy either the intellect or the heart. 
 Each proclaims the deviation of the others while never finding 
 the path of truth itself. 1 
 
 i " Velut silvis, ubi passim 
 Palantes error (^rfo de tramite pellit ; 
 Ille sinistrorsuin, hie dextrorsum abit; unus utrique 
 Error, sed variis illudit partibua." Horace, Sat. lib. ii. 3, 48-51. 
 
222 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Atheism in each of its forms is in some particulars in agree- 
 ment with theism. 
 
 The extreme positivism of Comte, which is at the farthest 
 remove from theism, may be supposed to have nothing in com- 
 mon with it. It renounces all attempt to give a theoretical or 
 philosophical construction of the universe and regards "the inves- 
 tigation of what are called causes, whether primal or final, as for 
 us absolutely inaccessible and void of meaning." Yet positivism 
 agrees with theism in recognizing the necessity of religion and 
 proposing an object for it. In Comte 's Positive Philosophy no 
 such recognition is found. After its publication, in his love for 
 Madame Clotilde de Vaux and his grief at her death, the reli- 
 gious element in his constitution seems to have been awakened 
 and to have asserted itself in his consciousness. He speaks of his 
 " moral regeneration " brought about by this u incomparable an- 
 gel." In subsequent works he recognizes religion, proposes hu- 
 manity as the Grand Etre to be worshiped and prescribes an 
 elaborate ritual. Of this Mr. Huxley said that it is Roman Ca- 
 tholicism with the religion left out. This religion, as expounded 
 by Mr. Frederic Harrison, presents the ideal of all that is strong- 
 est, wisest, noblest and best in humanity as the object of worship. 
 Here is agreement with theism in recognizing religion as neces- 
 sary to man and in proposing as its object, not the universe nor 
 any thing physical or material, but the true, the right, the per- 
 fect, the worthy and good, the rational and spiritual, in the high- 
 est forms in which they are known in the constitution and history 
 of man. The fatal defect is that this grand object is only an ab- 
 stract idea, not a being ; much less a personal Spirit that can 
 know, love and help the worshiper and be the object of his trust 
 and hope and love. 
 
 Agnostics and monists generally agree with theism in the 
 recognition of religion as constitutional in man and the necessity 
 of providing for it, at least in the imagination, some object of 
 worship. 
 
 Agnostics and monists further agree with theism in affirming 
 the knowledge that absolute Being exists as the ultimate ground 
 of the universe. Since physical science has left the Comtist 
 positivism behind as inadequate to the purposes of science, the 
 number who deny the knowledge that an absolute Being exists 
 is inconsiderable; and the theist is justified in assuming that its 
 existence at least is conceded by all who hold to the reality of 
 knowledge in distinction from phenomenalism. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM 223 
 
 Monists, both pantheistic and materialistic, agree still further 
 with theism in asserting that it is possible for man to have some 
 positive and real knowledge of what the absolute Being is. This 
 being admitted the next question at issue is, whether the abso- 
 lute Being is Reason or Spirit. 
 
 On this question, again, the idealistic pantheists agree with the 
 theist in affirming that, in some sense, it is so. Hartmann, for 
 example, presents with great clearness and force convincing evi- 
 dence that the absolute Being is Spirit. With pantheists of this 
 type the question at issue is reduced to this : Is the absolute Rea- 
 son or Spirit a conscious personal Spirit ? 
 
 Materialism has little in common with theism beyond the bare 
 recognition that something unconditioned exists and that we 
 may know what it is; if indeed at the present day there are any 
 materialists in the strict meaning of the word. Professor Haeckel 
 and Dr. Biichner perhaps are as near as any among educated men 
 to being representatives of this form of unbelief. Haeckel, after 
 defining what he calls " scientific materialism," says : " Moral or 
 ethical materialism ... is quite distinct. ... It proposes no other 
 aim to man than the most refined possible gratification of the 
 senses. It is based on the delusion that purely material enjoy- 
 ment can alone give satisfaction to man. . . . The profound truth 
 that the real value of life does not lie in material enjoyment but 
 in moral action, that true happiness does not depend on external 
 possessions but only on a virtuous life this is unknown to eth- 
 ical materialists." l Lange makes the same distinction : " If by 
 practical materialism we understand a dominant inclination to 
 material acquisition and enjoyment, then theoretical materialism 
 is opposed to it, as is every effort of the spirit towards knowl- 
 edge." 2 Materialism, denying that any thing exists except mat- 
 ter and its forces, is logically shut off from recognizing this higher 
 end of life which transcends sensuous enjoyment and material ac- 
 quisitions. These disclaimers, expressing the consciousness of 
 cultivated men, are unwitting protests against materialism as not 
 Capable of satisfying the higher nature of man ; they are unwit- 
 sing revelations of the existence of that higher spiritual capacity 
 which demands other than sensuous pleasures and material pos- 
 sessions; thus they are evidence that man can be comprehended 
 only as a spirit related to God, the absolute Spirit. From many, 
 who, whether properly called materialists or not, have lost their 
 
 1 History of the Creation, vol. i. pp. 35-37, Trans. 
 
 2 History of Materialism, vol. i. p. 46, Thomas's Trans. 
 
224 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 belief in God, similar testimony comes in the sorrow and some- 
 times the anguish with which they see this great inspiration of 
 the higher life dying out. Of the same purport is their testi- 
 mony that in their best hours it spontaneously reasserts its power. 
 Such is the testimony of Mr. Tyndall : " Christian men are 
 proved by their writings to have their hours of weakness and 
 doubt, as well as their hours of strength and conviction ; and 
 men like myself share, in their own way, these variations of mood 
 and tense. ... I have noticed during years of self-observation 
 that it is not in hours of clearness and vigor that this doctrine 
 (of materialistic atheism) commends itself to my mind ; that in 
 the presence of stronger and healthier thought it ever dissolves 
 and disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in which 
 we dwell and of which we form a part." l 
 
 Theism takes up whatever religious truth is implied in any 
 form of atheism or in any line of human thought, supplies their 
 defects, and gives, and it alone gives, a reasonable and satisfac- 
 tory explanation of the universe. 
 
 7. It remains to notice some pantheistic misconceptions which 
 some theists are inclining to accept as broadening and strength- 
 ening the positions of theism, but which only embarrass and con- 
 fuse theistic thought. Whatever of truth is in these conceptions 
 is more clearly, correctly and effectively set forth in theism itself, 
 without the pantheistic error. 
 
 Kant says : " Reason has no ground, in regard to the category 
 of substance, to proceed regressively with conditions. For acci- 
 dents (qualities) so far as they inhere in a substance are coordi- 
 nated with each other and do not constitute a series. And they 
 are not properly subordinated to substance, but are the mode of 
 existence of the substance itself. It is therefore only in the 
 category of causality that we can find a scries of causes to a 
 given effect, in which we ascend from the effect as conditioned 
 to the cause as conditioning, and thus answer the question of 
 reason." 2 The questions of reason which theism must answer 
 pertain not to substance but to cause, law and end ; to the inter- 
 action of individual finite agents, personal and impersonal, and 
 their unity in a dynamic and rational system. The essential 
 conception of pantheism is that the universe is one in substance, 
 by whatever name the substance may be called. This sets aside 
 at once the essential and fundamental conceptions of theism. 
 
 1 Preface to Address before the British Association at Belfast. 
 
 3 Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, bk. ii. chap. ii. sect. 1. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 225 
 
 From this unwarranted primal assumption of pantheism arises a 
 swarm of inferences incompatible with theism. 
 
 Hegel says that if one considers the reality of things he must 
 renounce his own individuality, cease to regard reason as his own 
 in a distinct personality, and must regard himself as universal 
 consciousness; for the reason is the divine spirit; and only in 
 this way can he escape the antitheses which appear in the uni- 
 verse. This is a necessary inference if there is but one being 
 and man is only a mode of the universal substance, having no 
 personal being and destined to be reabsorbed into the absolute 
 again. But theism recognizes individual persons who know 
 God, are subjects of his law and objects of his love, and who live 
 in communion with him. Therefore, according to theism, the 
 nearer man comes to God, and the more clearly and fully he sees 
 him in the grandeur of his perfections, the breadth, purity and 
 inviolability of his law, and the greatness of his redeeming love, 
 the more is he aware of his own personal greatness and worth, 
 the more does his personality reveal its godlike powers, the more 
 does he become aware of the responsibility, obligations and pos- 
 sibilities of his personal being. 
 
 Hegel also says that to apprehend God as the supreme Being 
 is to make him hollow, empty and poor. This is a necessary in- 
 ference from pantheism. God is the one only being ; he cannot 
 be the supreme Being, for this would distinguish him from other 
 beings. But according to theism God is distinguished from all 
 finite beings as the ground of their existence. He is the supreme 
 Being as the absolute Reason in whom all truth and law are 
 eternal, the eternal ground of all truth, law, authority and obli- 
 gation. 
 
 Hegel says that the wisdom of this age has made God an 
 infinite ghost (Gespensf) which is far from us beyond the stars; 
 and so has made human perception (Erkenntniss) into an empty 
 gliost of finiteness, or into a mirror on which fall only forms and 
 phenomena. But the alternative is not between one only being, 
 and God a ghost beyond the stars ; for according to the theistic 
 idea God is not far from every one of us, we know him, trust 
 him, commune with him, serve him. And this is not the pan- 
 theistic losing of ourselves in the absolute, but it is standing be- 
 fore God face to face, it is being received by him as his children, 
 it is greatening the personality of man by his communion with 
 God and service of him, it is knowing him, as Niebuhr says, 
 " Heart to heart with us." 
 
 15 
 
226 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Those who have merely an historical knowledge of God and 
 have not become personally acquainted with him in experience 
 are compared by Hegel to book-keepers in a great commercial 
 house who keep account of all the transactions but own nothing 
 themselves in the concern. 1 The distinction is important and the 
 comparison striking. Yet since the pantheist thinks himself 
 merely a mode of the absolute Being, and will himself eventually 
 lose his individual being in the All whence he came, it is he who 
 knows the absolute while personally he owns no interest therein ; 
 it is not the theist, who knows God as the giver of all good ; who 
 is the recipient of his blessings, active in his service, filled with 
 his fulness, and can say : "Thou art my Father, my God and the 
 rock of my salvation ; " and who looks forward to personal im- 
 mortality in communion with him. 
 
 Hartmann objects : " God cannot be called holy, because he 
 has not, like a limited personality, to govern his relations to 
 other persons by moral laws. God, as the cause of moral law, is 
 indeed its sanctifier, but he is not holy according to its criterion. 
 Only when it is shown that God does not stand with his personal 
 caprice behind the law as its maker, but goes out with his will 
 into the moral world-order, and also that the moral world-order, 
 so far as it affects man, can itself be identified with God, may 
 the holiness of the moral world-order be transferred to the God 
 identical with it." 2 But here is the error that the alternative is 
 between God as the unconscious constitution of things, and a 
 God standing with his personal caprice behind law, thus making 
 law to be the arbitrary decree of a capricious will. Whereas 
 theism presents God as the absolute Reason in whom all truth 
 and law are archetypal and eternal. These eternal principles 
 and laws are the constitution of the universe. No power of 
 either physical force or personal agency, no will-power of man or 
 God can annul, subvert or change them. And with these truths 
 and laws, these rational ideals and ends, God's will in free spon- 
 taneity is eternally in harmony. The universe as the progressive 
 and never ending realization of these principles is the progressive 
 expression and revelation of the eternal and perfect Reason. 
 
 An objection is urged that in ascribing reason, will and various 
 attributes to God we think of him as divided, as dual or plural. 
 But as theism puts it, these are merely different names of the one 
 absolute Being revealed in different aspects. When we think 
 
 1 Hegel, Philosophie der Religion, vol. i. pp. 31, 34, 37, 42. 
 
 2 Die Religion des Geistes, pp. 171, 172, part B. 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 227 
 
 that all truths, laws, ideals and ends, and all archetypes of things 
 in accordance with the same, are eternal in the absolute Being, 
 we call him Reason. When we think of him energizing in ac- 
 cordance with these truths and laws for the realization of all 
 perfection and good, we call him Will or Power ; and in refer- 
 ence to his character revealed in the eternal harmony of the will 
 with the reason, we call him Love and Wisdom. When we 
 think of him as conscious of himself in unity and identity, we- 
 call him Person. When we think of him as unconditioned in 
 dependence and unlimited in time, space and quantity, we call 
 him the Absolute and the Infinite. When we think of him as 
 the author and supporter of the universe, we call him the All- 
 conditioning, the u Great First Cause." But as the one being 
 existing in all these aspects, we call him God, the eternal 
 Spirit. 
 
 As theism puts it, God is the ground alike of all finite being, 
 power and rational intelligence. Reason must be universal; truth 
 and right, the rational standards of perfection and worth, must 
 be everywhere and always the same. The power that orders the 
 universe must order it according to the universal principles, laws, 
 ideals and ends of the one absolute Reason ; otherwise no rational 
 conclusion would be possible, no scientific observation would be 
 trustworthy, no scientific system could be verified, science would 
 be disintegrated, and all knowledge crumbled into isolated and 
 illusive impressions. Hence God is essential to the reality of all 
 knowledge as well as of all being. We cannot think him away ; 
 for without the assumption explicit or implied of his existence, 
 all ratiocinated thought becomes empty and cannot conclude in 
 knowledge. If thought rests ultimately on zero all its creations 
 and conclusions must be zero. 
 
 If we assume that God, as indeterminate being, is zero and that 
 he comes to consciousness in man, then it is man who creates 
 God rather than God who creates man. So J. G. Fichte is said to 
 have announced to his class : " To-morrow we will create God." 
 If we assume the external existence, independent of God, of 
 gross matter, or of a homogeneous nebulous matter, or of a form- 
 less and motionless fluid, or of something still more subtile, the 
 principles and laws which are the constitution of the universe, 
 then God is conditioned by this reality existing independent of 
 himself and becomes a mere demiurge, shaping the worlds as 
 under these external and independent conditions he best can. 
 And here tigain the ultimate ground of the universe is in the- 
 imoersonal and the unconscious. 
 
228 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 On either of these last mentioned assumptions a man may con- 
 sistently amuse himself by toying with the idea of God. He may 
 ask himself what would be if God were other than he is, or if lie 
 did not exist, and may imagine that lie can answer the questions. 
 He may think of God as non-existent and yet may imagine the 
 universe with its constitution and laws remaining as it is, and 
 himself existing and thinking under the regulative principles of 
 reason as now. What difference does the non-existence of God 
 make to his rationality ? Neither his own rational constitution 
 nor the constitution of the universe is dependent on God. He is 
 above God and can in thought dismiss him from the universe. 
 God is not essential to his knowledge and rationality. He ad- 
 mits God indeed to a corner of his mind. He timorously pleads 
 that it is possible to have some knowledge of God ; or if not 
 knowledge, at least an indefinable belief. The knowledge of 
 God is dubiously admitted, while the knowledge of the universe 
 is pronounced real and indubitable and would remain indubita- 
 ble knowledge if there were no God. Hence his religion may 
 consistently be crowded into a corner of his life, into a closet in 
 which he worships ; while the reat area of life and its interests 
 lies entirely outside of it; and both his thinking about God and 
 his religion take on unreality. 
 
 When one accustomed to such thoughts of God begins to see 
 that God is the absolute Reason, that he cannot be thought other- 
 wise without annulling man's own reason, that if he is non-ex- 
 istent the universe with its constitution, its rational principles 
 and laws, its ideals and its good, disappears with him and there 
 IK> longer remains any reason or any intelligent thought, then his 
 knowledge of God will take on a reality, grandeur and power 
 such as he had never conceived. Instead of timorously pleading 
 to be allowed some belief in God in a corner of his knowledge, 
 he will see that his own rationality and all rational intelligence 
 rest on the, existence of God, the supreme Reason. Instead of 
 amusing himself with thinking God other than he is or non-ex- 
 istent, he will see that all rational intelligence rests on his exist- 
 ence ; and that if God were not or were other than he is, all ra- 
 tional thought and knowledge would cease, there, would be no 
 difference between the reasonable and the absurd and the one 
 would be as possible as the other, and the universe and all its 
 principles and laws, its perfection and its worth, would be no 
 more. Now the knowledge of God, no longer crowded into a 
 corner and affirmed with doubt, becomes the basis of all rational 
 
THE ABSOLUTE BEING AND THEISM. 229 
 
 thinking and the all-pervading and sustaining life of all rational 
 intelligence. And religion, no longer secluded in a corner, takes 
 possession of man's whole being, inspires and ennobles all his 
 activity, is that which alone makes life worth living. He begins 
 to understand that God is not far from every one of us ; that in 
 him we live and move and have our being. 
 
 Man's consciousness of his limitations reveals his consciousness 
 of the absolute. He beats against the bars of his cage because 
 he has wings and is competent to soar in the empyrean beyond. 
 Brutes follow their instincts with no irksomeness under their 
 limitations and no consciousness that they are limited. It is be- 
 cause their limitation is complete and they have no capacity for 
 another sphere. Complete limitation excludes all consciousness 
 of the limit. Man's consciousness of limitation is the conscious- 
 ness of a reserved power which would find its sphere if the lim- 
 itations were removed. Man cannot be content in the finite 
 only. He aspires to know the absolute Being, to enter into com- 
 munion with him and to know all reality in unity in relation, 
 to him. It is this aspiration toward the absolute, this struggle 
 to transcend the limits of sense and matter, this longing to com- 
 mune with the eternal Spirit, which reveals the grandeur of 
 man's being, and which has been the spring of all that is noblest 
 and greatest in the achievements of the individual and in the 
 history of mankind. 
 
 We have already considered the belief in a divinity which 
 arises spontaneously from the constitution of man as acted on by 
 his environment, and have thus ascertained the origin of the idea 
 of God. We have seen that this spontaneous belief must be veri- 
 fied in thought. The verification is the proof that God exists. 
 We have been considering the verification of this belief directly 
 from the intuitive reason, and have found that it is a principle 
 of reason and a necessary law of thought that an absolute Being 
 exists. Here then we have, if I may so say, two legs of the belief 
 in God resting firmly on what is constitutional, spontaneous and 
 intuitive in man. We have the primitive belief in a divinity 
 arising in experience, and the belief that absolute Being exists, 
 arising in rational intuition. We proceed to inquire what this 
 absolute Being must be and whether it is the God whom we ought 
 to worship. Is the God whom we worship the absolute Being 
 that reason reveals ? 
 
PART III. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE AS PERSONAL 
 SPIRIT THROUGH THE CONSTITUTION AND COURSE 
 OF NATURE AND THE CONSTITUTION AND HISTORY 
 OF MAN. 
 
 " Wouldst know the whole ? then scan the parts ; for all 
 That molds the great lies mirrored in the small." Goethe. 
 
 " If we insist on penetrating the insoluble mystery of the essential cause of phenomena, 
 there is no hypothesis more satisfactory than that they proceed from wills dwelling in them 
 or outside of them. ... Were it not for the pride induced by metaphysical and scientific 
 studies it would be inconceivable that any atheist, ancient or modern, should have believed 
 that his vague hypothesis on such a subject was preferable to this direct mode of explana- 
 tion. And it was the only mode which really satisfied reason, until men began to see the 
 utter folly and inutility of all search for absolute truth. The order of nature is doubtless 
 very imperfect; but its production is far more compatible with the hypothesis of an intelli- 
 gent will than with that of a blind mechanism. Persistent atheists therefore would seem 
 to be the most illogical of theologians; for they occupy themselves with the same questions, 
 yet reject the only appropriate method of handling them." Comte, Politique Positive, 
 Translation, vol. i. p. 37, London ed. 1875. 
 
 " Very little thought is required to satisfy one's self that the natural, all and everywhere, 
 rests upon the supernatural and terminates in it. Every atom of nature still preaches its 
 supernatural origin and being." Hartmann, Die Religion des Geistes, part B, p. 118. 
 
 "Nature is a kind of illuminated table of the contents of the spirit." Novalis. 
 
 " Esse apibus partem divinae mentis, et haustus 
 JEthereos dixere; deum namque ire per omnes 
 Terrasque, tractusque maris, co3lumque profundum." 
 
 Virgil, Georgic iv. 220-223. 
 
 " Man is man's A, B, C ; there 's none that can 
 Read God aright unless he first spell man." Quarles. 
 
 " Res non tarn sub duratione quam sub quadam specie aeternitatis percipit et numero in* 
 finite." Spinoza, De Intellectus Emendatione, Opera, vol. ii. p. 41, Leipsic, ed. 1844. 
 
 " No bar the spirit-world hath ever borne; 
 It is thy thought is shut, thy heart is dead. 
 Up, scholar, bathe, unwearied and unworn, 
 Thine earthly breast in morning's beams of red.'* 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE AS THE POWER FROM 
 WHICH IT ORIGINATES AND ON WHICH IT DEPENDS. 
 
 THEISM affirms that the absolute Being is revealed in the uni- 
 verse as the personal God, the eternal Spirit, both in the physical 
 system and in the moral or spiritual. This revelation is three- 
 fold. 
 
 God is revealed in the causal energy acting in the universe, as 
 the Power from which it originates and on which it depends ; as 
 the First Cause, whose power is manifested continuously and 
 everywhere in the universe. 
 
 God is revealed in the universe as personal Spirit through the 
 constitution and course of nature. 
 
 God is further revealed in the universe as personal Spirit 
 through the constitution and history of man. These three lines 
 of God's revelation of himself in the universe will be the subjects 
 of the three chapters of this Third Part. 
 
 These three lines of evidence are commonly called arguments. 
 They consist rather in tracing out and interpreting the manifes- 
 tations or revelations of the absolute Being in the universe. So 
 far as they involve argument it consists in inferring from these 
 manifestations what the absolute Being is revealed to be. 
 
 In controverting these arguments it is commonly assumed that 
 tlioy are presented as evidences that the absolute Being exists* 
 But thus the true point and significance of the evidence are 
 missed, and at the utmost all which is refuted is what the evi- 
 dence is not designed to prove. We already know that the ab- 
 solute Being exists. This is a necessary principle of reason or 
 law of thought underlying all proving and all thinking. 
 
 Assuming this, in the three lines of evidence now to be con- 
 sidered we are not proving that the absolute Being exists, but by 
 the study of the universe so far as open to our observation, we 
 are ascertaining what can be known of the absolute Being every- 
 where manifested in it. Theism claims that it finds in the uni- 
 verse manifestations of the absolute Being, unchanging in its 
 
234 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 eternal essence, the all-originating and ever energizing first Cause, 
 the universal and supreme Reason. This is being in its highest 
 form, Being, Power, Reason, the three in one, unconditioned, un- 
 changeable, the eternal Spirit, the personal God. We are to ex- 
 amine the universe to ascertain whether this claim of theism can 
 be substantiated. 
 
 The first of the three lines of evidence is called the cosmolog- 
 ical argument. 
 
 This considers the universe merely as existing and manifest- 
 ing power or causal energy ; it takes no notice of the existence 
 of rational beings in the universe nor of the evidence of rational 
 direction and design. And all which the theist aims to establish 
 by it is, that the absolute Being is revealed in the universe as the 
 first Cause, as the absolute and unconditioned source of the causal 
 energies ever acting in it, as the transcendent Power from which 
 it proceeds and on which it depends. It is not therefore the whole 
 evidence as to what the absolute Being is, but only a single step 
 in attaining the knowledge of it. All objections to this line of 
 evidence, because it does not prove something other than this, 
 are entirely aside from the point. 
 
 In examining this evidence, the essential point is to ascertain 
 whether the absolute Being is a first Cause that transcends the 
 universe or is simply identical with it. 
 
 Monism, pantheistic and materialistic, affirms that the absolute 
 Being is identical with the universe ; that there is therefore no 
 occasion to inquire for any transcendent cause. The false ideas 
 and methods, the difficulties and contradictions involved in all 
 monistic theories have already been exposed. In contradiction of 
 these, theism affirms that the universe, so far as known to us, is 
 found to be incompatible with the monistic theories ; that it is 
 essentially limited, conditioned and dependent ; that therefore it 
 cannot itself be the absolute Being; that consequently it must be 
 dependent on causal power other than and transcending the uni- 
 verse. The cosmological argument consists in establishing this 
 position from an examination of the universe so far as we can 
 know it. Hence Leibnitz rightly called it the argument from the 
 contingency of the world. It is necessary to this argument to 
 establish the fact that the universe is always conditioned and de- 
 pendent, consequently an effect. Then the inference is inevitable 
 that the universe is not itself the eternal, self-existent, uncondi- 
 tioned Being, but that it reveals the power of the absolute Being 
 transcending it and on which it depends. 
 
GOD KEVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 235 
 
 Here it is objected that in order to prove that the universe is 
 an effect we must prove that it had a beginning. And it is urged 
 with triumphant confidence that this is impossible. Of course it 
 is impossible to prove by any historical testimony that the uni- 
 verse had a beginning. But an object, an arrangement, an equi- 
 librium of forces may be known to be an effect, although the 
 causal act has not been observed. The most of scientific dis- 
 coveries of unknown causes rest on the assumption that causes 
 inny be thus discovered. In the same manner we may know that 
 the universe is an effect. It is known to be so because it bears 
 in its essence unmistakable marks of finite ness and dependence. 
 This becomes continually more evident the more thoroughly 
 science explores it. 
 
 First, the universe cannot be comprehended scientifically by 
 the recognition only of its multitudinous and finite forces in dis- 
 integration. Science is found to be possible only on the basis of 
 the maxim that the sum of all forces potential and energetic is 
 always the same. Nothing can ever be added to it or taken from 
 it ; and it is manifested or revealed in all the particular and meas- 
 urable forces observed in the universe. This maxim physical 
 science assumes without proof as a self-evident principle of rea- 
 son or law of thought and necessary to all scientific knowledge of 
 the universe. Thus science by its exploration of the universe 
 lias discovered that it, with all its multitudinous beings and forces, 
 is in the unity of a dynamic system ; that it is an effect ; and that 
 it is the effect of one cause. Here then the first requisite of the 
 cosmological argument is already scientifically established. 
 
 And it is evident that this power is not merely the sum of all 
 the finite powers acting in the universe ; for this would imply 
 that it is consequent and dependent on them ; whereas, if this 
 power is to meet the demand of science under this necessary law 
 of thought, it must be their antecedent and cause. Therefore it 
 must be the absolute, originant and transcendent cause of the 
 universe. 
 
 And this power or cause cannot be finite. Whatever power is 
 finite and measurable must be capable of increase or diminution. 
 This power, which is the one power from which the universe pro- 
 ceeds, and which is manifested in all its finite energies, and is in- 
 capable of increase or diminution, must be the absolute and tran- 
 scendent Power. 
 
 But there can be no power without a, being. Power or force 
 is unthinkable except as exerted or conveyed by a being. If we 
 
236 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 hypostasize the power, we only delude ourselves by transferring 
 to it the essential attributes of substantial being. 
 
 Thus physical science brings us to the same necessary law of 
 thought which is recognized in philosophy and theology ; the 
 power from which the universe proceeds is the power of the 
 absolute Being, transcending the universe and manifested or re- 
 vealed in it. 
 
 It may be added that science finds the universe to be not 
 merely in a dynamic but also in a rational unity. At the basis 
 of all science is the assumption that the universe is throughout 
 a reasonable universe, capable of being scientifically known by 
 rational beings so far as their rational powers are developed and 
 they have opportunity to observe it ; and this assumption is con- 
 firmed by the whole progress of scientific investigation. This 
 implies the absolute and universal Reason, everywhere the same 
 and everywhere energizing and directing. Here again science 
 discloses the unity of the universe as an effect depending on a 
 cause transcending itself. Further than this the application of 
 this thought is not pertinent in the line of evidence now under 
 consideration. 
 
 It may be added, however, in respect to the moral system, that 
 while men know themselves rational and free, they also know 
 in their own self-consciousness that they are limited, conditioned 
 and dependent. They know that the ultimate ground of the uni- 
 verse is not in man. The very consciousness of moral obliga- 
 tion carries in it the consciousness of a law above man, eternal 
 in the Reason that is absolute and supreme. Therefore, so far 
 as the universe has come to any consciousness of itself, it is a 
 consciousness of limitation and dependence, and of a law tnm- 
 scending the universe and significant only as it is eternal in the 
 absolute Reason. 
 
 In the second place, the physical universe is in its essence finite 
 and conditioned. To know it as such it, is not necessary to push 
 our observations to its utmost limits and to trace with our own 
 eyes its farthest bounds. Limitation and conditionateness are of 
 the essence of matter, for it is essentially that which is contained 
 in and occupies space, and is in other particulars in its essence de- 
 pendent and finite. In its masses and its molecules, and in every 
 form of its existence in time and space, it is essentially finite 
 and conditioned, and cannot be the absolute and unconditioned 
 Being. 
 
 Materialism supposes a definite quantity of matter and force 
 
GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 237 
 
 In the universe, conceivably measurable. This is a necessary 
 conception from the essential finiteness of matter. If now it is 
 assumed that the power from which the universe proceeds and 
 on which it depends is identical with the universe itself, it 
 is a limited power. The universe then becomes a mechanism 
 which constructs itself, generates its own force, expends energy 
 in work forever, and continually reproduces the force expended. 
 This implies a mechanism realizing the absurdity of a perpetual 
 self -generating motion. And this is as absurd in a great ma- 
 chine as in a small one. 
 
 Thus again science discovers that the causal energy which 
 originates and sustains the universe cannot be the same with 
 the universe itself, but must transcend it. The conception that 
 it is identical with the universe is unthinkable, unless the essen- 
 tial meaning of matter is changed and it is assumed to be en- 
 dowed with the attributes of the absolute Being. 
 
 Thirdly, the universe is found in fact to be an effect in all its 
 parts and in every condition in which man knows it. 
 
 According to the old conception of a universe finished and 
 at rest and of the inertia of matter, this would not have been 
 evident. A mere unchanging substance carries the mind back 
 on no regression to a cause. But science has discovered that 
 nothing in the universe is inactive or at rest. Everywhere and 
 always, everything, from the largest mass to the minutest mole- 
 cule, is in intense activity putting forth and receiving energy. 
 Wherever we find the universe or any thing in it, we find it an 
 effect of previous energy and a cause of new conditions. And a 
 series of causal actions, with nothing that originates it and noth- 
 ing that persists and is manifested in it, is unthinkable. 
 
 . Thus, in whatever condition the physical universe is found, we 
 must always go back to an antecedent condition in order to ac- 
 count for it. In its determinate condition it is always found to 
 be an effect. Accordingly Kant says : u As every determination 
 of matter which constitutes what is real in it is an effect which 
 must have had a cause, and is for this reason always derived, 
 the notion of matter cannot harmonize with the idea of a neces- 
 sary being in its character as the principle of all derived unity." 
 
 Further, in its search for physical causes science seems to be 
 receding from matter and recognizing causes which continually 
 approximate to an abandonment of its essential idea. In account- 
 ing for masses of matter it recognizes molecules ; in explaining 
 1 Critique of Pure Reason, Transc. Dialectic, bk. Hi. chap. iii. sect. 5. 
 
238 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the molecules it supposes atoms ; in explaining the ethers it sup- 
 poses atoms of a second order ; and in explaining the atoms it 
 supposes that the atom itself may be a complicated system with 
 its parts moving and interacting. Thus in finding the physical 
 causes of the various determinate conditions of matter science 
 seems to be demonstrating that physical effects cannot be ulti- 
 mately accounted for by physical causes ; it seems to find itself 
 gradually forced out of the material universe to look for a cause 
 that transcends it. 
 
 If we push our inquiries into the internal constitution of mat- 
 ter to the molecules and ultimate atoms, we must indeed suppose 
 that they exist unchanged through all the changes of nature. 
 But this very fact is urged by Clerk-Maxwell to prove that they 
 are not products of nature. " The formation of the molecule 
 is an event not belonging to that order of nature under which 
 we live. It is an operation of a kind which is not, so far as we 
 are aware, going on on earth, or in the sun or the stars, either 
 now or since these bodies were formed. It must be referred 
 to the epoch, not of the formation of the earth or of the solar 
 system, but of the establishment of the existing order of nature, 
 and till not only these worlds and systems, but the very order 
 of nature itself is dissolved, we have no reason to expect the 
 occurrence of any operation of a similar kind." 
 
 To many minds there seems to be a contradiction involved 
 in the eternal existence of the atoms, on account of their lim- 
 itation in space and the multitude of them. Professor Max- 
 well adds that they are alike. "There are immense numbers 
 of atoms of the same kind, and the constants of each of these 
 atoms are incapable of adjustment by any process now in action. 
 Each is physically independent of all the others. Whether or 
 not the conception of a multitude of beings existing from all 
 eternity is in itself self-contradictory, the conception becomes 
 palpably absurd when we attribute a relation of quantitative 
 equality to all these beings. We are then forced to look be- 
 yond them to some common cause or common origin to explain 
 why this singular relation of equality exists, rather than any 
 one of the infinite number of possible relations of inequality. 
 Science is incompetent to reason on the creation of the world 
 out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our think- 
 ing faculties when we have admitted that, because matter can- 
 not be eternal and self-existent, it must have been created." 1 
 1 Encyc. Brit. vol. iii. art. Atom, p. 49, 9th ed. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 239 
 
 Thus, from its ultimate atoms to its largest masses and its 
 grandest systems, nature reveals itself finite and dependent. No- 
 where in all our search through the material worlds do we find 
 any cause which accounts for the universe itself nor ultimately 
 for any of its parts. Modern science repeats with new emphasis 
 the ancient words of Job : " The depth saith, It is not in me, 
 and the sea saith, It is not in me." But the universe and every- 
 thing in it points to a cause beyond itself. 
 
 Fourthly, this conclusion is confirmed by the theory of evolu- 
 tion. This supposes a beginning of motion ; for when motion 
 begins the nebulous matter must cease to be homogeneous. The 
 theory does not profess to account for the beginning of motion 
 except by the intimation of a force incident on the homogeneous; 
 this, if it means anything, means a cause of motion outside of 
 the universe itself. Therefore, even if we suppose matter to 
 have been without beginning as a formless and motionless fluid, 
 imperceptible by sense till motion began, as some scientists con- 
 jecture, or as a homogeneous nebulous matter, as Spencer sup- 
 poses, it could never have been the cause of its own motion, 
 but the motion must have been communicated from without. 
 Then the universe as we now know it is the effect of a cause 
 that transcends it. Evolution also involves the necessary event- 
 ual cessation of motion. If by its continuous and necessary in- 
 teraction all its forces must come into equilibrium and all motion 
 cease, this proves that the motion and the energy revealed in it 
 must have had a beginning. Thus modern researches in the sci- 
 ence of heat seem to give us scientific knowledge that the uni- 
 verse had a beginning and is an effect, and as such is conditioned 
 and dependent. 1 
 
 Finally, there are gaps or breaks, both in the interaction of 
 bodies in the physical system and in its evolution, which cannot 
 be accounted for under the law of the conservation and correla- 
 tion of force. Science teaches that bodies, whether molar or 
 molecular, never come into real contact. In cohesion, chemical 
 affinity and gravitation, the action is always at a distance. 
 Whether we suppose the force acting in the universe to be in- 
 herent in the masses or the molecules, or to be communicated by 
 impact, we are confronted in every direction by this mystery of 
 action at a distance and by other difficulties which science has 
 never resolved. And in the evolution of the cosmos there are 
 breaks, in the appearance of higher powers unaccounted for by 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 455-536. 
 
240 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 any cause or force known to science. Such are the beginning of 
 organic life, the beginning of sensitivity, and the beginning of 
 rational personality. 1 
 
 From these distinct lines of evidence the conclusion is inevi- 
 table that the universe is essentially dependent and conditioned, 
 and that the absolute Being cannot be the universe itself but 
 must transcend it. 
 
 When we found that man has knowledge that the absolute 
 Being exists we parted company with the extreme positivists. 
 Here we part from the monists, pantheistic and materialistic ; 
 for we have refuted their theory that the absolute Being is the 
 same with the universe. We have learned that the universe has 
 not its ultimate ground and cause in itself. This necessarily 
 implies that the absolute Being is distinct from the universe and 
 transcends it; that it is the eternal Being from which the uni- 
 verse proceeds ; the first and ever energizing cause on which the 
 universe depends always for its existence, and whose power is 
 continually manifested in it. 
 
 Mr. Spencer goes with the theist to this point. He main- 
 tains as strenuously as the theist that we have knowledge that 
 the absolute Being exists, and that this is a necessary law of 
 thought, " the best guaranteed of all." He also maintains that 
 we know the absolute positively as the omnipresent Power man- 
 ifesting itself in the universe. He affirms essentially the same 
 knowledge of God which the theist reaches, aside from religious 
 experience, in the conclusion of this cosmological argument. It 
 is only in inconsistency with himself that he persists in affirming 
 that the absolute Being is the Unknowable. He ought also to 
 see that the evidence in the universe that the absolute is Reason, 
 is of the same kind and equally convincing with the evidence 
 that the absolute is Power. It is surprising that he and other 
 rejecters of theism do not see that the conception of the universe 
 as grounded in and directed by energizing Reason or God, is as 
 completely a scientific comprehension of it as the conception of it 
 as grounded in an insensate homogeneous, or in Power, or in the 
 one substance, or in primordial atoms, or matter in any form ; 
 and that the theistic subordination of the physical to the spiritual 
 completes the unity of these, the duality of which cannot be re- 
 moved by atheism in any form, but remains a separating gulf 
 which non-theistic theories can never bridge. 
 
 An objection is urged that theism implies a beginning of the 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, 420-427, 491-526. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 241 
 
 universe ; and there is always a difficulty in thinking of its be- 
 ginning. But it is a difficulty which presses just as heavily on 
 pantheism, materialism, agnosticism and evolution, as on theism. 
 Theism accounts for this difficulty. The absolute reveals itself 
 as Reason energizing in wisdom and love. Yet it must always 
 reveal itself as the absolute ; and there must be mystery all 
 along the line at which the absolute expresses or reveals itself 
 in the finite. Creation can be thought in the sense that the 
 universe is always dependent on God for its existence. God is 
 through all time the prius of the universe and the ground of its 
 existence. 
 
 Another objection is that this argument proves only that the 
 cause of the universe is adequate to the effect actually produced, 
 but not that it is unconditioned and unlimited in power. Thus 
 Hegel argues that an infinite cause cannot be inferred from a 
 finite effect. 1 Hume has urged the same objection : " The cause 
 must be proportioned to the effect. . . . Allowing the gods to 
 be the authors of the existence and order of the universe, it 
 follows that they possess that precise degree of power, intelli- 
 gence and benevolence which appears in their workmanship ; but 
 nothing further can be proved." 
 
 It may be replied that if the argument proves the existence 
 of a being with power adequate to cause the universe, then the 
 power of this being must transcend all other power actually ex- 
 isting, which, as derived from the first cause and dependent on 
 it, must be inferior to it. The first cause is then practically the 
 supreme and almighty Being. 
 
 But the radical error in this objection is that it assumes that 
 the existence of the absolute is proved by an inference from, 
 effect to cause. Under the principle of causation we can infer 
 from an effect only a cause adequate to produce it ; and from the 
 universe as an effect we can infer, as the objector insists, only a 
 cause adequate to produce it. And this does not give us the ab- 
 solute Being in its true meaning. On the contrary, that the ab- 
 solute Being exists is a necessary intuition of reason, a funda- 
 mental law of thought, which asserts itself as the necessary ulti- 
 mate postulate in every line of thought. Against this position 
 this and analogous objections are powerless. And the position 
 itself is impregnable, so long as knowledge of being is admitted. 
 This is now accepted, as we have seen, as an ultimate postulate 
 and necessary law of thought, by materialists, pantheists and 
 
 1 Philosophic der Religion, vol. ii. pp. 23, 24. 
 16 
 
242 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Spencerian agnostics. It is also implied in the fundamental 
 postulate of physical science, that the sum of matter and of force 
 potential and energetic is forever the same. And thus it may 
 truly be said that the last word of science is the first word of 
 theology. 
 
 Closely allied to. the objection last considered is another, 
 founded on the persistence of force ; that there is an exact equiv- 
 alence of causes and effects ; that the effect is the cause itself 
 reappearing in a new form ; that therefore in reasoning from the 
 effect to the cause we simply find in the cause that which we had 
 already found in the effect. To this also the answer is the same, 
 that we do not profess to prove the existence of God merely by 
 reasoning from effect to cause under the law of causation. 
 
 This objection implies also another error, that the cause is 
 simply the force which is transmitted and reappears in a new 
 form. But the cause implies a being that exerts or conveys the 
 force and the effect is some change in the being that receives the 
 force. If a cannon ball strikes a building and shatters it, the 
 force that shattered the building is the same with the force 
 which was in the moving ball ; but the ball which conveyed the 
 force and caused the effect is not the same with the effect, and 
 has not passed into the effect and disappeared. The theory that 
 the cause is the force and in the effect remains the same in a 
 new form, is tenable only on some theory which denies all real 
 being and resolves all reality into disembodied force. But if the 
 cannon ball is nothing but a force, the force, which constitutes 
 it a ball and abides in it as such, is just as completely distin- 
 guished, and not only distinguished but separated from the force 
 it conveys and transmits, as it is if the ball is a being. Hence 
 it is necessarily hypostasized, or regarded in thought as a being. 
 So that, think of it as one will, a cause is not identical with its 
 effect, is not transmitted into the effect, does not disappear in 
 the effect, but remains capable of further causal efficiency. In 
 reasoning from an effect, therefore, the causal judgment requires 
 not merely a force exerted, but also a being that conveyed or ex- 
 erted it. Pushing our thought back under the demands of the 
 causal judgment, we are obliged at last, by a necessary law of 
 thought, to believe in the existence of a Being that is the first 
 cause in which all the powers actually found in the universe exist 
 potentially. And the being that is the cause of the universe is 
 not identical with it. When we apply a similar train of thought 
 to rational free agents, who are self-directive and self-exertive, 
 
GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 243 
 
 the futility of the objection becomes still more apparent. In fact 
 the force of the objection rests on the assumption that the uni- 
 verse consists solely of physical forces acting in the fixed course 
 of nature, and that no supernatural being and in fact no real 
 being of any kind exists. 
 
 Hegel objects that if we argue from effect to cause, we con- 
 dition the cause by the effect. 1 This, however, is only one of 
 those pantheistic objections which arise from a false idea of the 
 absolute as the sum total of all realities, or as indeterminate 
 being, or as out of all relations, and from the false method of 
 confounding the order of a logical process with the order of his- 
 torical and concrete reality. It can be no limitation of a poten- 
 tial cause that it is able to exert its powers in action ; it would 
 be a limitation if it could not. It may be added that it is as 
 much a limitation of absolute substance to unroll itself into many 
 modes, as for an absolute cause to exert its energies in causing 
 many effects, or for absolute reason to express its thoughts of 
 wisdom and love in finite forms. But these answers need not 
 be insisted on, for this objection, like those preceding, derives its 
 force from the error that the existence of God is proved solely by 
 reasoning from effect to cause. 
 
 There are also various objections to the cosmological argument 
 which are founded on erroneous definitions of a cause. 
 
 Some of them rest on the error that cause and effect denote 
 merely antecedent and consequent. Mr. Boole exemplifies it : 
 A little boy asked his brother, Why does going to sleep at night 
 make it light in the morning ? His brother, a year or two older, 
 could answer, that it would be light in the morning even if little 
 boys did not go to sleep at night. 2 Men always distinguish be- 
 tween a cause, in which they recognize power or force, and a 
 mere antecedent. Even the child in the anecdote made this dis- 
 tinction, for he thought his going to bed made the sun rise. His 
 mistake was not as to the nature of a cause but as to the ques- 
 tion of fact, what was the particular cause of a particular effect. 
 This objection is nullified by the present scientific conception of 
 force and its fundamental importance in all scientific thought. 
 Science does not recognize mere antecedence and consequence, 
 but energy actually exerted. The law of the correlation and con- 
 servation of force is a scientific recognition of this in causation. 
 The objection is consistent only with complete phenomenalism 
 
 1 Phil, der Religion, vol. ii. pp. 24, 25. 
 
 2 Boole's Laws of Thought, p. 361. 
 
244 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 <*r Comtist positivism, which rejects the reality of force, "as a 
 mere figment of the imagination." Yet even these positivists. 
 are obliged to use the word, and their language implies that 
 they, in common with all men, in describing actual events, have 
 a consciousness of the reality of the efficient power which they 
 deny. Hence Mr. Spencer says : " The consciousness of caust^ 
 can be abolished only by abolishing consciousness itself." l And 
 Dr. Carpenter says : " The notion of force is one of those ele- 
 mentary forms of thought with which we can no more dispense 
 than we can with the notion of space or of succession." 2 
 
 There are also objections founded on the theory that the belief 
 in causation is the result of mental impotence. But it has been 
 shown that the causal judgment does not rest on mental impo- 
 tence, but on the positive, self-evident intuition of reason. The 
 same is true of all the first principles of reason, which are laws 
 of thought and action. They do not arise from mental impo- 
 tence, but from mental power. They are the constituent ele- 
 ments of reason, by which man is distinguished from the brutes, 
 is capable of reasonable knowledge, attains scientific compre- 
 hension of the universe, and is in affinity with God and in his 
 likeness. On them not only theology and philosophy, but also 
 all the reasoning of empirical science, must rest. 
 
 Other objections are founded on the supposition that the causal 
 judgment is merely the result of an association of ideas in expe- 
 rience. Resting on this theory Professor Clifford ridicules the 
 argument from causation as invalid and even silly. He says that 
 the Greek word represented by cause " has sixty-four meanings 
 in Plato, and forty-eight in Aristotle." The latter defines ex- 
 plicitly the four meanings of cause as he uses the word. But if 
 the assertion of Professor Clifford were true, his inference from it 
 would rest on the puerile conception that a word cannot be used 
 with exactness in science and philosophy if it is also used with 
 various other meanings in common speech. In precisely the same 
 way the arguments of scientists respecting " force " may be ridi- 
 culed, because the word " force " is sometimes used to denote the 
 stuffing of a turkey for roasting, and the Imperial Dictionary 
 gives it twenty-eight separately numbered definitions, with a 
 number of synonyms under almost every one. This is not an 
 argument but an appeal to ignorance. Charity would hope that 
 it was also from ignorance. But this is not easy to be believed 
 
 1 The Classification of the Sciences, p. 36. 
 
 2 Address before the British Association, 1872. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 245 
 
 of a man characterized in the Rede Lecture before the University 
 of Cambridge in 1885 as " one of the most powerful intellects 
 ever sent out into the world by this University." Professor 
 Clifford proceeds to give the significance of the causal judgment 
 as he views it, and ridicules the use of it in philosophy and the- 
 ology. When we have become familiar with a property of any 
 being and so this has become associated in our minds with its 
 other properties, we transfer this property by analogy to any 
 other being that has any casual resemblance to it. You come to 
 a scarecrow and ask what its cause is. You learn that it is de- 
 signed to frighten birds. You conclude that every thing is like 
 the scarecrow and exists for a purpose. You see a hair-dresser's 
 rotary brush and ask for the cause of its motion ; you learn that 
 it is a man at the handle ; you conclude that every thing has a 
 man at the handle. By and by a case arises to which your simile 
 will not apply; you say that is a mystery. In illustration of 
 this he supposes a man to infer from his own nervous system that 
 his umbrella has a nervous system ; but, as he cannot make that 
 out, he says the nervous system of his umbrella is a mystery. 
 Whereas he should say that it has no nervous system. 1 In this 
 caricature, for it cannot be called an argument, he confuses under 
 the idea of cause the efficient cause, the final cause and the prin- 
 ciple of the uniformity and continuity of nature, apparently with- 
 out being aware of the difference between them. And the belief 
 in causation he explains as the result of a casual association of 
 Lleas and some loose resemblance unscientifically observed. But 
 if this is the true conception of the causal judgment, it involves 
 the denial of the validity of all inferences from an effect to its 
 cause or from the uniformity and continuity of nature. But since 
 all physical science rests helplessly on the principles on which 
 these inferences rest, his ridicule is as effective against it as 
 against philosophy and theology. 
 
 Physicus, in Theism, thinks that he has put it forever beyond 
 controversy that the persistence of force, the indestructibility of 
 matter and the fact of evolution absolutely shut out all scientific 
 evidence of the existence of God or of any first cause or absolute 
 Being as the ultimate ground of the universe ; and that, though 
 metaphysical reasoning on the subject is still possible, it per- 
 tains to an unknowable and scientifically illegitimate object of 
 thought and yields only the slightest probability that some such 
 
 1 Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought, Lectures and Essays, vol. L 
 pp. 149, 150. 
 
246 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 being may exist. 1 But while he announces his conclusions as 
 the result of rigidly logical processes, an examination shows that 
 they rest on the assumption that empirical science is the only 
 scientific knowledge, and on a theory of the relativity of knowl- 
 edge by which all knowledge is invalidated. Unlike Mr. Spen- 
 cer, who sees clearly that the knowledge that some absolute Being 
 exists is a self-evident and necessary law of thought, Physicus as- 
 sumes that the existence of the absolute can be known only by 
 being logically proved from the law of causation. The impos- 
 sibility of this proof intelligent theists are equally decisive in 
 affirming. Physicus assumes with Mr. Spencer that the mind is 
 merely a series of states of consciousness. Hence he infers that 
 the theist, by his hypothesis of the divine Mind or Reason as the 
 first cause and ultimate ground of the universe, does not escape 
 an infinite series nor reach an absolute being any more than 
 the materialist does ; God himself would be merely a series of 
 states of consciousness. If we admit, what everybody practically 
 believes in the lace of all theorizing, that a man has knowledge 
 of himself as one and the same being in successive states of 
 consciousness, his elaborate reasoning crumbles into utter incon- 
 clusiveness. If we once see the absurdity which is involved in 
 Spencer's conception of the mind, that separate and successive 
 events in a series are conscious of themselves as in the unity 
 of a series and at the same time always and necessarily mistake 
 themselves for one and the same person ; if we admit the simple 
 proposition imperatively demanded alike by common sense and 
 philosophy, that every motion, thought and action must be the 
 motion, thought or action of a being, then we must admit the ex- 
 istence of the absolute Being, as the eternal principle and ground 
 of all beginning and change, of all finite power, knowledge and 
 being. And conversely, if no absolute Being exists as the ulti- 
 mate ground of all, then there is no being and no knowledge ; 
 but all knowledge is volatilized into a phantasmagoria of noth- 
 ingness. An examination of the seemingly exact reasoning of 
 Physicus shows that it is vitiated by the false theory of the rela- 
 tivity of knowledge ; and that its conclusions are valid only on 
 the basis of the complete positivism of Comte, who clearly saw 
 and plainly affirmed that if the idea of force or cause is once 
 admitted, God as the first cause will have to be admitted with 
 it. Thus we are brought again face to face with the fact that 
 the denial of the knowledge of God, the absolute Being, involves 
 the denial of all knowledge. 
 
 1 Theism, chap. vi. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 247 
 
 It may be added, that if, as Physicus assumes, the mere ex- 
 istence and persistence of matter and force suggest no need of 
 a beginning or cause, but permit us to believe them eternal, the 
 equally certain fact of the existence and persistence of reason 
 suggests no necessity for a cause, but permits us to believe that 
 reason is eternal ; and eternal reason is God. 
 
 The foregoing objections all assume that the existence of the 
 absolute Being cannot be known unless it is proved, and that 
 the proof must rest on the principle that every beginning or 
 change of existence must have a cause. They have held a large 
 place in the discussion of the evidence of the existence of God. 
 And theists are unable to refute them so far as they have failed 
 to see and expose the fundamental error of the assumption on 
 which the objections rest. The theists have not been shaken in 
 their belief, because it has rested, not on the conclusiveness of 
 their arguments, but on a necessary law of thought, which under- 
 lies all argument. As soon as the true ground of the belief of 
 the existence of the absolute Being is recognized, every one of 
 these objections falls powerless. Then they are exposed in 
 their real significance, as striking at the foundation of all real 
 knowledge. Then are brought into clear light the facts that 
 the existence of absolute Being is essential to the reality of any 
 being and to the possibility of any knowledge of beings ; and 
 that the existence of absolute Reason is essential to the possibil- 
 ity of any reasonable and scientific knowledge. Thus these ob- 
 jections only project into more intense light the imperative de- 
 mand of reason for the existence of the absolute, unconditioned 
 and all-conditioning Being. 
 
 Before leaving this topic some consideration must be given to 
 the question whether the revelation of God as causal power of 
 itself conveys any intimation of his personality. 
 
 Some philosophers have taught that the idea of will is inhe- 
 rent and essential in the idea of an efficient cause, because the 
 idea of power and cause first arises in the exertion of our own 
 wills. If this is true then, if we have evidence that the uni- 
 verse has a cause, we rightly infer that the first Cause is a 
 rational free will, that is, a self-exertive and self-directive power. 
 But in the premise of this argument the origin of the idea of 
 cause seems to be inadequately set forth. As in one and the 
 same mental state one has knowledge of himself as knowing and 
 of an object known, so in a voluntary exertion of power one is 
 ^conscious in one and the same act of his own exertion of power 
 
248 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 and of a power from without which acts upon him. In rolling- 
 a heavy stone one is conscious at once of his own power and 
 of the resistance of the stone. Thus in the very origin of the 
 idea of causal efficiency or power we. have knowledge of it both 
 in ourselves and as acting on us from without. Therefore 
 from the origin of our idea of causal power we can no more 
 infer that there is no cause but will, than we can infer from the 
 origin of knowledge that the only objects of knowledge are sub- 
 jective ideas and that all reality is comprehended within the 
 sphere of one's own self-consciousness. 
 
 But the origin of the idea of causal efficiency does establish so 
 much as this : that the knowledge of free power is given in the 
 very origin of our knowledge of power ; and that thus in this 
 very origin is laid the foundation for the distinction which cleaves 
 all human thought, whether scientific or popular, between a per- 
 sonal agent self-directive and self-exertive and a body which is 
 the unconscious vehicle of conveying a force previously commu- 
 nicated from without. The free or personal cause as distinguished 
 from physical force cannot be excluded from the powers known 
 in the universe. 
 
 It follows that there is no place for dogmatic materialism, 
 which denies free will, and which affirms that all power in the 
 universe is merely physical, or even that the universe is mere 
 mechanism and the only power in it is mechanical motor-force. 
 The consciousness of free power is given in the consciousness of 
 power ; if either is to be denied it must be the physical power 
 external to and acting on us, rather than the free power which is 
 inherent in us and known in our consciousness of ourselves. 
 
 This refutes dogmatic materialism also in its arbitrary and 
 unwarranted assertion that in the ultimate cause or ground of 
 the universe rational free power does not exist. There is noth- 
 ing in causal efficiency which excludes from the first Cause ra- 
 tional free will ; on the contrary, it includes it. 
 
 We must advance a step further. Physical things which cause 
 effects are mere vehicles which convey and communicate a force 
 imparted from another. In the strict sense of the words they 
 neither exert nor direct the force which they communicate. But 
 so long as, in observing physical things, the mind finds that they 
 only communicate a force which they had previously received, it 
 cannot rest in them as the real and ultimate cause. It can rest 
 only when it finds a cause which itself exerts and directs the 
 force which it imparts. The ultimate cause, therefore, must be 
 
GOD REVEALED IN THE UNIVERSE. 249 
 
 self-exertive and self-directive ; in other words, it must be a 
 rational, personal spirit. All physical causation, therefore, seems 
 necessarily to carry us back to spirit as its first cause. In this 
 conception the mind rests. 
 
 Some theists incline to the position that all acts of physical 
 force in nature are immediate acts of God's will. But if the 
 action of physical force is the action of will, then will and phys- 
 ical force seem to be identified, and the distinction between the 
 two, so sharply marked in every act of man on nature, is lost ; 
 the distinction between God and the universe is lost, and we 
 fall into the pantheistic conception of God as unconscious spirit 
 identical with the universe. The true and theistic conception is, 
 not that all physical force is the immediate action of God's will, 
 but that, as we observe its action in the course of nature, we are 
 obliged to refer it ultimately to the rational will of the eternal 
 Spirit as its first cause. 
 
 We find that the absolute Being reveals himself in the uni- 
 verse as its first cause, the original source of all its power. In 
 the words of Mr. Spencer, the theist has attained u the one abso- 
 lute certainty that he is in the presence of an Infinite and Eter- 
 nal Energy from which all things proceed." And the powers 
 acting in the universe reveal him, and help us to form some idea 
 of that power which is forever immeasurable. 
 
 And the physical force energizing in the course of nature does 
 of itself carry the thought back to mind or spirit, to rational 
 power, self-exertive and self-directive, as the original first cause 
 of all the forces and the course of nature. Accordingly Dr. Car- 
 penter says : " Science points to the origination of all power in 
 mind. This is no new doctrine. ... It is as old as Socrates. 
 But I think it derives new importance from the recent develop- 
 ment of the dynamic philosophy, which looks at matter as the 
 mere vehicle of force, and regards the various modes of force as 
 convertible." " The deep-seated instincts of humanity and the 
 profoundest researches of philosophy alike point to Mind as the 
 one and only source of power." 1 Mr. Grove says: u Causation 
 is the will, Creation is the Power of God." 2 Sir John Herschel 
 says : " It is but reasonable to regard the force of gravitation 
 as the direct or indirect result of a consciousness and a will 
 existing somewhere." 3 These are utterances of scientists. Shel- 
 
 1 Mind and Will in Nature, Cont. Rev. 1872; Address, Brit. Association, 
 1872. 
 
 2 Correlation of Forces, p. 199. 3 Quoted, Bray on Force, p. 64. 
 
250 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ley gives poetical utterance to the human consciousness which 
 even in his speculative atheism he did not escape : 
 " The awful shadow of some unseen Power 
 Floats, though unseen, among us." 
 
 It is sometimes said by theistic writers that the assaults of ag- 
 nosticism have compelled human reason to abate its pretensions 
 as to knowledge of the supernatural. It is true that on rational 
 grounds and in accordance with the teachings of Christianity 
 from the beginning, theologians are learning that great part of 
 human wisdom equanimity in being ignorant as to many de- 
 tails of God's relation to the world and his action in it, in being 
 unable to picture the mode in which God reveals himself in the 
 finite, and in refraining from excessive refining and defining. 
 But the discussion of the current skepticism has issued in a clearer 
 apprehension and higher appreciation of the powers of the human 
 reason in its deeper significance. It is more and more fixing at- 
 tention on the facts that the ultimate ground of the universe is 
 the absolute Reason that is ever energizing in it ; that this is 
 essential to the reality of the universe and to the possibility of 
 scientific knowledge of it ; that human reason is cognizant of ulti- 
 mate, self-evident principles, which are constituent elements of all 
 rationality ; that all science postulates the truth and universality 
 of these principles; that it is continually verifying this postula- 
 tion by discovering that the universe is constituted in accordance 
 with them and with the inferences from observed facts which 
 these principles require ; that reason in harmony with human rea- 
 son pervades and directs the universe, and thus makes human sci- 
 ence possible ; that human reason is in the likeness of the divine, 
 and therefore capable of receiving and interpreting the revelation 
 of God. 
 
 In this chapter we have considered only the existence of the 
 physical world and of its forces as they act in nature. We have 
 found them always forcing our minds back to a cause antecedent 
 to themselves ; as we trace them backwards we have found them 
 converging on a first cause as their common origin and revealing 
 its power ; and even carrying the thought to mind or spirit as 
 their common source, "sloping through darkness up to God." 
 This, however, is but the beginning of the evidence which nature 
 gives of what the absolute Being is. We are next to consider 
 what further and clearer evidence it presents that the absolute 
 Being is the energizing Reason, the eternal Spirit, the personal 
 God. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 GOD REVEALED AS PERSONAL SPIRIT IN THE CONSTITU- 
 TION AND COURSE OF NATURE. 
 
 PROFESSOR T. H. GREEN has .felicitously described philoso- 
 phy as the result of " a progressive effort toward a fully articu- 
 lated conception of the world as rational." This conception is 
 true only if the universe is grounded in reason and the absolute 
 Being manifested in it is the absolute Reason, the eternal Spirit, 
 the personal God. Theism is the basis and the only basis on 
 which such a philosophy is possible. 
 
 We have already ascertained that the absolute Being exists 
 and manifests itself in the universe as the first Cause or absolute 
 Power from which it proceeds and on which it depends. We are 
 next to consider the evidence of the presence and directive action 
 of reason in the universe, in which the absolute Power reveals 
 itself as the personal God. 
 
 The evidence of this in the spiritual system as known to us in 
 the constitution and history of man will be examined hereafter. 
 In this chapter only the evidence from the physical system will 
 be considered. 
 
 This evidence is called by Kant the Physico-theological Argu- 
 ment. This name properly denotes all the evidence in the phys- 
 ical system of the exictence of a personal God. It is the evidence 
 or proof that nature exists in the unity of a reasonable and scien- 
 tific system, that in the constitution and course of nature rational 
 ideas, laws and ends*are disclosed and the presence and direction 
 of Reason are revealed, and that thus the absolute Being, whose 
 power is manifested in the universe, is revealed to be the absolute 
 Reason, the personal God. 
 
 Here we take another step in attaining knowledge of what the 
 absolute Being is. Yet it is but one step and not the whole rev- 
 elation. Since impersonal beings are not responsible subjects of 
 moral law, we do not look in the sphere of the impersonal for 
 the primary and principal evidence of the righteousness and 
 benevolence of God. It is important to notice this, because many 
 
252 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of the objections against this evidence spring from misconceiving 
 its scope, as if, because it does not prove everything for theism, it 
 proves nothing. The revelation of God from each source ex- 
 plains, confirms, and enlarges the revelation from every other. 
 It is God's revelation of himself through various media, one con- 
 tinuous revelation, to be completed for man only with the com- 
 pletion of human history. 
 
 Trendelenburg says : "' The so-called proofs of the existence of 
 God have worth only as points of view which cannot be under- 
 stood without the absolute. They are indirect proofs which de- 
 velop the ground-theme of the unconditioned. . . . They point out 
 what confusion must arise if we do not postulate the existence of 
 God. In this they have their constraining power." 1 
 
 But he himself affirms that we have a positive knowledge of 
 the absolute Being. Therefore the so-called proofs are the exam- 
 ination of the universe to ascertain in it what the Absolute has 
 revealed itself to be. Also we have the revelation of God in con- 
 sciousness through which he is known in experience. These are 
 not indirect proofs. Further, in the cosmological proof we find 
 the absolute revealed in the universe as Power ; and in the phys- 
 ico-theological proof, as Reason. These are simple inferences 
 from the nature of the effect to the character of the cause. The 
 latter of these two proofs is in fact a Newtonian induction, ascer- 
 taining the cause from the effect by hypothesis, deduction and 
 verification. These are not indirect proofs, but direct, the same 
 as are employed in science. It must be added that the indirect 
 proof itself is valid. This is denied by some. Professor Sidg- 
 wick, for example, says : " The mere fact that I cannot act ra- 
 tionally without assuming a certain proposition, does not appear 
 to me, as it does to some minds, a sufficient reason for believing 
 it to be true." 2 But it seems incontrovertible that reason must 
 accept as true every principle, the truth of which is necessary 
 to its own rationality and capacity of knowing. If the rejection 
 of a proposition involves the confusion of reason itself, that cer- 
 tainly is valid ground for accepting it as true. And this indirect 
 proof itself rests on direct and positive knowledge. It is only 
 when the rejection of a proposition involves contradiction of a 
 universal principle of reason and necessary law of thought that 
 its rejection involves the confusion of reason. 
 
 At the outset we are met with objections warning us off from 
 this investigation as unscientific and illegitimate. 
 
 1 Logische Untersuebungen, vol. ii. p. 339. 
 
 2 Methods of Ethics, p. 471. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 253 
 
 It is objected that the idea of God as a rational power or per- 
 sonal being is not a scientific idea and therefore is not admissible 
 in a hypothesis. But the true cause required in a hypothesis is 
 merely one of a kind already known ; or at least its component 
 elements must be of a kind already known. This is true of the 
 idea of God. We know power ; we know reason as well as we 
 know power ; we know ourselves and our fellow-men as personal 
 beings ; and we know the absolute in a necessary intuition of 
 reason. Therefore the hypothesis that the universe reveals the 
 absolute Being energizing in the light and under the direction of 
 reason is scientifically legitimate. And if it is found that the 
 facts and laws of nature can be accounted for and known in the 
 unity of a system by this hypothesis and not as well accounted 
 for and systemized by any other, the theistic hypothesis is veri- 
 fied. The objection, that it is not verified till God is brought 
 under the observation of the senses, is not scientific. It is not 
 demanded in scientific verification. The hypotheses by which 
 science explains light, heat, electricity, molecular action of every 
 kind, gravitation, the origin of fossils, the makers of stone imple- 
 ments, are all verified and accepted as established without any 
 observation of the agents supposed to be the causes of the ob- 
 served effects. Our proposed investigation of the evidence of a 
 directing reason in nature will be a verification of the theistic 
 hypothesis. It must also be remembered that agnostics, pan- 
 theists and materialists acknowledge the existence of an absolute 
 Being and construct hypotheses or theories of the constitution of 
 the universe accordingly. The objection, therefore, can be urged 
 consistently only by complete positivists or phenomenalists, who 
 deny all knowledge of the existence of the absolute Being and, 
 by logical necessity, of all beings. And their position is itself 
 rejected as unscientific by scientists themselves. 
 
 It is objected further that the idea of rational, free personality 
 is itself unscientific and illegitimate, because it involves the su- 
 pernatural and therefore transcends the uniformity and continuity 
 of nature. 
 
 The answer is that rationality and free choice are indisputable 
 facts, known in the same way in which force and bodies are 
 known, that is, in our own consciousness. Science recognizes 
 them as facts and declares that they are phenomena which can- 
 not be identified with motion, and that all the discoveries respect- 
 ing brain and nerve leave thought, volition and all mental phe- 
 nomena as completely unexplained as ever. It is then unscien- 
 
254 TIIE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tific to exclude these facts from science. It is the condition on 
 which science stands or falls that it takes up all known facts and 
 brings them under its laws. A so-called science which accepts 
 matter and force as the only reality, breaks down if it fails to 
 explain by matter and force all the facts which come under ob- 
 servation. The only scientific course is to recognize these facts 
 of rationality and free will, and when confessedly they cannot be 
 explained by matter and force, then to admit that some other 
 agent transcending matter and force is revealed in them. The 
 doctrine that there is nothing in the universe but matter and 
 force is a mere assumption, which cannot stand in the presence of 
 rationality and free will revealing rational free personality. And 
 the attempt thus to construct a theory of the universe always 
 issues in a silent change of the essential meaning of the words 
 matter and force. 
 
 It is not uncommon for scientists to acknowledge the distinction 
 between the physical and the spiritual and yet to insist that both 
 must be included in nature ; and they use nature as synonymous 
 with the realm of law, and the supernatural as synonymous with 
 a realm without law. Here it becomes a question as to the use 
 of words. On the one hand, the scientist, when he has given 
 the name, nature, both to the physical system and the spiritual 
 or personal, is immediately confronted with the old distinction 
 of mind and matter, and all the old questions and difficulties 
 come back on him. He has gained nothing but to hide the facts 
 from his own eyes. On the other hand, the theist, recognizing 
 both the spiritual system and the physical or natural, insists as 
 strenuously as the scientist that both are under the reign of law. 
 In fact while the scientist accepts the order, uniformity and con- 
 tinuity of nature under law merely as a necessary but inexplic- 
 able fact, theism, by showing that the universe is grounded in 
 reason and is the expression or revelation of its eternal and un- 
 changing principles, laws, ideals and ends, not only affirms the 
 universal reign of law but shows also why it must be universal. 
 Theism also shows the unity of the spiritual and the natural in 
 one all-comprehending system, by the fact that the natural is 
 subordinate to the spiritual as the expression of its principles 
 and ideas, as regulated by its laws, and progressively realizing 
 its rational ideals and ends. Theism shows for the universe, 
 spiritual and physical, one Cause, one Power, one universal Rea- 
 son, one end in the realization of the rational archetypes of all 
 wisdom and love. Here are a unity at once dynamic and ra- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 255 
 
 tional, and a uniformity and continuity comprehensive as the do- 
 main of the universal Reason, and fixed and unchangeable as 
 its eternal principles and laws. This is " a fully articulated con- 
 ception of the world as rational." This, more than any other 
 conception, accords with J. S. Mill's law, that science must 
 always ask: "What are the fewest and simplest assumptions, 
 which being granted, the existing order of nature would follow?" 
 
 The principle on which the physico- theological argument de- 
 pends is simply that there must be an adequate cause for every 
 effect. As we know the personal and therein the supernatural 
 in our knowledge of ourselves, we can recognize it when revealed 
 in action, just as we know power in our knowledge of ourselves 
 and can recognize it when it is revealed in action. 
 
 This evidence or proof of mind revealed in nature is often 
 called the teleological argument, or the argument from final 
 causes. This assumes that the whole evidence is exhausted in 
 showing that many arrangements in nature subserve a good end ; 
 or still narrower, that they are useful to man. This is but a 
 small part of the physico-theological evidence. A large part of 
 the objections against this evidence are founded on this narrow 
 view of it and would have no force against it rightly understood. 
 
 The physical system manifests the presence and direction of 
 reason. In this manifestation the absolute Being, already re- 
 vealed as the Power working in the universe, is further revealed 
 as a rational Power, that is, as the personal God. 
 
 The evidence of this revelation in the physical system may be 
 presented under five heads, of which the four first correspond to 
 the four fundamental ideas or norms of reason, the True, the 
 Right, the Perfect, and the Good. 
 
 1. Nature is symbolic ; it expresses thought. 
 
 2. Nature is orderly, or uniform and continuous under law. 
 
 3. Nature is progressive toward the realization of ideals. 
 
 4. Nature is telic, being subordinate to the spiritual or personal 
 system and subservient to its ends. 
 
 5. Nature is in harmony and unity with the spiritual system 
 under the true law of continuity. 
 
 Under each of these heads the evidence of mind may be found 
 in the constitution and action of particular objects, as the eye, 
 and their adaptation to other objects ; and in the unity of system 
 in the constitution and course of nature and its progressive evo- 
 lution, as a whole. 
 
 Examples of the revelation of mind in nature are innumerable ; 
 
256 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 for it is the whole physical universe through which the revelation 
 is made, and in every branch of physical science examples abound. 
 Diderot hardly put it too strongly when he maintained that one 
 could slay the atheist with a butterfly's wing or the eye of a 
 gnat, and still have in reserve the weight of the universe with 
 which to crush him. It is needless therefore to dwell on exam- 
 ples. It is sufficient to indicate the different lines of evidence. 
 
 I. NATURE SYMBOLIC. Nature is symbolic ; it expresses 
 thought ; it is significant of ideas. 
 
 First, this is implied in the fact that outward objects can be 
 apprehended by the mind in ideas which are their intellectual 
 equivalents. 
 
 Ever since philosophical thought began thinkers have been 
 perplexed with the question how it is possible for a mind to ap- 
 prehend a material thing ; how that which is pure intelligence 
 can apprehend that which is solid matter ; how stones, trees and 
 other material things, which have not the distinctive qualities of 
 mind, can be apprehended in ideas which have no resemblance to 
 the objects and are yet their intellectual equivalents through 
 which the mind knows them. To remove this difficulty various 
 fruitless suppositions have been suggested, as, for example, that 
 ethereal images of the objects in some way enter the mind. The 
 mind seems to demand that, in every apprehension of an outward 
 object in an idea, some inherent relation of the object to the 
 idea, some likeness between them, some inherent ideal signifi- 
 cance in the object must be presupposed. The object must in 
 some way be symbolic of the idea or thought. 
 
 When an object acts on the sensorium and reveals itself in a 
 sensation, the mind reacts in its power of intelligence and per- 
 ceives the object, knows it in the forms of reason, and in thought 
 apprehends it in an idea. This object, therefore, is revealed to 
 the mind not merely as an external object occupying space, but 
 also as having the quality of intelligibility; it is capable of being 
 apprehended in an idea and, through this as its intellectual 
 equivalent, of being known. It being revealed to the mind as 
 an object, it is also revealed as an intelligible or knowable ob- 
 ject. And this is involved in the fundamental law of thought 
 that knowledge implies a subject knowing, an object known and 
 the knowledge which is the relation between them. 
 
 But the object was susceptible of being apprehended in intel- 
 ligence, before I perceived and apprehended it. It had a quality 
 of ideality, that is, of being apprehended in an idea, before I had 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 257 
 
 any idea of it in my consciousness. Every object in nature, 
 therefore, is inherently and essentially intelligible. But the 
 ideality of the object, its susceptibility of being apprehended in 
 an intellectual equivalent, exists in the object independent of 
 man's conscious apprehension of it. We may therefore say that 
 the idea of the object existing subjective in my consciousness of 
 it, existed objective and independent of my consciousness in the 
 object ; existed potentially, waiting only the presence of a mind 
 in order to be revealed. Thus the object presupposes its idea. 
 Hence we may truly say that the object is symbolic, it expresses 
 thought ; when presented to a conscious mind the object reveals 
 itself as having significance to thought, it calls forth in the con- 
 scious mind an idea which is the intellectual equivalent of the 
 object. As sensation gives no intelligence except as the intellect 
 reacts in perception of the object and then apprehends it in an 
 idea ; so, on the other hand, the object could not be apprehended 
 by intelligence if it had not already ideality in itself; that is, the 
 quality of intelligibility and the capacity of being apprehended 
 in its idea. Hence through sensation the mind is revealed to 
 itself as intelligent, and the intelligibility or ideality of the 
 object is revealed to the mind. As a visible spark reveals the 
 invisible ether which causes it, and its crackling reveals the 
 unseen undulations which cause the sound, so the sensation re- 
 veals the supersensible sphere of intelligence both in the person 
 perceiving and in the object perceived. 
 
 Non-theistic philosophies fail to give any reasonable explana- 
 tion of the fact that the mind apprehends material objects in 
 ideas. Theism alone gives a reasonable explanation. 1 It rec- 
 ognizes material things as real beings ; they are not indepen- 
 dent, but are creations of God, the conscious, personal absolute 
 Reason ; in creating them he has expressed or revealed in them 
 liis archetypal thought under the limits of space and time. 
 Thus they are in their essence symbols ; that is, they express 
 the thought of their creator, as a steam-engine expresses and 
 reveals the thought of its maker, or as written words express 
 the thought of the writer. This accords with the true meaning 
 of the maxim, " Like is known only by like." Objects which 
 are the creation and expression of thought can be apprehended 
 by thought. Material things can be apprehended in ideas be- 
 cause they are, in themselves and their relations, expressions of 
 ideas, that is, of the archetypal thought of God. Being them- 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 89, 90. 
 
 17 
 
258 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 selves the expression of thought they reveal themselves as such 
 and return to their primal form as thought or idea in the mind 
 to which they are presented. The idea is thus objectively real, 
 independently of the consciousness of the observer ; not in itself 
 nor in the object, but as the archetypal thought of the eternal 
 Reason expressed in the object. 1 
 
 In this sense every material object is symbolic of the arche- 
 typal thought of God ; and the objective reality of its idea is in- 
 dependent of the consciousness of the observer, and has an intel- 
 ligible and real significance, which it lacks in every non-theistic 
 philosophy. 
 
 This gives us, also, the real significance of the maxim that 
 whatever is real is rational. Its real meaning is that whatever 
 is real is essentially intelligible ; it has the quality of intelligible- 
 ness or ideality. And this is true, even when, through lack of 
 information or opportunity, we may be at present ignorant re- 
 specting it. All science rests on this assumption ; for it assumes 
 that whatever is real is a legitimate object of scientific investiga- 
 tion and may be scientifically known. Science and practical 
 wisdom would alike be impossible and inconceivable, if the world 
 were unreasonable, a lawless ehnos, not rationally ordered, and 
 therefore not capable of being rationally understood. Scientific 
 knowledge is possible only on the presupposition of rational co- 
 herence, arrangement and direction. So Hegel says : " The form 
 of the natural is nature as pervaded by thought : " 2 That is, the 
 only form in which a scientific comprehension of nature is possi- 
 ble is the form of nature as pervaded, arranged and ordered by 
 intelligence. 
 
 We see also the real significance of the old phrase, Mundus In- 
 telliyibilis or K 007x05 NO^TO?, which denotes the objective reality 
 of the idea of the world as archetypal and eternal. If every ob- 
 ject in nature has the quality of intelligibility and so has its ideal 
 side, the universe itself has the same quality and presupposes its 
 idea ; and its idea would be the universe of archetypal thought 
 of which the existing universe is the progressive expression or 
 
 1 " When the sculptor develops his Apollo or his Venus from the quarried 
 marble, it is his own creation and has his image stamped on it; but the truth 
 which the man of science extracts has an absolute character of its own, which 
 no power of genius can transform and which is neither attributable to accident 
 nor born of human parentage. It pervades the meanest chip of stone which 
 the artist rejects." Ideality of Physical Science, by Professor Benj. Peirce, 
 of Harvard, p. 26. 
 
 2 Philo-ophie der Religion, vol. i. p. 275. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 259 
 
 revelation. We study the' universe and find in it the Mundus 
 Intelligibilis, the world of archetypal thought. Science is noth- 
 ing but the enunciation of what this world of archetypal thought 
 revealed in universe is. If this world of ideas were known to 
 exist without the universe that reveals it, we should necessarily 
 believe that it existed us the thought or idea of some mind ; for 
 thought or idea without a mind is as unthinkable and as impos- 
 sible as motion without a body which moves and a force which 
 moves it. And this inference is not the less necessary because 
 we find the archetypal universe progressively revealed in the act- 
 ual universe which is its expression, the book in which we read 
 it, the word of God which declares it. On the contrary all the 
 more must we infer that the universe itself is the product of an 
 efficient mind or energizing Reason progressively expressing in 
 it his archetypal thoughts. 
 
 We see, then, that nature is symbolic ; it is the expression or 
 revelation of thought. And the thought is presupposed in the 
 existence of nature and must be archetypal in the eternal Reason 
 that is revealing itself in it. 
 
 In this discussion we see the starting point and significance of 
 Plato's doctrine of ideas. He recognizes the objective intelligi- 
 bility or ideality of all things, existing independent of his own 
 conscious apprehension of them. He thus recognizes the fact 
 that the object presupposes its idea existing independent of the 
 consciousness of the human percipient. These ideas, presup- 
 posed in the objects and appearing in the consciousness of the 
 observer, he recognizes as eternal ideas which are at once the 
 forms of thought and the forms of things. So far his doctrine is 
 true ; and by virtue of this great truth his philosophy has held 
 its place and influence in human thought through the ages. The 
 theist finds the reality and significance of these ideas in the 
 archetypal thought of God. 
 
 Hegel also recognizes the objective reality of the idea. His 
 recognition of the universe as the revelation of thought is thej 
 truth which gives the value to his philosophy, opening to various 
 applications which are helpful to theistic thought. But his funda- 
 mental and fatal error is that the idea or thought is not referred 
 to the personal Reason or Spirit. " The essence of nature as a 
 system of laws is nothing other than the generic or universal 
 (Das Allgememe)" l The essence or ultimate ground of the uni- 
 verse is thought, or the objective Idea. The idea is creative, 
 1 Philosophic der Religion, vol. i. p. 275. 
 
260 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 evolving itself into the universe. But it is impersonal and un- 
 conscious, it is the abstract logical general notion, the widest 
 possible. And this logical general notion, the universal, is treated 
 as a creative idea, which has unfolded itself into the universe and 
 eventually has come to consciousness in man. The world-process 
 by which it has evolved itself into the universe is identical with a 
 process of logic. Thus we are abandoned to idealistic pantheism. 
 And ultimately the idea comes to be confounded with subjective 
 conscious thought and the universe itself is lost in subjective 
 idealism. Here, as a witty writer suggests, is a catastrophe the 
 reverse of that of Korah ; the earth has not swallowed up the 
 man, but the man has swallowed up the universe. And in this 
 fatal error must every system issue, which assumes that the uni- 
 verse is grounded in thought, and yet that the thought floats in 
 emptiness, thought without a thinker, without a rational personal 
 mind existing eternally and energizing in the universe. 
 
 In the second place, that nature is symbolic is evident in the 
 fact that it is capable of being comprehended in a scientific sys- 
 tem and thus is found to be the expression of mind in harmony 
 with our own. The mind finds in nature its own rational princi- 
 ples, its own inferences, its own mental creations. The observa- 
 tion of nature is a continual confirmation in experience of the 
 truth of the primitive intuitions of reason and the validity of the 
 processes of thought. Man finds in nature the expression of his 
 own reason. Thus he finds himself " at home " in the physical 
 system to its remotest worlds, because everywhere he finds in it 
 the expression of intelligence like his own. 
 
 This is evident from the fact that physical science exists. 
 Physical science is nothing but the setting forth of the realities 
 of nature in the forms of intelligence and in the order of its prin- 
 ciples and laws. We explore the outward world and we find it 
 the expression of the intelligence of which we are conscious in 
 our own minds ; we find it conformed to the principles and laws 
 which regulate our own thinking. We observe bodies and their 
 motions, but they conform to the laws of mind and express its 
 thoughts. Nature is scientifically known only as we know the 
 thought which it expresses. Science is itself the knowledge of 
 nature in its most exact and complete form. It declares the men- 
 tal ideas, laws, harmonies which it finds in nature ; the exact 
 knowledge which it enunciates it has read in nature. If nature 
 was not the expression of intelligence like our own, there could 
 be no science. If nature were not already the expression of ideas, 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 261 
 
 and ordered according to law it could never be translated into 
 thought. Science observes nature and finds intelligence ex- 
 pressed everywhere in it. It finds all things in nature to be 
 symbols and it interprets them. It deciphers nature and learns 
 the thought which it expresses, as Champolliou deciphered the 
 Egyptian hieroglyphics. If the hieroglyphics had not first been 
 symbols of intelligent thought, no diligence could have found in- 
 telligence in them. They have objective reality and ideality ; and 
 the essential significance of their objective reality is in their ob- 
 jective ideality. As Dr. Carpenter says : " We cannot proceed 
 a step without translating the actual phenomena of nature into 
 intellectual representations of those phenomena." * 
 
 That the Reason revealed in nature is like our own is remark- 
 able in scientific prevision ; and Comte insists that the power of 
 foreseeing and foretelling phenomena is essentially distinctive of 
 science ; and that any knowledge which does not reach this power 
 is unworthy of the name of science. In this he is doubtless in 
 error. Yet physical science has already attained this power in 
 many cases. It knows so exactly the laws under which the forces 
 of nature are ordered that it can foretell events ages distant in 
 the future to the fraction of a second. 
 
 The same is remarkable in scientific discovery. The mind 
 forms its hypothesis of what must be; and then goes out into 
 nature and finds that it is so. The genius of the discoverer cre- 
 ates a prophetic picture and says : " Nature must be so and so;" 
 then he goes out into nature and finds his conception there, al- 
 ready realized in nature ages before he had thought it ; and yet, 
 all the same, a pure intellectual conception. This is the almost 
 universal history of discovery ; it is an intellectual creation, a 
 prophetic idea, afterwards found expressed and realized in the 
 material creation. And not infrequently the prophetic concep- 
 tion of genius is announced years or even centuries before it is 
 actually discovered and verified by observation. 
 
 Another exemplification is in invention. The inventor creates 
 his machine in thought before he realizes it in actual construc- 
 tion ; and the steel and brass and wood, the water, the fire, the 
 electricity, created as expressions of intelligent thought, yield 
 readily to the thought of the inventor, obey the laws which 
 guided him in creating his idea, and steadily do the work which 
 he directs. And when he investigates nature he finds in it 
 
 1 Man as the Interpreter of Nature; Popular Science Monthly, Oct. 1872, 
 p. 687. 
 
262 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 similar contrivances doing the same kind of work according to 
 the same laws. And often it is the contrivance in nature which 
 suggests the invention to man. The divine art in nature is the 
 model for human art. 
 
 The use of mathematics in science is another striking illustra- 
 tion. We spin our geometrical lines and figures out of our own 
 thoughts and within our own minds without the slightest refer- 
 ence to experience. Yet when we go out into the material uni- 
 verse we find it everywhere constructed according to the purely 
 a priori geometry of our own minds. There are no meridional 
 or equatorial lines and circles on the earth or in the sky, yet the 
 universe is constructed according to the principles and demonstra- 
 tions of mathematics. We construct a crystal a priori and geo- 
 metrically. We examine nature and find crystals constructed 
 according to the same plan. ''Every atom solves differential 
 equations which, if written out in full, might belt the earth." 1 
 Professor Peirce, of Harvard University, several years ago pub- 
 lished a volume on Mathematics, in which, as those competent to 
 follow him in his course of thought tell us, he proved that "from 
 our a priori conceptions of form, number and power we should 
 be inevitably led, were creation intrusted to us, to create a world 
 similar in its plan to this." In like manner by mathematical 
 reasoning we determine the form best fitted for motion through 
 air or water; and in birds and fishes we find forms accordant 
 with these a priori demonstrations of our own pure intelligence. 
 " In Peirce's Integral Calculus, published in 1843, is a problem 
 invented and solved purely in the enthusiasm of following math- 
 ematical symbols; but in 1863 it proved to be a complete pro- 
 phetic discussion and solution of the problem of two pendulums 
 suspended from one horizontal cord. Thus also Galileo's discus- 
 sion of the cycloid proved long afterward to be a key to problems 
 concerning the pendulum, falling bodies and resistance to trans- 
 verse pressure. Four centuries before Christ Plato and his 
 scholars were occupied on the ellipse as a purely geometrical 
 speculation. But in the seventeenth century Kepler discovered 
 that the architect of the heavens had given us magnificent dia- 
 grams of the ellipse in the starry heavens." 2 
 
 We must conclude that in every observation of nature " reason 
 disengages an element exclusively its own ; " and that " the no* 
 
 1 Jevons, Principles of Science, p. 756. 
 
 3 Natural Sources of Theology, by Thomas Hill, D. D., LL. D., pp. 
 66, 67. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 263 
 
 tion of a perfect science is a delusion when it does not find its 
 root in an invisible world." ] 
 
 Therefore not only does nature, as scientifically investigated, 
 express thought and reveal mind ; it also expresses thought and 
 reveals mind in unison with our own. The intelligence, the prin- 
 ciples, the laws, the ideas, which science finds revealed every- 
 where in nature, which it finds determining the constitution of 
 the physical universe, and on which it rests its own claim to be 
 science, are the intelligence, the principles, the laws, the ideas of 
 the human mind. The inevitable inference is that the human 
 reason is in the likeness of the Reason that has constituted the 
 universe, the Reason that is universal ; and that reason through- 
 out the universe, in God and in man, is one and the same in kind. 
 This is the necessary presupposition of all science. For science 
 is nothing but human intelligence. It becomes a science of the 
 universe solely by the processes of human intelligence and in ac- 
 cordance with its ideas, principles and laws. If reason and its 
 principles and laws are not the same through all space and time, 
 if in other worlds or in other ages intelligence is something 
 wholly unlike human intelligence and therefore to us inconceiva- 
 ble, if its principles and laws supersede or contradict the princi- 
 ples and laws of human intelligence, then science is impossible, 
 its observations and inductions, its logic and mathematics give no 
 knowledge of those other worlds and ages, human perceptions, 
 ideas and inferences have no objective reality, and human intelli- 
 gence fades into mere sensations within the consciousness of an 
 individual. 2 
 
 From the foregoing considerations it is evident that physical 
 science in its fundamental assumptions and its consequent meth- 
 ods is in essential harmony with theism and not antagonistic. In 
 all its investigations and discoveries it rests, consciously or un- 
 consciously, on the theory of knowledge which I have called Ra- 
 tional Realism, on which theism also rests. It is true, some 
 scientists hold theoretically that man has knowledge only of sub- 
 jective impressions and phenomena. But these very men in their 
 actual scientific investigations and discoveries have assumed with- 
 out being aware of it the truth of Rational Realism, a theory 
 of knowledge contradictory of their own philosophical specula- 
 tions. They have " builded wiser than they knew." Physical 
 
 1 Prof. Wm. Archer Butler, History of Ancient Philosophy, vol. ii. pp. 116, 
 130. 
 
 2 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 142-151, 560-564. 
 
264 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 science in all its actual work as such, has definitely abandoned 
 phenomenalism and the positivism of Comte. It builds on the 
 recognition of the objective reality of beings, of their relations, 
 and of the principles, laws, ideals and ends of reason revealed in 
 them. Physical science, therefore, in its fundamental assump- 
 tions and its methods consequent on them, is in real alliance 
 with theism. In all its discoveries it is verifying that Rational 
 Realism which is the philosophical basis of theism. 
 
 A third evidence of symbolism in nature is the common recog- 
 nition in human action and language of a correspondence between 
 spirit and nature. 
 
 This correspondence is indicated in the tendency of man to 
 construct his ideas in physical forms, in mechanical inventions, 
 in architecture, painting and sculpture. 
 
 This correspondence is also incorporated into language. Spir- 
 itual realities are designated by words originally appropriated to 
 physical realities. This fact accords with the theistic conception 
 and corroborates it. The eternal Spirit expresses his archetypal 
 thought in the physical universe. This is the primitive medium 
 of revelation, the first Word of God. The book of nature is the 
 primer, in which he sets his childivn first to spell out his name 
 and to read what he is. Therefore in all languages the names of 
 spiritual things continue to indicate the primitive medium of rev- 
 elation. 
 
 This correspondence of nature and spirit has forced itself into 
 the thinking of men in all ages and in all spheres of thought. If, 
 as theism declares, the eternal Spirit has revealed himself in na- 
 ture, there must be, not an antagonism and reciprocal repulsion, 
 but a correspondence between them ; nature must be the fit me- 
 dium for the revelation, the garment in which the Spirit clothes 
 himself with visibility. And history shows that men have al- 
 ways acted, though unreflectively, under this impression. The- 
 ism says that spirit reveals itself in nature ; and in their religion 
 from the earliest times men have found spirit revealed in na- 
 ture. Theism says that God has expressed his thought in na- 
 ture ; and in all ages men have read thought in nature, though 
 sometimes miscalling the words, or missing the true meaning, or 
 spelling the words without taking the sense. This correspond' 
 ence is also recognized, as we have seen, in empirical and phi- 
 losophical science ; for it consists in reading the thought revealed 
 in the universe, and all its conclusions, rest on the presupposition 
 that reason, one and the same in kind, pervades the universe and 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 265 
 
 reveals its thought in it. The correspondence of nature and spirit 
 is also recognized, unconsciously it may be, in man's delight in 
 personification and poetry which look through the symbols of 
 nature to its significance and picture life and spirit in inanimate 
 things. Heine's lonely tree is an example : 
 " A Pine-tree stands forsaken, all alone, 
 
 Upon yon far-off, towering, vasty height ; 
 
 And mourning, chilled to heart by Winter's blight, 
 
 Trembles and sways, by every rude wind blown. 
 
 Warm dreams of love keep the cold tree from death, 
 
 Dreams of a Palm-tree in the Orient land ; 
 
 Ah, on a rocky cliff, in burning sand, 
 
 The Palm-tree pants to feel the Pine-tree's breath." 
 
 Thus religion, empirical and philosophical science, and poetry 
 unite in recognizing the correspondence of nature and spirit ; all 
 find in nature the expression of an intelligence, the revelation of 
 a rational spirit like our own. Each presents nature as a mirror 
 in which the spirit of man sees the reflected i range of itself. It 
 is the same mirror in different frames. 1 
 
 Finally, that nature is expressive of thought is evident from 
 the fact that all material beings and their physical forces exist in 
 the unity of a system which is the cosmos or the physical uni- 
 verse. This conception is essential in all science. But a system 
 in its essence involves intelligence. It supposes a plurality of 
 objects acting in harmony in accordance with common laws and 
 a controlling idea. Knowledge must have made great progress 
 before man could have formed the idea of a universe. Yet this 
 idea was so ancient that its origin is lost in oblivion. The unity 
 of all material things in a system, the universe or cosmos, is now 
 familiar to all civilized people, and is assumed as unquestionable 
 in all science. It is of itself indisputable evidence that nature 
 reveals intelligence and expresses thought. And it proves not 
 merely this, bu also that the system is the product of one ra- 
 tional mind, the, same in kind with the mind of man and pervad- 
 ing and controlling the universe. 
 
 It is also a system embracing in its larger unity innumerable 
 smaller systems, so that all these systems are harmonious con- 
 stituents of the one all-comprehending system, expressing one all- 
 comprehending idea or pian. In it our sun and planets consti- 
 tute a solar system. As there are numberless suns, there are 
 probably numberless solar systems, all in unity in the one system 
 
 1 "Ein Spiegel mit zwei isTarnen 
 
 Verschiedeu tiur durch Schliff und andren Rahmen." 
 
266 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of the universe. And on earth we find many systems. Organ- 
 ized beings are grouped in genera and species; and they are not 
 merely thus classified, but are also systemized in the subordi- 
 nation of lower types to higher and in the progressive develop- 
 ment of higher types. Every organized being is also individually 
 in itself a system of innumerable cells, all acting harmoniously in 
 subordination to the idea of the organism. All atoms and mole- 
 cules in their interaction are acting harmoniously in the system. 
 And finally passing downward from the cosmos which includes 
 all, to these ultimate elements, science finds itself unable to re- 
 tain the ancient simple atom in solid singleness, but finds it, 
 though infrangible, yet composed of parts, and endowed with 
 potencies, and so a system in itself. The theory of the vortex- 
 atom represents it as a sort of infinitesimal solar system as com- 
 plex as our solar system, revolving like it according to fixed laws, 
 and requiring an astronomy of the infinitesimal as mathematical 
 and complex as that of our solar system. And if this theory be 
 never established, the molecule at least is recognized in science 
 as a complex whole, with many potencies, and the source of pow- 
 erful energies. Each of these numberless minor systems is an 
 expression of mind ; and so, but immensely more, is their com- 
 bination in the unity of the one all-comprehending system of the 
 cosmos. And the unity of this system is neither conceivable nor 
 thinkable except as the effect of one absolute Reason energizing 
 in the realization of its own eternal and never changing arche- 
 typal plan. 
 
 Physical science is rapidly enlarging our knowledge of the 
 unity of nature. It has been proved that the law of gravitation 
 extends beyond the solar system to the stars. The mysterious 
 ether pervading all space binds all worlds in unity ; a commotion 
 in the flaming sun moves at once every magnetic needle on the 
 earth. The spectroscope shows in the sun and other heavenly 
 ' bodies the same elements which we find on earth. Thus science 
 discloses the unity of the cosmos through all space. And in 
 evolution it is disclosing its unity in progressive development 
 through all time. 
 
 The necessary conclusion is that all nature is symbolic of 
 thought and thus reveals the universal Reason. Atheistic science 
 discovers the symbol and stops. Theism passes through the 
 symbol to the reality behind it and thus interprets its signif- 
 icance. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 267 
 
 II. NATURE ORDERLY UKDER LAW. Nature is orderly or 
 uniform and continuous under law. 
 
 There is no question here as to moral law. The physical 
 system, comprising only the impersonal, is not subject to moral 
 law. But law in its most general meaning is truth considered 
 as regulating action. 1 Thus the truths or principles regulating 
 mechanical action are the laws of mechanics ; a steam-engine 
 constructed according to these laws is said to be constructed 
 right; and if it is in perfect order, its action is said to be right ; 
 that is, it acts according to the law of its being. In this sense the 
 physical system and all things in it may be said to be constructed 
 right, that is, according to a law, and to act right, that is, in ac- 
 cordance with a law. The uniform factual sequences observed in 
 nature are also called laws of nature. But these are so called only 
 in a secondary sense. In truth they are only factual manifesta- 
 tions or revelations of law in its true significance, which is always 
 a principle or law of reason. 
 
 From the order or uniformity of action we infer a law regu- 
 lating the action. If a stone hits a spot in a wall, we make no 
 inference as to intelligent direction. But if twenty stones in 
 close succession hit the same spot, we infer that they were in- 
 telligently directed. If a player with dice throws double sixes a 
 dozen times in succession we Imve no doubt that the dice are 
 loaded. Thus uniformity in a brief series of very simple acts 
 forces us to infer an intelligent intention regulating the action. 
 
 This inference is seen to l>e reasonable when we reckon the 
 possible combinations of a very few units. Professor Jevons 
 says : u In whist the four hands are simultaneously held ; and the 
 number of distinct deals becomes so vast that it would require 
 twenty-eight figures to express it. If the whole population of 
 the world say one thousand millions were to deal cards day 
 and night for a hundred million years, they would not in that 
 time have exhausted the one hundred thousandth part of the 
 possible deals. ... It is in the highest degree improbable that 
 any one game of whist was ever exactly like another, except it 
 were intentionally so." 2 Laplace estimated that the forty-three 
 independent motions of bodies in the solar system as known in 
 his day admitted of 4,400,000,000,000 combinations. 
 
 Thus the coincidence of a few elements in a continuous order 
 of succession is decisive evidence of intelligent direction. The 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 185, 186. 
 
 2 Principles of Science, pp, 190, 191. 
 
268 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 irresistibleness of the evidence becomes more and more apparent 
 with every increase in the number of the units, the complexity 
 of the idea, the complication of the arrangement, and the invari- 
 able accordance of the arrangement with the idea. It increases 
 so rapidly that a very small number of units and a moderate 
 degree of complexity make the inference of intelligent direction 
 from uniformity a resistless certainty. 
 
 The physical system of the universe is pervaded with order, 
 from the planets and suns and solar systems down to the ultimate 
 atoms. Wherever matter is, there is order. The innumerable 
 agents in nature, in all their complicated combinations and in- 
 teractions, act in unvarying order and according to law. All 
 science is engaged in discovering this order of nature. All in- 
 duction is founded on it. The plans of everyday life are made 
 in dependence on it ; if one observes the signs of the sky and 
 says, " It looks like rain," he is merely drawing an inference 
 from previous observations, founded on the uniform order of 
 nature. If then a dozen uniform throws of a pair of dice con- 
 vince us at once that some intelligence has loaded the dice and 
 thus caused the uniformity to result in accordance with the law 
 of gravitation, how much more must we infer from the order 
 pervading the universe, with beings so innumerable, with inter- 
 actions and complications so intricate, with extent so immense, 
 with order and uniformity persisting through all time, that this 
 uniformity and order under law is the result of intelligent direc- 
 tion. Even an opponent of theism, one of the ablest in our day, 
 has said : " Let us think of this supreme causality as we may, 
 the fact remains that from it there emanates a directive influence 
 of uninterrupted consistency on a scale of stupendous magnitude 
 and exact precision worthy of our highest possible conceptions of 
 Deity." 
 
 Physical science rests on the law of the uniformity and con- 
 tinuity of nature as its fundamental postulate. Thus the neces- 
 sity of recognizing God immanent and energizing in nature is 
 disclosed by physical science itself. 
 
 In the first place it is necessary to any rational explanation of 
 the fundamental postulates of physical science. 
 
 One postulate is, that the sum of all force potential and ener- 
 getic is always the same ; no action makes it greater and no 
 cessation of action makes it less. The assumption is that the 
 universe consists of a fixed quantity of matter and force eternally 
 acting. This assumption implies that the universe is a machine 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 269 
 
 keeping itself in motion forever without external force. Then 
 the fundamental principle of science involves the absurdity of a 
 perpetual motion ; and this absurdity it is impossible to elimi- 
 nate. Physical science itself exposes this absurdity and escapes 
 it only by denying the perpetuity of the motion. For it dis- 
 covers that eventually all the forces must come into equilibrium 
 and the whole machinery must stop. Once thus stopped it is 
 stopped forever; for by the supposition there is no power ex- 
 terior to the machine to renew the motion. 
 
 Theism affirms this fundamental principle of science, and re- 
 moves the difficulties which physical science reveals but cannot 
 remove. The sum of all force potential and energetic is eternal 
 in God. It is unchanging and inexhaustible, incapable of in- 
 crease or diminution, because God is the absolute Being. It is 
 directive and regulative, because God is the absolute Reason. 
 It may be potential or energetic, because God exerts his power 
 in the finite or refrains from exerting it at will. 
 
 Another fundamental postulate is that nature is orderly under 
 law. But the continuity and uniformity of nature and its unity 
 in a system depend themselves on the existence of God and his 
 immanence and action in nature. 
 
 Physical science assumes the continuity and uniformity of na- 
 ture, but cannot prove or account for it. It is sometimes claimed 
 that the belief rests on experience and observation. Scientific 
 observation and experiment continually confirm these principles, 
 but cannot be said to prove them. Scientific observation cannot 
 be universal, and cannot establish a universal truth. And in fact 
 there are many effects the causes of which cannot be observed, 
 and many events in which the continuity and uniformity do not 
 appear to the observation of sense. Hence science is obliged to 
 assume the principle and work by it without proof. It is not 
 science which establishes the principle of the uniformity and con- 
 tinuity of nature, but it is the principle of the uniformity and 
 continuity of nature which makes science possible. 
 
 Theism not only accepts the principle, but also gives a philo- 
 sophical basis for it. The action of an almighty will in per- 
 fect harmony with Reason must give the highest uniformity, 
 continuity and unity. 
 
 In i he second place, science discovers facts in nature which 
 can be harmonized with its uniformity, continuity and unity 
 only on the supposition that a supernatural power is immanently 
 active in it. 
 
270 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Such facts are found in nature in its space-relations. Physical 
 science cannot explain gravitation, cohesion, nor light and heat, 
 either as forces inherent in matter or as caused by impact ; but 
 in the attempt to explain them it encounters um-esolvable objec- 
 tions and contradictions. 1 It is assumed that neither masses nor 
 molecules ever come in contact. With stronger vision we should 
 see every mass of matter perforated with vacant space surround- 
 ing every molecule. It follows that the action of one body, molar 
 or molecular, on another must always be action at a distance. 
 The acting force must always pass disembodied through empty 
 space. 
 
 Nature presents similar difficulties in its time-relations. 
 
 Physical science cannot account for the beginning of motion. 
 The finiteness of the universe demonstrates that it must have 
 had a beginning. The evolution of a finite universe must come 
 to an end, and must have had a beginning. The only escape 
 from these conclusions is by recognizing the existence of an infi- 
 nite and absolute power above and beyond nature, which perpet- 
 ually sustains it, supplies it with force and directs its development. 
 
 Mr. Spencer's primitive homogeneous matter involves in its 
 essential idea a beginning of motion. In the homogeneous, as 
 he defines it, the sixty-four elemental substances or primitive 
 units are "so uniformly dispersed among each other that any 
 portion of the mass shall be like any other portion in its sensible 
 properties." 2 This would imply that in every cubic inch of the 
 nebulous matter every one of these elements would be found ; 
 and if so, then necessarily the quantity of each in every cubic 
 inch must be in the same proportion to the quantity of all the 
 rest as it is in the universe. In every cubic inch there would 
 be yttrium, vanadium, thorium, glucinum and every element of 
 which the whole quantity in the world is very little, and its uni- 
 versal diffusion would be inconceivably tenuous ; and of oxy- 
 gen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and others, which compose 
 almost the whole globe. If a cubic inch of iron or silver ex- 
 isted anywhere, the homogeneous would already have become 
 heterogeneous. This uniformity of distribution itself reveals the 
 direction of mind. Besides this, the equilibrium of the homo- 
 geneous implies the entire absence of motion. Necessarily, then, 
 there must have been a beginning of motion. This cannot be 
 accounted for by the homogeneous itself, but necessarily implies 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 420-426. 
 
 2 First Principles, p. 335. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 271 
 
 a power beyond and above it that acts on it. The universe 
 itself, in the light of modern science, can no more account for 
 the beginning of motion than it could in the days of Aristotle. 
 
 Physical science is confronted by similar insuperable difficul- 
 ties in its attempts to explain the course of nature. The evo- 
 lution of the nebulous matter cannot be explained, consistently 
 with known facts, as a mere development or disentangling of 
 what already existed in it. There are successive epochs or stages 
 in the evolution, in which new and higher powers are revealed, 
 acting on a higher plane. Notable are the epochs of the appear- 
 ance of life, of sensitivity and of rational persons. No power 
 disclosed in the previous stages can account for these higher 
 manifestations. If there is no power beyond the universe itself, 
 these higher stages of being are effects without a cause. 1 
 
 Thus physical science discloses facts which of itself it cannot 
 reconcile with the continuity and uniformity of nature. 
 
 But theism removes these difficulties, and shows the harmony 
 of these facts with the continuity and uniformity of nature in 
 the unity of a system. It teaches that the universe is the con- 
 tinuous and progressive expression of God's thought. God, the 
 absolute Reason, is continually energizing on and through it, 
 directing its action and development to rational ends. The uni- 
 verse is the medium in and through which God is revealing him- 
 self. But the infinite cannot be revealed in the finite all at once. 
 God cannot reveal his eternal wisdom and love at a stroke. If 
 the infinite is revealed in the finite the revelation must be pro- 
 gressive, and cannot be complete at any terminal bound of time 
 or space. And matter itself must be elaborated in and from 
 lower forms to higher and finer, in order to be made receptive 
 of higher manifestations of God's thought and power. We may 
 conceive of the energy of God's inexhaustible and never dimin- 
 ished wisdom and power in perpetual tension within the universe 
 developing it to higher receptivity and capacity, and manifesting 
 through it higher potencies, bringing in higher orders of beings, 
 disclosing new and higher spheres of activity and achievement, 
 as fast as the finite is developed to a capacity to be a medium 
 for the higher action and the higher manifestation of the divine 
 perfection. And thus the material world itself is developed and 
 revealed. Modern science is more and more disclosing the mys- 
 tery and capacity of what we call matter. Matter has been 
 called an #, an unknown quantity. But it is an unknown, not 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 472, 491-502, 454. 
 
272 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 an unknowable, and science is continually revealing to us more 
 and more its hidden capacities and energies. The progressive 
 revelation of God in nature is also a progressive revelation of 
 the "Open Secret" of the universe and of the mysteries hid- 
 den in matter itself. 
 
 Thus it appears that the continuity and uniformity of nature 
 and its unity in a system depend on the existence of God and 
 his immanence and action in nature. It has been objected to 
 philosophy that it ultimately breaks down in contradictions or 
 antinomies. We find that, if there is no God and no system 
 of rational and free persons, then these antinomies are irrecon- 
 cilable contradictions and reason is discredited. But if there is 
 a God and a spiritual system of rational free agency, then these 
 antinomies are not contradictions, but complementary truths. 1 
 In like manner we find antinomies in physical science. And the 
 same is true of these as of the antinomies of philosophy. If God 
 does not exist the} 7 are irreconcilable contradictions. Then the 
 maxim that nature is uniform and continuous, on which phys- 
 ical science rests, is contradicted by indisputable facts which 
 science discovers. But if God exists immanent and acting in 
 nature, they are no longer contradictions, but manifestations of 
 the uniformity, continuity and unity of nature, as expressing the 
 truth and law and realizing the ideals and ends of the absolute 
 Reason energizing in it. It is the existence of God which makes 
 the continuity, uniformity and unity of nature possible. Thus 
 physical science itself reveals its own insufficiency and points 
 unmistakably to a sphere of existence beyond itself. 
 
 III. NATURE REALIZING IDEALS. Nature reveals action di- 
 rected toward the realization of ideals. 
 
 We come here to that part of the physico-theological proof 
 which is more specifically teleological ; the consideration of the 
 ends for which nature and all which it includes exist. The ends 
 subserved by nature and its agencies and processes are twofold, 
 and may be distinguished as internal and external. The over- 
 looking of this distinction has caused much confusion of thought 
 on the subject. 
 
 The internal end of anything in nature is the realization of its 
 plan or ideal. The external end is the uses which it may sub- 
 serve after it is completed according to its ideal. 
 
 The first of these ends is to be considered here. The other 
 will constitute the fourth line of evidence. 
 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 128-135. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 273 
 
 It may be assumed that whenever any agent is working accord- 
 ing to a plan, the work has always a final cause or end in the 
 realization of the plan. That is, all the parts and agencies are 
 subordinate to the plan of the whole. This is often said to be 
 the distinctive characteristic of living organisms. Hence it is 
 said that final causes are found only in them. But the final cause 
 seems to be not less a characteristic of mechanism. When one 
 is making a steam-engine every part is subordinated to the whole, 
 and every stroke in making it is for the purpose of realizing its 
 ideal or plan. After it is made the engine is used for purposes 
 external to itself ; yet its structure still reveals the fact that it 
 was made according to a plan and that every part is subordinate 
 to the ideal of the whole. An organism differs from a machine 
 in the fact that the former is seen to grow ; and after it has 
 ceased to grow we see the vital processes continually going on to 
 repair waste and to preserve the life and power of the organism. 
 During its whole existence from the seed or egg onward it is 
 seen to have its end in itself, and every organ and function exists 
 for the organism. In a machine, on the contrary, it is only dur- 
 ing the process of its construction that our attention is directed 
 to the fact that it has its end in itself, and that every part is sub- 
 ordinated to realizing the plan of the whole. After it is finished 
 our attention is directed to the ends beyond itself for which it is 
 used. On the other hand, organisms subserve external ends, in 
 bearing fruit, presenting beauty and fragrance, supplying mate- 
 rial and fuel, yielding medicines, promoting health and fertility, 
 and in other ways. Therefore organism and mechanism each 
 subserves both internal and external ends ; although in the for- 
 mer the internal, and in the latter the external end most attracts 
 attention. 
 
 Our present thought is that throughout nature, organic and 
 inorganic, we find the realization of ideals, the continuous and 
 progressive completing of plans and systems. I shall consider, 
 first, the realization, in specific things and systems, of subordi- 
 nate plans or ideals ; secondly, the progressive realization of the 
 plan or ideal of the cosmos as a whole ; and, thirdly, the revela- 
 tion of the beautiful in nature. The theory of evolution, by pre- 
 senting the cosmos as unfinished and in continuous and progres- 
 sive development, enal>les us to look at it in the process and see 
 it progressively realizing the plan or ideal, as we see the process 
 of constructing a steam-engine, or of the germination of a seed 
 and the growth of the plant. 
 
 18 
 
274 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 1. We are to consider the evidence of action directed toward 
 the realization of ideals in specific things and subordinate sys- 
 tems. 
 
 In the first place, many objects in their structure give evidence 
 of action directed toward the realization of an ideal ; such are the 
 eye, the hand, and in fact all the organs of animal and vegetable 
 life ; for every organ is fitted for its function. 
 
 In the second place, the truth of this proposition is exempli- 
 fied in processes going on under observation. A striking example 
 is in the development of a germ or egg. Mr. Huxley says : 
 " Examine the recently laid egg of some common animal, such as 
 a salamander or a newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best 
 microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac inclosing a 
 glairy fluid holding granules in suspension. But strange possi- 
 bilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate 
 supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter 
 undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so steady and purpose-like 
 in their succession, that one can only compare them to those 
 operated by a skilful modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As 
 with an invisible trowel the mass is divided and subdivided into 
 smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggrega- 
 tion of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of 
 the nascent organism. And then it is as if a delicate finger 
 traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column and 
 molded the contour of the body, pinching up the head at one end 
 and the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb in due 
 salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way that, after watching 
 the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by 
 the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic 
 would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving 
 with skilful manipulation to perfect his work." 1 
 
 Other examples are found in the vital processes of an organism 
 after birth. Professor Newcomb says : " Should we see in visi- 
 ble masses of matter the same kind of motions which we know 
 must take place among the molecules of matter as they arrange 
 themselves into the complex attitudes necessary to form the leaf 
 of a plant, we should at once conclude they were under the direc- 
 tion of a living being, who was superintending the execution of 
 these arrangements." And could we see the particles arranging 
 themselves in the formation of a crystal, it would seern to us like 
 soldiers at the roll of the drum coming from their resting places 
 and taking each his proper position in the ranks. 
 1 Lay Sermons, pp. 260, 261. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 275 
 
 We may notice, next, the process of selection in the germina- 
 tion, nourishing and development of an organism. Different por- 
 tions of germinal matter, differing from each other in nothing: 
 which science can observe, grow severally into different organ- 
 isms, one into an oak, another into an oyster and another into a. 
 man. Different seeds grow each without fail into a plant of its 
 own kind ; and so persistent is this distinguishing energy, that if 
 a scion of one species is grafted into the stock of another, it per- 
 sists in bearing fruit of its own kind. It cannot be that this de- 
 termination is effected by soil or climate, by any cosmic influence 
 or any cultivation, because under precisely the same external in- 
 fluences the seeds develop severally each its peculiar life. Here 
 is evidence of a selecting agency directing the action to the reali- 
 zation of a specific ideal. 
 
 A selecting agency is equally remarkable in the growth of the 
 organism and its continued sustenance. At different points in 
 the organism the nutriment is converted into different tissues ; 
 various glands exude various secretions ; from the same blood 
 some agency takes out at different points material for muscle, 
 nerve, bone, skin, hair, eyes, the enamel of the teeth, and shapes 
 it into different forms to meet the needs of the organism. Be- 
 sides this, the body is in a perpetual process of waste and restora- 
 tion ; from the innumerable particles which are acting together 
 some are selected to be thrown out, while new ones take their 
 places for a time. If all these processes were visible, we could 
 not resist the conclusion that these selections are made, immedi- 
 ately or mediately, by some intelligent agency. 
 
 And, fourthly, we notice the coordination and cooperation of 
 many agencies all acting together according to one plan to realize 
 an ideal. 
 
 In their own conscious action men form plans and then put 
 forth their energies to realize them. One may be spending his 
 energies for years and even for his whole life in realizing a plan. 
 Men exist in society. They form plans together and cooperate 
 in their realization. Men may cooperate in realizing a common 
 plan on which through successive generations and many centuries 
 they expend their energies. A nation may work for the realizing 
 of an idea through centuries. Christians have been laboring, 
 ever since Christ died, for the realization of the idea of the king- 
 dom of God on earth. Thus man has the conception of a plan, 
 and of the coordination of many agents in working for its realiza- 
 tion as an ideal end. 
 
276 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 As we extend our researches downward through the physical 
 system, we. find at every grade of descent evidence of the coopera- 
 tive action of many agents for the realization of a plan or ideal 
 end. 
 
 In the higher orders of brutes, we find them in the exercise of 
 Instinct individually performing a series of actions for the attain- 
 ment of an end. Often also we find a pair or a larger company 
 cooperating to accomplish a plan, as birds build nests, and bea- 
 vers build darns, and wolves hunt in packs. 
 
 Among insects we find swarms, which, rather than individuals, 
 seem to be the units of the life of the species. All the bees in a 
 swarm work together all summer to realize a complicated plan, 
 each part of the work having significance only in reference to 
 something further in the future. Every ant in a swarm works in 
 like mariner in cooperation with every other, not only in work 
 which has significance only in its relation to the realization of 
 the plan in the future, but also in a marvelous division of labor, 
 in which the work of each class has significance only in its rela- 
 tion to the entirely different work of the others. 
 
 Descending still lower to the protozoa, we find the same co- 
 ordination and cooperation among them. A striking example 
 is the building of a coral structure called Neptune's cup. This 
 cup is built by myriads of coral polyps, and by many successive 
 generations of them. Yet from the beginning these myriads of 
 polyps work all on the same plan, progressively realizing the 
 same ideal. At first many successive generations of them build 
 the broad and gently swelling circular base. Then they simul- 
 taneously change the direction and fashion the cylindrical stem. 
 Then the stem is gradually swelled out and fashioned into the 
 regularly curved hollow bowl. Surely some power other than 
 these barely animate creatures directed the myriads of them as, 
 in entire isolation from each other, they steadily, through many 
 successive generations, wrought out this plan and realized this 
 ideal. 
 
 Descending to a lower grade, we come to the cells of living 
 organisms, animal and vegetable. We find them, like the coral 
 polyps, working together through many years and through innu- 
 merable lifetimes of the working cells, which continually perish 
 and pass away ; and working in the progressive realization of a 
 .plan more complicated than that of the Neptune's cup; a fungus, 
 a lichen, a rose-bush and roses, an oak-tree, a salmon, an eagle, 
 a horse, a man. Here again is evidence of coordination of myr- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 277 
 
 lads of agents under some directing intelligence in progressively 
 realizing an ideal. 
 
 Descending to a lower grade we find the molecules which have 
 combined to form the cells are coordinated in action to realize 
 an ideal, namely, a cell. And the coordination of molecules is 
 not merely in the production of the cells which are the basis of 
 organic matter. In inorganic matter they are marshaled in order 
 in crystallization. The chemical elements acting on one another 
 combine in definite mathematical proportions. The law of chem- 
 ical equivalents indicates that the combining molecules are fitted 
 accurately to their positions and, it might almost be said, stamped 
 with their combining numbers ; as the parts of Waltham watches 
 and of Springfield rifles are made each to fit into its appropriate 
 place in any watch or rifle ; or as blocks of stone are shaped and 
 numbered in the quarry, each for its appropriate place in the 
 building. Thus all of them are coordinated by the intelligence 
 of the builder to realize the ideal of the building. Hence Sir J. 
 Herschel and after him Professor Maxwell said that the ultimate 
 atoms have the marks of manufactured articles. 
 
 Passing from molecules to masses, we find them also coordi- 
 nated, working together to realize the idea of a habitable earth, 
 a solar system, a cosmos. 
 
 2. We are to consider the evidence in the progressive realiza- 
 tion of the plan or ideal of the cosmos as a whole. 
 
 This plan is disclosed in the fact that the physical system re- 
 veals gradation and subordination. In it beings exist in different 
 grades, inorganic and organic, and in each of these are subordi- 
 nate gradations. Animals of the lowest grade are by virtue of 
 sensitivity superior to vegetables of the highest. Yet animal life 
 in its lowest grade does not originate from vegetable life in its 
 highest. They seem to be two parallel series. It is the lower 
 orders of both animal and vegetable organization which are so 
 much alike that it is difficult to determine to which of the or- 
 ganic kingdoms they respectively belong. In each kingdom 
 there is a succession of ascending grades, in- which the individ- 
 uals are more and more highly organized. 
 
 In the inorganic world we find also a gradation : the mechan- 
 ical action of masses ; superior to that, the mechanical action of 
 molecules in electricity, heat and light ; superior to this, the ele- 
 mental or chemical forces. 1 
 
 Further and decisive evidence is found in the fact, disclosed by 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, p. 495. 
 
278 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 science, that nature is progressive in realizing the plan or ideal of 
 the physical system or cosmos. 
 
 The physical system as a whole is a cosmos ; that is, a whole 
 that is ordered in unity under law. We trace in it gradation 
 and subordination and infer from its structure that it is the prod- 
 uct of action directed to the realization of an ideal. 
 
 But of late our position in respect to this argument is changed. 
 Science has discovered in the earth itself the effects of mighty 
 agencies active in remote ages through long periods of time form- 
 ing it into its present condition ; and has disclosed marvelous 
 changes through which it has passed and the processes by which 
 it has gradually been brought into its present state. And sci- 
 ence gives us reason to suppose that the whole cosmos may have 
 been brought to its present condition through a process of evolu- 
 tion. We are, therefore, not to look on the universe as a product 
 finished in its creation, but as the result of processes which have 
 been going on in the past and which are not yet completed, but 
 which are always directed toward realizing in the universe a grand 
 ideal. We are no longer shut up to reasoning from the structure 
 of the universe as a product finished at a stroke in the creation. 
 We are able to look into the past and catch some glimpses of the 
 processes by which the world was formed and from their discov- 
 ered effects learn something of the agencies which were active in 
 them. We thus discover that the gradations which we have 
 observed in nature were actual historical results of successive ad- 
 vances of the energy working in nature and revealing new poten- 
 cies in new products which mark grades or stages in the progress 
 of the universe. Thus while the universe goes on in order and 
 uniformity and so seems to be advancing in a circle, we now dis- 
 cover that the seeming circle is a spiral which at each return is 
 on a higher plane than before. And, as an organism is charac- 
 terized by germination and growth and by the subordination of 
 one organ and its function to another and of all to the whole or- 
 ganism, the universe in these respects has more analogy to organ- 
 ism than to mechanism. And as the universe advances to the 
 revelation of mechanical force and of the highest powers of it in 
 molecular motion, to the revelation of the higher chemical or ele- 
 mental force, to the revelation of the power of life, and ulti- 
 mately to the revelation of personal and spiritual power in man, 
 we are obliged to recognize behind all that appears in the uni- 
 verse a power transcending it and revealing itself progressively 
 in it. 1 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 491-502. 
 
GOD KEVEALED IN NATURE. 279 
 
 The theory of evolution, therefore, confirms rather than annuls 
 the evidence of a power in and above nature directing its ener- 
 gies toward the realization of an ideal. We are not confined to 
 evidences of the progressive realization of ideals k in particular 
 structures, processes and systems, but find the same in the evo- 
 lution of the cosmos as a whole. Mr. Wordsworth says : " The 
 idea of law conceived as a formula capable of enunciation once 
 for all in set terms and having an eternal changeless validity, has 
 gradually given way before that of process in almost all depart- 
 ments of scientific observation." l But the fact of process does 
 not do away with fixed law. It is essential to the idea of a pro- 
 cess that it go on under fixed law. The law is revealed in the 
 process. The error to be corrected is that the universe was fin- 
 ished at once in a fiat of creation, and that it can be studied only 
 as a finished and fixed product. Whereas we now know its pres- 
 ent condition to be the result of immensely long processes in the 
 past, which in fact have realized higher and higher ends, and 
 have culminated in the appearance of rational man. Thus it is 
 found to be a fact that the power which energizes in nature has 
 been working toward the realization of an ideal, and we have the 
 basis for an induction that it will continue to work toward an 
 ideal in the future. 
 
 Whatever may have been the origin of the universe, its sub- 
 sequent condition at any point of time is not the product of an 
 immediate fiat of God's will. It is the result of a process, in 
 which the existing material and agencies have been prepared 
 for higher manifestations ; and the progress is limited by the 
 material in which and the agencies through which the result is 
 effected. According to Mr. Spencer the doctrine of evolution is 
 that the type of the universe is an organism which grows, and 
 not a machine which is made and finished once for all. Chris- 
 tian theism accepts this ; it is in harmony with the words of 
 Jesus, who declares that the type also of the spiritual system, 
 the kingdom of God on earth, is the growing grain : first the 
 blade, then the ear, then, the full corn in the ear. 
 
 Because the action is progressive through the development of 
 finite material and the action of finite agencies, it follows that 
 the universe at every period in time and every boundary in space 
 is unfinished and incomplete. Therefore if we find imperfection 
 in it, if we can conceive of a universe more nearly perfect than 
 this, if we find evil in it, this is not inconsistent with the pro- 
 1 The One Religion; Bampton Lectures, 1881, p. 307. 
 
280 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 gressive realization of a perfect universe, but is incidental to the 
 progressiveness. In ages before man existed it was less devel- 
 oped, and therefore more imperfect than now. So much prog- 
 ress is a fact already known. In philosophy we know, from the 
 idea of the infinite and the finite, that if the universe is the rev- 
 elation of the infinite in the finite, the revelation can never be 
 finished or complete. And now physical science, discovering that 
 the universe is in fact progressive, teaches that it is always work- 
 ing toward the realization of an ideal archetype, but is never its 
 finished and complete realization. In the infinite, however man- 
 ifested in the finite, there is always something remaining to be 
 manifested. 
 
 Evolution, therefore, does not annul the evidence of the ex- 
 istence of God found in particular beings and arrangements in 
 nature. The fact of a process does not annul the facts of order 
 and law, and of progress toward realizing an ideal. On the other 
 hand it presents the argument on the grandest scale by empha- 
 sizing its application to the universe as a whole. 1 It shows that 
 the universe from its beginning, as a whole as well as in its 
 parts, in all times as well as in all places, has revealed the pres- 
 ence and action of a power continuously and progressively work- 
 ing towards the realization of one grand ideal. And its not 
 realizing the ideal in its fulness at any point of time is not fail- 
 ure and defeat; it results from fulness, not from deficiency; the 
 outflowing can never be finished or complete, because it is con- 
 tinuous fulness which overflows. The divine communication in 
 and to the finite is ever greater and greater; but in all commu- 
 nication of the infinite there is always something which remains 
 uncommunicated. That is the Infinite itself ; the Incommuni- 
 cable Name. 
 
 3. Nature in its beauty reveals ideals of perfection. 
 
 Beauty, as the revelation or at least the indication or sugges- 
 tion of an ideal of perfection in some concrete object or combina- 
 tion of objects, always reveals mind. In appreciating beauty the 
 mind sees in the beautiful object the revelation of an ideal crea- 
 tion by a mind. 2 
 
 1 " The force of evolution is as brute and unconscious as that of fire ; there 
 is no more royalty in it than in the log which Jupiter threw down to the frogs. 
 In its descent it has made a frightful splash in the pool of science ; but the 
 world will recover from it, as it did from the dangerous doctrine of the earth's 
 motion." Prof. Benj. Peirce, Ideality of the Physical Sciences, p. 35. 
 
 2 Phil. Basis of TheisnVpp. 227-243, 250. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 281 
 
 The physical world is full of beauty and sublimity. The cos- 
 mos, as we think of it in its unity, awakens the emotion of the 
 sublime. We see expressed in it an archetypal ideal of all things- 
 in the unity and harmony of a system. 
 
 Individual objects in nature and their combinations and ar- 
 rangements are beautiful. In fact one seldom gets anywhere a 
 wide view of nature without finding it either beautiful or sublime. 
 
 Painters and poets are interpreters of nature. The " vision 
 and faculty divine of genius " sees the significance of nature and 
 the ideals it reveals, and in art or poetry sets them forth to the 
 view of others. The artist reveals the significance of nature,, 
 not by copying its forms, but by seizing the ideals which they 
 express, the spirit which reveals itself through them. Thus in 
 these creations all men may see what genius sees in nature, what 
 nature reveals to the most clear-seeing and deep-seeing minds. 
 
 If to these rninds the forms of nature reveal ideals of the per- 
 fect and so kindle them to enthusiasm in aesthetic admiration, 
 then, in all these beautiful forms, are revealed the creations of 
 some mind. For how can a poet or artist find nature full of 
 these ideals, unless first some mind has expressed its own ideals 
 in nature's forms ? 
 
 IV. NATURE SUBSERVES USES. Nature subserves the uses 
 of sentient beings and preeminently of man. 
 
 Here we come to the teleological evidence in its narrowest 
 meaning. Much of the discussion on both sides has been mis- 
 leading because it has accepted this as the whole. But while it 
 is not the whole it presents a part of the evidence which is im- 
 portant to its full significance. We have been considering the 
 internal end, the realization of a plan, ideal or system in the 
 particular arrangements and processes of nature and in nature as 
 a whole. We come now to the external end, to the subservience 
 of physical agents and processes to the uses of sentient and pre- 
 eminently of rational beings. 
 
 Here also two lines of thought present themselves : First, the 
 subservience of particular agents and processes in nature to the 
 uses of sentient and preeminently of rational beings ; Secondly, 
 the subservience of nature as a whole or cosmos to these ends. 
 
 1. The evidence in the first of these lines of thought is too 
 abundant to be presented in its details. It will be sufficient to 
 exemplify it in a few instances. 
 
 In the outset it must be noticed that the cosmic agencies of 
 inorganic nature are subservient to all organic life. 
 
282 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Jesus says, " Consider the lilies, how they grow ; " he teaches 
 that it is God's care which clothes them with beauty. Accord- 
 ingly we find that every agency in nature is laid under contribu- 
 tion to promote the lily's growth. The sun quickens it by its 
 beams ; the earth and the atmosphere contribute material for its 
 structure ; the ocean gives water which the winds bear to the 
 growing flower ; all chemical and organic forces are energizing 
 in it ; gravitation bends its gracefully drooping head. 
 
 Jesus says that God cares for every sparrow and notes its fall. 
 And science reveals in the little bird the evidence of a divine 
 knowledge and power. Examine it and learn all which may be 
 known about it. But this would involve an encyclopedia of 
 knowledge. There must be the knowledge of mechanics to un- 
 derstand the leverage of its limbs and the flow of its blood ; of 
 chemistry, to know the composition of its body; of terrestrial 
 physics, to explain its weight and its relation to the air in flying; 
 of anatomy and physiology, to know its organs and their func- 
 tions ; of zoology, to know its place and relations in the animal 
 system ; of physical geography, to learn its distribution over the 
 earth ; of palaeontology, to learn when it first appeared ; and of 
 some of the profoundest questions of metaphysics, to learn what 
 its life is, what is the instinct by which it builds its nest, and 
 wherein its intelligence differs, if at all, from human reason. 
 Thus the whole compass of human science is concentrated and 
 exemplified in a sparrow. 
 
 And this is how the lily grows and the sparrow is formed 
 under the care of God. And this concentration of thought and 
 energy on so small a creature is no evidence of defect of power, 
 but of the overflowing fulness of the power always energizing in 
 the world. It is no evidence of waste of energy on a small effect. 
 The lily and the sparrow are small only in bulk ; they are great 
 as the blossoms of the great tree of the universe, after its growth 
 through ages maturing itself to capacity for the great result, the 
 blossoming into life, the production of living organisms. And 
 since the universe must mature for ages before it is fitted for the 
 production of organic life, the lily and the sparrow reveal in 
 themselves the product of cosmic forces through ages, as the fruit 
 of a tree reveals the result of years of growth. Each is a phys- 
 ical universe in little, so far as the cosmic powers were developed 
 at the appearance of vegetable and animal life. The powers of' 
 the universe have concentrated their energies in developing a 
 lily or a sparrow as if this little thing were the only object of 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 283 
 
 action, the one ultimate and highest end of the universe ; and 
 the same is done for every other organism ; as every fruit on a 
 tree is the product of the united energies of the whole tree. 
 And yet the universe and all its energies remain unwasted for 
 new productions. This is not a deficiency of power but an inex- 
 haustible fulness ; not waste, but an expenditure commensurate 
 with the resources of the agent. If God does anything he must 
 do it as God. And every lily and every sparrow, because it is 
 the work of his hand, reveals in itself the thought and power of 
 God. 
 
 Thus we see that all cosmic forces of inorganic nature are sub- 
 servient to organic life. 
 
 In the next place, the vegetable kingdom is subservient to the 
 animal. Unorganized matter cannot sustain and nourish animal 
 life ; it must be organized into plants before it can be food for 
 sentient beings. It was impossible for animals to exist on the 
 earth until it had been clothed with vegetation. The animal 
 kingdom depends on the vegetable kingdom for its existence. 
 The latter exists to subserve the uses of the former. 
 
 In the next place, there is a remarkable adjustment of the 
 organs, functions and instincts of sensitive beings to their envi- 
 ronment. The being and its environment are fitted to each other 
 as a coin to the die, or a molding to the matrix. They seem to 
 have been made for each other. As Goethe puts it poetically, so 
 it is scientifically true : 
 
 " From the cold earth, in earliest spring, 
 A flower peeped out, dear, fragrant thing! 
 Then sipped a bee, as half afraid ; 
 Sure each was for the other made." l 
 
 There are adaptations or adjustments of particular organs to 
 the medium in which they severally act ; as the eye to the light, 
 the lungs to the air. There are provisions in the environment 
 for supplying nourishment to organisms. There are adaptations 
 of particular beings to their peculiar environment. A fish has gills 
 instead of lungs ; a bird in its entire organization is constructed 
 for flying. Dr. Darwin in his treatise on Orchids describes the 
 fertilization of flowers by the action of insects, and points out 
 various remarkable contrivances in the flower to attract the in- 
 sects and to direct their action so as rightly to distribute the 
 pollen. There are changes in the organs and functions of the 
 same individual to meet changing conditions of life, as in frogs 
 1 Gleich und Gleich. 
 
284 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 and insects in their several transformations, and in the gradual 
 extinction of an organ when in a different environment there is 
 no further use for it. There are also temporary changes to meet 
 a temporary change of condition ; the scent of a pheasant is 
 suppressed during incubation, and this protects her from dogs. 1 
 There is a power of modification to meet new conditions, as the 
 healing power in nature, the marvelous power of perception in 
 the finger's end of the blind. There are guiding and preserving 
 instincts. 
 
 There is also the great complexity and nicety of the adjust- 
 ments on which life depends. No single agent or action effects 
 such an adjustment. It is the result of different or opposing 
 forces nicely balanced ; of agencies acting under different laws 
 nicely concurring to produce a definite result. Any disturbance 
 in the proportions or the adjustment would change the effect, 
 and might transform what had sustained life into a power de- 
 structive of it. The air is composed of the same elements as 
 nitric acid, and if chemically combined the air might be trans- 
 formed into that corrosive agent. The chemical principles of 
 tea and strychnine are composed of the same elements differ- 
 ently combined. The whole earth, with its atmosphere, is com- 
 posed of sixty-four elements ; much the larger number of these 
 exist, so far as known, in very small quantities. It has been 
 estimated that some twenty of these make up almost the entire 
 globe. It is evident that there must be great variety and nicety 
 of their combinations to form the multitude of diverse kinds of 
 things in the world. And these nice adjustments of agents, 
 forces and laws imply the action of mind. And since it is by 
 these that sentient beings are sustained and nourished, it is plain 
 that nature is constituted and administered in subservience to 
 the uses of sentient beings. Evolution, if true, does not alter 
 these facts ; nor does it invalidate the argument that the facts 
 reveal mind. For if these adjustments come to pass in a process 
 of evolution, the original constitution of that which is evolved,, 
 the appearance at the fit time of organic and then of sentient 
 beings, and the direction of the evolution to effect the adjust- 
 ments necessary to their preservation and sustenance, still reveal 
 the agency of mind. 
 
 In like manner nature subserves the uses of man as one class 
 of its sentient beings. We find in him similar adaptations and 
 adjustments to his environment. The earth is habitable. It 
 1 Nature, May 15, 1873, pp. 48-50. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 285 
 
 yields him food fitted to his needs. It supplies him with wood, 
 stone, coal, the earths and the metals, material for building, for 
 tools and machinery. The strata of its crust are tilted up, giving 
 access to buried mineral deposits which he could never have 
 reached had the strata been uniformly horizontal ; and thus its 
 surface is thrown up into mountains, hills and valleys, giving a 
 bed for the ocean, and springs and streams of living water, and 
 fit sites for happy homes. All the energies of nature wait his 
 bidding and do his work. Earth, air, fire and water offer them- 
 selves for his use. 
 
 In all instances of this kind the adaptations and subservience 
 to uses are facts found in nature and scientifically established. 
 The theist says they are evidence of rational intelligence direct- 
 ing the plan and development of nature to rational ends. 
 
 2. We come now to the second line of thought : Nature as a 
 whole is subservient to the spiritual system and to man as be- 
 longing to it. 
 
 Here we are to consider what is the external end, the end 
 beyond itself, for which the physical system as a whole exists. 
 
 It may safely be said that to the rational spirit of man, with 
 all his spiritual faculties and susceptibilities awake, the phys- 
 ical system in itself presents no worthy end for its existence, no 
 end which can meet and satisfy the demands of reason and of 
 the spiritual life. We must look beyond nature to find the end 
 for which it exists. 
 
 Beyond nature there is nothing known to us but the sphere 
 of the spiritual and personal. This sphere man already knows 
 in his consciousness of himself and his knowledge of his fellow- 
 men. He knows it as a sphere distinct from and above all 
 impersonal being and all that belongs merely to the physical sys- 
 tem. He knows nature by observation to be a realm of means 
 and instrumentalities. Everything in it is the effect of a pre- 
 vious cause and a means or instrument of a subsequent effect. 
 Everything in it is an intermediate, receiving from something 
 before and transmitting to something coming after. Everything 
 in it exists only as a means subordinate to an end. On the con- 
 trary, in his own moral consciousness of freedom and personality 
 he knows the sphere of the spiritual and personal to be a realm 
 of ends. He knows that a rational free person is not a tool to be 
 used, but a being to be served. He rightly assumes that in this 
 higher system, this realm of ends, the highest and true end of 
 the physical system may be found. 1 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 357-361. 
 
286 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 It is a fact that, so far as we on this earth know the evolu- 
 tion of the cosmos, it has culminated in the appearance of men, 
 of rational moral agents. It has culminated in the appearance 
 of just this moral system, this realm of ends. And this has 
 been the highest result of the progressive evolution of the cos- 
 mos through successive higher and higher stages of being until 
 man appeared. 
 
 We therefore infer that the physical system as a whole exists 
 not for itself, but as subservient to the bringing in of the spirit- 
 ual system and of man as belonging to it. 1 
 
 This may be illustrated from organic life and growth. If one 
 watches the germination of a peach -stone and its subsequent 
 growth, the first revelation of its living force and its specific 
 character is the pale and tender shoot ; the next higher is the 
 leaf, then higher still is the blossom ; and the last and consum- 
 mate revelation is the ripe fruit. When we see this highest and 
 consummate revelation of the living force and specific character 
 of the peach-stone, we conclude that the tree exists to produce 
 peaches ; for that in fact is what it does. 
 
 The most perfect type of the evolving universe is a living and 
 growing organism. The universe in its development reveals its 
 power and its specific character, first in mechanical action pre- 
 paring the homogeneous material for chemical combinations ; 
 then in chemical affinities, preparing the material for vital action; 
 then in vegetable life, preparing the earth for the sustenance of 
 animals ; then in animal life, fructifying and ripening in rational 
 man. We thus know the fact that its highest product, so far as 
 its gradations come under our observation in the history of this 
 planet, is rational man. And we reasonably conclude that this 
 earth exists for the production of rational man ; and the further 
 inference is, that the universe exists for the production of rational 
 beings as its highest and consummate product. 
 
 We also infer that rational man is, so far as this earth is 
 
 1 " There is in every earnest thinker a craving after a final cause ; and this 
 craving can DO more be extinguished than our belief in objective reality. . . . 
 The glorious consummation toward which organic evolution is tending is the 
 production of the highest and most perfect psychical life. . . . When from 
 the dawn of life we see all things working together toward the evolution of 
 the highest spiritual attributes of man, we know, however the words may 
 stumble in which we try to say it, that God is in the deepest sense a moral 
 Being." John Fiske, The Idea of God, pp. 138, 160, 167. 
 
 Mr. Spencer speaks of " the naturally revealed end towards which the Power 
 manifested in Evolution works." Data of Ethics, 62. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 28T 
 
 concerned, the being to whose uses preeminently nature is sub- 
 ordinate and subservient ; that nature is subservient to man pre- 
 eminently as a rational and spiritual being and belonging to the 
 spiritual system ; it is subservient to the spiritual interests and 
 ends of man ; and that the physical system as a whole is subordi- 
 nate and subservient to the spiritual system. 
 
 This is inferred from the fact that in the evolution of the uni- 
 verse rational, spiritual beings in a rational, spiritual system 
 have actually been produced, and are actually its highest and 
 consummate product. Man finds himself rational, spiritual and 
 therefore supernatural. Born of nature he finds himself above 
 nature. He finds himself personal and free, determining himself, 
 exerting and directing his own energies, seeing rational truth and 
 knowing himself subject to rational, moral and spiritual law ; he 
 sees himself with his fellow-men rational and free like himself, 
 united under moral and spiritual law in a moral and spiritual 
 system. Here is the indisputable fact that nature in its pro- 
 cesses and progressive development has issued in the production, 
 either by itself or by a power present in it but above it, of ra- 
 tional, moral and spiritual beings, knowing themselves to be 
 under a common law in a rational, moral and spiritual system. 
 And this is the highest and consummate product of the develop- 
 ment of the universe. 
 
 We say then that nature exists for the spiritual interests of 
 man, and that the physical system is subordinate and subservient 
 to a spiritual system, because, as a matter of fact, rational, moral 
 and spiritual beings, recognizing themselves as under rational, 
 moral and spiritual law in a moral and spiritual system, are actu- 
 ally its highest and consummate product. 
 
 We have further evidence in the observed fact that the phys- 
 ical system gives scope to the rational, moral and spiritual activ- 
 ity and culture of man. In contact with it man is wakened to 
 consciousness of himself. In the investigation of it his intellect 
 is quickened and developed. In subduing, cultivating, develop- 
 ing and civilizing nature he subdues, cultivates, develops and civ- 
 ilizes himself. In resisting temptation from the nature-side of his 
 own being and subjecting it to the spiritual he develops his own 
 spiritual purity, insight and power. And the physical universe 
 in its grandeur reveals the glory of God and is a magnificent and 
 fit temple for his worship and service. 
 
 V. UNITY OF NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. To 
 complete this evidence it is necessary to show that in theism, and 
 
288 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 in it alone, we find adequate ground for the complete harmony 
 and unity of the two systems, the physical and the spiritual, 
 under the true law of continuity. 
 
 In the foregoing discussion we have opened to our view the 
 universe consisting of two grand systems, of nature and of spirit. 
 In the subordination of the former to the latter we see the only 
 conceivable end worthy of the existence of the physical universe 
 in its vastness, magnificence and grandeur. And in this is dis- 
 covered the solution of the otherwise intractable problem of find- 
 ing harmony and unity in the duality of the natural and the su- 
 pernatural, of matter and mind. 
 
 Reason demands for the universe unity of dependence on some 
 common original ground or cause, unity of order and law, of 
 common intelligibility and significance, and of rational end; and 
 theism meets and satisfies these demands. It presents, as the 
 absolute ground or cause from which all things originate, the 
 absolute Reason, self-exerting and self - directing. In the last 
 analysis of physical force science always finds a power transcend- 
 ing it and suggestive of will-power. In all its explorations of 
 nature and its explanations of it by natural laws, it carries us 
 into sight of the mystery of the infinite which no natural law 
 can explain. But theism shows us the mystery itself as the 
 absolute Reason progressively revealing itself in the universe. 
 Theism finds the order, law and significance of nature in the fact 
 that it is the expression of the archetypal thought of absolute 
 Reason in conformity with rational laws. It finds unity of end 
 in the subordination of nature to the spiritual system. The spir- 
 itual system is in its essence a realm of ends ; every spiritual or 
 personal being has rights and is in himself an object of service, 
 never a tool to be used. In the sublime ideas of spiritual de- 
 velopment, of the realization of the kingdom of God, the reign 
 of peace arid love on earth and its perpetuation in heaven, we 
 see an end to be attained by the existence of the universe which 
 reason pronounces of true worth. Theism, therefore, gives the 
 harmony and unity of the physical and spiritual systems in the 
 universe as the creation of God, the absolute Reason, dependent 
 on him, expressing his archetypal thought, ordered under ra- 
 tional laws, and progressively realizing in the spiritual sphere 
 the ideals and ends of perfect wisdom and love. 
 
 Here also we find the synthesis of nature, man and God. The 
 ultimate significance and the deepest reality of the universe are 
 the rational principles and truths, the thoughts of the absolute 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 289 
 
 Reason which it expresses and in which it reveals God. Theism 
 explains why in the investigation of the universe we always find 
 science. It teaches that the universe is the expression or mani- 
 festation of the thoughts of God ; it is the revelation of the eter- 
 nal Reason. And since the reason of man is the same in kind 
 with the universal Reason and participates in its light, man can 
 apprehend the universe in his thought because it is the expres- 
 sion of the divine thought ; the world without is the expression 
 and revelation of the spiritual principles within. Here we find 
 the true meaning of a principle of Kant's philosophy : " Man's 
 knowledge of his own spirit is the starting-point and key of his 
 knowledge of the world." Here we find the synthesis of nature 
 and spirit ; nature is not antagonistic to spirit, for it is the ex- 
 pression of the spirit. Here we find the synthesis of nature, 
 man and God ; for the spiritual system and the physical are the 
 manifestation of God, the absolute Reason, and are in unity 
 through their common relation to him. The eternal Spirit re- 
 veals himself, not in the spiritual system only, but in the phys- 
 ical system which to superficial thought seems entirely con- 
 trary to him. As we think more deeply and devoutly, we find 
 ourselves saying with Carlyle : " The whole creation seems 
 more and more divine to me, the natural more and more super- 
 natural." ! 
 
 The constitution of the physical system is the archetypal, 
 thought of God expressed in it. Its invariable factual sequences 
 which are called the laws of nature and constitute its uniformity, 
 and continuity, are accordant with the truths, laws, ideals ands 
 ends which are eternal in the absolute Reason. Mr. Drummond:' 
 maintains that the laws of nature extend to the spiritual world, 
 and are its laws. He writes in defense of theism and with the- 
 laudable intent to remove the common error that nature and! 
 spirit are contradictory and separated by an impassable gulf, and! 
 to show that the law of continuity extends from the one to the 
 other and connects them in unity. But his way of putting it is 
 that the laws of nature extend to the spiritual world. This im- 
 plies that spirit is generated from nature, not that nature is the 
 manifestation of spirit. In the last century skepticism in France 
 busied itself with proving that the spiritual and the material, the 
 supernatural and the natural are the same ; but it was trying to 
 do it, not by lifting the natural into relation with the spiritual, 
 but by sinking the spiritual into the natural. The materialistic 
 
 1 Froude's Life of Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 258. 
 19 
 
290 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 evolutionists of the present day are trying to do the same. Mr. 
 Drummond does not accept this inference ; he even says ex- 
 plicitly that the spiritual precedes the natural, and that its laws 
 :are projected into the natural ; he speaks of matter as an x or 
 symbol and so verges close upon idealism. 1 From this the logical 
 inference is that the principles of the spiritual system pass over 
 into the natural and determine its factual sequences and evolu- 
 tion. He is inconsistent with himself in teaching the contrary, 
 that the laws of nature pass over to the spiritual system and de- 
 termine it. Yet this latter is his doctrine both in his statement 
 of his principle and in the successive chapters in which he ap- 
 plies natural laws to spiritual facts. Thus he unwittingly con- 
 cedes the essential premises of materialistic evolution. But in 
 truth it is the spiritual which gives laws to the natural, not the 
 natural which gives laws to the spiritual. It is the spirit which 
 manifests itself in nature, not nature which manifests itself in 
 spirit. The law of uniformity and continuity extends through 
 the realms both of spirit and of nature ; but it passes from the 
 realm of spirit into that of nature, not from the realm of nature 
 into that of spirit. The uniformity and continuity of the uni- 
 verse are the uniformity and continuity of the absolute Spirit 
 continuously and progressively expressing the truths which are 
 eternal in the unchanging Reason, by action according with its 
 unchanging laws, and realizing its unchanging ideals and ends. 
 
 Accordingly, if I may use a significant expression of Hegel, 
 man finds himself " at home " 2 in nature, not merely because 
 as to his physical organization he is in nature and is acted on 
 by it through his sensorium, but also because he finds in it the 
 principles of his own reason, in its accordance with which he can 
 comprehend it in science ; in studying it, he finds it revealing 
 his own spiritual being to himself and opening to him the range 
 and power of his own intelligence ; he finds its correspondence 
 with his own spiritual life, so that it furnishes the symbols which 
 illustrate and the words which declare spiritual realities ; in its 
 forms of beauty he rejoices to discover his own ideals of per- 
 fection ; and everywhere sees the wisdom of God, the perfect 
 Reason. The words of Sidney Lanier are hardly too strong : 
 
 " His heart found neighbors in great hills and trees, 
 And streams and clouds and suns and birds and bees, 
 And throbbed with neighbor-loves in loving these." 
 
 1 Natural Law in the Spiritual World, pp. 53-57. 
 
 2 See, for example, Hegel, Philosophic der Religion, vol. i. pp. 17, 26. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 291 
 
 On the other hand, he finds himself no stranger in the realm 
 of the spiritual and the supernatural; there also he is "at home" 
 with God and all that is spiritual and supernatural, for he is a 
 child of God the father of spirits, and is himself in his inmost 
 being spiritual and supernatural. As spirit he feels his spirit- 
 ual environment. And the fact that man thus finds himself at 
 home with God and with spiritual realities is a decisive evidence 
 of the existence of God and his communication with man, and of 
 the reality of the spiritual realm. 
 
 Nature, therefore, is not in antagonism to spirit. It is itself the 
 manifestation of God, the expression of his archetypal thought, 
 the sphere in which he is continuously active, revealing himself 
 so far as he can be revealed in physical forces and their inter- 
 action. It throbs all through with spiritual energies more subtile 
 and more mighty than the currents of electricity and magnetism 
 or the vibration of the all-pervading ether flashing with light 
 and heat. With all its vast-ness and sublimity it is but the 
 ground, the place, the sphere for what is greater, for the rise and 
 development of the spiritual system. It is made for the abode 
 and the sphere of action of persons, rational and free, in the 
 image of God, constituting a rational and spiritual system in 
 which through endless time and space God realizes progressively 
 the purpose of his wisdom in acts of love. So man finds in na- 
 ture the resources for the accomplishment of his purposes, the 
 material, the instruments and the forces which he lays hold of 
 and directs and uses for his own ends ; in his acquisition of the 
 resources of nature he is himself disciplined and developed and 
 so revealed to himself in his real capacities and powers ; and in 
 his own development he cultivates, civilizes and develops the 
 earth itself, which advances step by step with him in his prog- 
 ress. The physical world, therefore, presents no antagonism to 
 the spiritual, but is a sphere for life and action, fitted for render- 
 ing service to God, for the spiritual work and culture of man, 
 and for the establishment and growth of God's kingdom of 
 righteousness and good-will, of peace and blessedness. 
 
 And around all the universe, physical and spiritual, rolls the 
 great ocean of the infinite, mysterious and incomprehensible. 
 This also verifies the belief in God ; for if this were not so God 
 would not be infinite. Yet in the evolution of the universe what 
 he is continually comes more and more to light. As in the be- 
 ginning the islands and the continents at the word of God were 
 heaved up slowly from beneath the all-pervading waters, and 
 
292 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the waters receded as the rising land enlarged, so in the evolu- 
 tion of the universe God is continually emerging from the dark- 
 ness and vastness of the infinite, and the area of the knowledge 
 of God within which men may live on solid and fruitful ground 
 and happily serve him, is enlarging ; yet for that very reason 
 the boundless ocean of his infinitude greatens to the view along 
 the lengthening shore as the waters give place to the rising and 
 enlarging land. 
 
 Thus the whole universe, natural and spiritual, known specu- 
 latively or practically, attests and verifies through all ages the 
 reality of the existence of God, certissima scientia et clamante 
 conscientia. 1 
 
 VI. THE INFERENCE. In the five lines of investigation 
 which have been indicated we find, in facts and laws scientifically 
 established, evidence of the presence and direction of reason in 
 the constitution and course of nature. This constitutes the verifi- 
 cation of the theistic hypothesis that the cosmos is grounded in 
 reason, and that the absolute Power manifested in it is a rational 
 power, the universal Reason energizing, the personal God. 
 
 The verification is complete if no other hypothesis is found 
 which as well accords with the known facts and laws and ac- 
 counts for them. 
 
 Physical science forces on the attention the problem of find- 
 ing a theory of the universe, but properly declines to attempt 
 its solution as not being within its sphere. As it pushes onward 
 the investigation of nature's forces attracting and repelling, of 
 its elemental constitution, its ethers and their vibrations, its pro- 
 gressive evolution, it finds itself involved in insuperable difficul- 
 ties and contradictions. Thus it finds that the ultimate explana- 
 tion of the physical system must come from beyond the system 
 and from beyond all which empirical science can discover. So 
 Lord Rayleigh, President of tne British Association, in his open- 
 ing address at the meeting in Montreal in 1884, said of "the 
 scientific worker : " " In his heart he knows that underneath the 
 theories that he constructs there lie contradictions which he can- 
 not reconcile. The highest mysteries of being, if penetrable at 
 all by human intellect, require other weapons than those of cal- 
 culation and experiment." 
 
 Passing from empirical to philosophical and theological sci- 
 ence, it has already been shown that positivism, denying all 
 knowledge of beings and forces, refuses to entertain the prob- 
 1 Augustine, De Trinitate, bk. xiii. chap. i. 3. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 293 
 
 lem of finding an explanation of the universe, that agnosticism 
 is inconsistent with itself, and that pantheistic and materialistic 
 monism each fails to accord with the facts and to account for 
 them, and falls into insuperable difficulties and contradictions. 
 And every hypothesis, which denies that the cosmos is grounded 
 in reason and manifests rational direction in its facts and laws, 
 fails. It explains phenomena only by some physical antecedent 
 equally needing explanation ; as if one should account for the 
 music of a piano as caused by the keys, with no recognition of 
 the composer or the pianist. The deduction from such an hy- 
 pothesis would be that nature would disclose no rational direc- 
 tion and no rational beings; and the deduction would be contra- 
 dicted by the observed facts at every point. 
 
 In the theistic hypothesis, that the universe is grounded in 
 personal Reason and manifests it directing and energizing, and 
 in this alone, the contradictions disappear and the universe is 
 accounted for in its rational cause, in its existence in the unity 
 of a rational system, and in its progressive realization of rational 
 ideals and its existence for worthy rational ends. 
 
 Nature itself through all its changes reveals laws which never 
 change. If the universe was once nebulous matter, yet through 
 all the changes during uncounted ages until now its laws have 
 been unchanged. The laws of gravitation, of mechanics, of 
 light, heat and electricity, of chemical affinity, all determined 
 with mathematical exactness, have been persistently the same. 
 Thus nature gives us a symbol of God immanent in nature 
 through all changes; and more than a symbol; for nature, in its 
 unchanging principles, laws and types, expresses the unchanging 
 thought of God. And as nature reveals God, so God reveals 
 nature ; for we know the real significance of nature, only as we 
 know the infinite in the finite, the ideal in the physical, the 
 God in nature. As the diamond reveals the light that contin- 
 uously falls on it, so the light reveals the diamond. The dia- 
 mond would be little esteemed if estimated only by what is 
 known of it in the darkness. God is the light of the world, and 
 he knows little of the real significance of nature who knows it 
 only as nature and without God. So Jean Paul Richter strik- 
 ingly describes the immanence of God unchangeable in the ever- 
 changing flux of nature : " The Reason mirrors itself in the 
 world-stream, like the sunlight in the water-fall ; " the sunshine 
 unchanging in the stream, but the stream ever flowing. Thus 
 even in our scientific investigations of nature we are confronted 
 
294 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 everywhere with God : " Thou hast beset me behind and before, 
 and laid thine hand upon me. Whither shall I go from thy 
 Spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? " 
 
 VII. OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE EVIDENCE. The objec- 
 tions are of two classes : those against the evidence ; and those 
 against the legitimacy of the inference from it. 
 
 The principal objections against the evidence may be grouped 
 under three heads. 
 
 Some objections arise from isolating a single fact adduced in 
 the evidence and insisting that it alone does not prove a direct- 
 ing intelligence in nature. Theists by insisting on isolated and 
 even trivial instances have sometimes given occasion for such 
 objections. The whole force of these arises from considering a 
 single fact, and that perhaps a trivial one, in isolation, as if it 
 included the whole evidence. But the evidence is not in single 
 facts, but in processes, and in combinations of facts, and especially 
 in the unity of innumerable processes and combinations in nature 
 as a whole. One may laugh at the argument that we see the 
 goodness of God in the adaptation of the bark of cork-trees to be 
 made into stopples, and of eggs to be made into omelets. But 
 the fact that the world as a whole is adjusted to man as a fit 
 habitation, yielding to his skill and industry food, clothing and 
 shelter, and all manner of material, instruments and agencies for 
 the accomplishment of his ends, is certainly an evidence that it 
 is constituted by a directing intelligence for a reasonable end. 
 Even when a single object is adduced in evidence, as an eye, a 
 lily or a sparrow, it is found to involve the concurrence in unity 
 of many complicated agencies and processes, and to present in 
 the evidence the consilience of many lines' of thought. As we 
 extend our thought to larger and larger wholes, with the unity 
 of ever increasing complications, the evidence of intelligent di- 
 rection becomes irresistible to one who has the concrete facts 
 clear before his mind. And when we contemplate the cosmos as 
 a whole in the unity of a scientific system, orderly and uniform 
 under the law of continuity, evolving through ages of time in 
 progressively realizing a plan, and subserving successively higher 
 and higher ends till man appears, the evidence of intellectual 
 direction is as complete as it is conceivable the evidence of any 
 fact not immediately perceived can be. Goethe says : " The 
 teachers of whom I speak would think they lost their God if 
 they did not adore him who gave the ox horns to defend him- 
 self with. But let them permit me to venerate him who is so 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 295 
 
 great in the magnificence of his creation as, after making a 
 thousand-fold plants, to comprehend them all in one ; and after a 
 thousand-fold animals, to make that one who comprehends them 
 all man. Farther, they venerate him who gives the beast his 
 fodder and man meat and drink as much as he can enjoy. But I 
 worship him who has infused into the world such a power of 
 production that, if only the millionth part of it should pass into 
 life, the world must swarm with creatures to such a degree that 
 war, pestilence, fire and water cannot prevail against them. 
 This is my God." ! 
 
 Other objections to the evidence are founded on the allegation 
 that the very objects adduced in the evidence are discovered to 
 be imperfect. 
 
 For example, Professor Helmholtz alleges that the eye, as an 
 optical instrument, has defects, several of which he specifies. He 
 speaks of it as more defective than optical instruments made by 
 man. 2 
 
 The first reply is that the eye is superior to all optical instru- 
 ments made by man in the fact that it sees. Without an eye 
 applied to it every optical instrument in the world is useless. Not 
 one of them can see. The eye was made to see and adapted to 
 that end. Optical instruments are made for the eye to see 
 through, and are adapted to that end. If the eye were exactly 
 like the most perfect optical instrument made by man, it would 
 be a total failure for all the purposes of an eye. 
 
 A telescope is made to assist the eye in seeing distant objects; 
 a microscope to assist it in seeing minute objects close at hand. 
 Each is unfit for the purpose of the other. An eye is made to 
 see both near and remote objects, as the purposes of life may 
 require. In this also it is superior to any optical instrument. 
 The objection therefore is analogous to saying that a razor is 
 inferior to an axe because trees cannot be felled with it. 
 
 Further, the eye is a living organ in a living organism; it 
 must be delicately sensitive ; it must conform to the laws of the 
 organism and is affected by all its organic action ; it must be 
 adapted to all these organic conditions as well as to the mechan- 
 ical action of light, and to all its environment. Professor J. P. 
 Cooke says : u The capacity of self-adjustment, preserving always 
 a perfect achromatism and freedom from spherical aberration, 
 has never been reached in nearly the same degree by art." 3 An 
 
 1 Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, Trans, pp. 370, 371. 
 
 2 Popular Lect. on Scientific Subjects, pp. 212-228. 
 
 3 Religion and Chemistry, p. 231. 
 
 "F THE 
 
 WVEKSITY 
 
296 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 organ with all these varied adjustments and meeting successfully 
 all these conditions is a far more admirable instrument than a 
 telescope or microscope. And Professor Helmholtz himself says 
 that the defects of the eye are counteracted ; that " the adapta- 
 tion of the eye to its function is most complete, and is seen in 
 the very limits given to its defects;" and that "every useless 
 refinement would have rendered it more delicate and slower in 
 its use" as an eye. It appears therefore that the defects in the 
 eye, which have been so much talked of, do after all enhance the 
 evidence of a directing intelligence in its structure. It has been 
 only by long study that the defects in the primitive optical in- 
 struments have been step by step corrected. Now we find that 
 in the eye nature has already made these corrections. It evinces 
 not only the. highest skill directing its construction, but also 
 adapting it to the uses of a living organism and counteracting 
 the influence of defects found by all opticians to be inseparable 
 from the construction of optical instruments. 
 
 Other examples of objections of this kind are those founded on 
 the alleged waste of power and resources in effecting a result in 
 nature ; as in the multitude of germs which perish in comparison 
 with the number which grow into mature organisms. This, it is 
 said, is "like shooting a million loaded guns in a field to kill one 
 hare," or "spilling a gallon of wine in filling one wine-glass." 
 But in view of all the conditions and processes of the universe it 
 is not known that this prodigality involves waste. And it indi- 
 cates the affluence of resources, the inexhaustible prolificness of 
 the power energizing in nature and its fixed purpose to preserve 
 and perpetuate the species against all adverse agencies. 
 
 To all objections like these, founded on a supposed imperfec- 
 tion in a product or process of nature, there is an additional an- 
 swer. They assume that the perfection of a product or arrange- 
 ment is necessary in order to prove intelligent direction. This is 
 erroneous. The pictures drawn by the cave men on tusks of 
 ivory are far from perfect, the implements of the earlier stone- 
 age are of the rudest kind ; yet all scientists recognize in them 
 indisputable evidence of the workmanship of rational beings. 
 And it must be borne in mind that our present argument is not 
 intended to establish the existence of the absolute Being and his 
 manifestation of his power in nature, for these are already known ; 
 nor to complete the proof of his perfection, for in order to do this 
 it must be supplemented by other evidence. It is simply evi- 
 dence that the power manifested in nature is guided by intelli- 
 gence . 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 297 
 
 Further replies equally pertinent to these objections will be 
 found in the answers to those of the next group. 
 
 Objections of the third group assert that the theist does not 
 take note of all the facts bearing on the question ; they allege the 
 existence of evil in various forms as positive evidence against 
 theism. 
 
 These facts are of two classes. 
 
 The first is moral evil, that is, sin. Sin, as a fact, is fully ac- 
 counted for by the existence of finite free agents. Through their 
 freedom they determine by their own choice whether to do right 
 or wrong; and through their finiteness they are liable to err. 
 Since there can be no moral system without finite free agents, 
 there can be no moral system without the possibility of sin. The 
 objection therefore is not ultimately against the fact that some 
 beings sin, but against the possibility of sin ; therefore against 
 the existence of any moral system. It demands a system of finite 
 free agents in which sin is impossible. But this is demanding an 
 absurdity. To this it is replied by the objector that the answer 
 implies that sin is necessary in the constitution of things. But 
 this rejoinder is founded on the failure of the objector to discrim- 
 inate between the fact of sin and its possibility. The fact of sin 
 is not necessary in the constitution of things, because all moral 
 agents are free to do right ; if they do wrong it is of their own 
 free choice and not of any necessity. But the possibility of do- 
 ing wrong is inherent in the constitution of any moral system. 
 If then any one freely chooses the wrong, this does not impeach 
 the wisdom of constituting a moral system ; it only shows that 
 some one in the system has in his freedom made an unwise choice. 
 The reasons which justify and demand the existence of the moral 
 system remain unchanged. This is as far as we can here proceed 
 in the discussion of this side of the objection. The full consider- 
 ation of these reasons is possible only when we are prepared for 
 an examination of the moral system in its relation to the gov- 
 ernment of God, and in the light of his revelation of himself in 
 Christ. 
 
 The second class of facts adduced by the objector are those of 
 physical evil in various forms. This includes pain and suffering, 
 and all agencies and arrangements, all imperfections and mal-ad- 
 justments which are adapted to cause them. 
 
 In respect to these objections from the existence of evil in both 
 kinds it must be noted in the outset that the belief in the suprem- 
 acy of reason and of the moral law does not originate in any 
 
298 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 empirical estimate of the comparative amount of happiness and 
 misery in the world. This belief wells up spontaneously from 
 the rational constitution of man. In studying the evidence of 
 the existence of God we do not begin with stripping ourselves of 
 our consciousness of moral obligation, of the distinction between 
 right and wrong, and of the supreme authority of moral law. 1 
 Therefore if the theist discovers facts which he cannot explain 
 in harmony with the reign of righteousness, he is justified in his 
 faith that the moral ordering of the universe is supreme and that 
 these facts, when all is known, will be found explicable in har- 
 mony with it. In scientific investigation it is assumed that every 
 fact is capable of being apprehended in science, though at present 
 its scientific relations are not discovered. Just so and on the 
 ground of the same confidence in the supremacy and universality 
 of reason, we are justified in assuming that every fact can be ex- 
 plained in harmony with the universality and supremacy of the 
 practical Reason in its moral ordering of the world. The atheist 
 claims that he has the same right to assume that the evidences of 
 benevolent design and righteous rule in the world are explicable 
 in harmony with a supreme malevolence and injustice, and so to 
 rest in faith in the supremacy of these in face of facts which he 
 cannot explain in harmony with them. But he has this right 
 only if the reason of man and its necessary principles are un- 
 trustworthy, if its moral intuitions are illusions and there is no 
 essential distinction between right and wrong. 
 
 Before considering the objection from physical evil it may be 
 premised that the physical system being impersonal and not sub- 
 ject to moral law cannot reasonably be expected to furnish com- 
 plete evidence of the righteousness and benevolence of the abso- 
 lute Being manifested in it. To answer this objection fully we 
 must have also the knowledge of God obtained from his revela- 
 tion of himself in the constitution and history of man, and espe- 
 cially from his revelation in Christ. 
 
 It must also be premised that theism alone even attempts to 
 answer this objection. Whether theism is true or not, the im- 
 perfection and suffering designated as physical evil remain facts. 
 They must either be explained as consistent with the directing 
 agency of reason or it must be admitted that the universe is not 
 a reasonable system. The objection urges these facts to prove 
 that the universe is not reasonable. But this is an objection 
 against all science as really as against theism ; for all science rests 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, chap. ix. pp. 185-226. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 299 
 
 on the assumption that the universe is a reasonable system and 
 that everything in it is essentially intelligible and explicable to 
 reason. And whoever is intellectually troubled and perplexed 
 by the existence of physical evil as something demanding ex- 
 planation, therein reveals his own consciousness that the universe 
 must be a reasonable system. And the very existence of a rea- 
 sonable system implies a rational plan and therein also implies a 
 rational end. 
 
 As a reasonable explanation of imperfection and suffering 
 theism presents three principal lines of thought in answer to the 
 objection. 
 
 The first answer is, that imperfection, privation and liability 
 to evil are involved in finiteness. 
 
 The second answer is, that physical evil is subservient to the 
 education and development of man and thus to the ends of the 
 higher spiritual system. 
 
 The third answer is that, notwithstanding physical evil, the 
 physical system does reveal God's benevolent disposition to pro- 
 mote happiness. 
 
 First Answer : Imperfection, privation and liability to evil are 
 involved in the limitations of finite beings. And this line of 
 thought is applicable both to physical and moral evil. 
 
 In carrying out this line of thought, theism rests on two prin- 
 ciples. One is this : The universe is the expression in the finite 
 of the archetypal thought or ideal of the absolute Reason, which 
 is the ultimate ground of its existence ; the infinite can never be 
 fully expressed in the finite ; therefore the expression of the in- 
 finite in the universe must be progressive, and at every point of 
 time or bound of space it must be incomplete and thus imperfect. 
 The other is this : the progressive expression or realization of the 
 archetypal ideal is in the finite universe and through the action 
 of its finite agencies. 
 
 Physical science declares the same. The universe is in contin- 
 uous evolution from lower to higher grades of being ; the evolu- 
 tion goes on in the finite through the interaction of finite agen- 
 cies ; beings of a higher grade never appear until through this 
 interaction the stuff existing in a lower grade has been prepared 
 for them ; and the universe is found to be the progressive expres- 
 sion and realization of archetypal thought, because the human 
 mind applying itself to it in observation and thought takes from 
 it into itself its intellectual equivalent, as an imprint is taken 
 from type ; and the imprint is found to be science. 
 
300 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The objection before us contradicts in these respects both phys- 
 ical science and theism. It assumes that the universe is a com- 
 pleted product finished in all its parts, and that therefore every- 
 thing in it must be found to be perfect. It also assumes that the 
 universe is made what it is by an arbitrary fiat of almighty will, 
 which at every moment effects whatever its caprice decrees in en- 
 tire disconnection from all existing finite things and agencies and 
 from the existing conditions, powers and capacities of the universe. 
 
 Theism and physical science concur in setting aside these as- 
 sumptions, and thus entirely take away the foundation on which 
 the objection rests. 
 
 We look now at the first of these two principles. It is evident 
 that if God expresses his archetypal thought in the universe, it 
 must be expressed in the finite. Hence its expression as actually 
 made in the universe must at every point of time and bound of 
 space be incomplete and imperfect. The archetypal plan or ideal 
 eternal in the absolute Reason is perfect ; its realization in the 
 finite must be progressive ; the universe in which it is progres- 
 sively realized can never be finished and complete. The manifes- 
 tation of the infinite in it must go on progressively forever. Only 
 the eternal word, which God sees in himself as the archetype of 
 the universe, is the complete and perfect word of God. The 
 word of God is uttered in the universe ; but the utterance al- 
 ways falls short of the infinite fulness of meaning in the word to 
 be uttered. In the universe God is always uttering his incom- 
 municable name. So Dante heard in Paradise : 
 
 " He who a compass turned 
 
 On the world's outer verge, and who within it 
 
 Devised so much occult and manifest, 
 Could not the impress of his power so make 
 
 On all the universe, as that his Word 
 
 Should not remain in infinite excess. 
 And this makes certain that the first proud being, 
 
 Who was the paragon of every creature, 
 
 By not awaiting light fell immature. 
 And hence appears it, that each minor nature 
 
 Is scant receptacle unto that good 
 
 Which has no end, and by itself is measured. 
 In consequence our vision, which perforce 
 
 Must be some ray of that intelligence 
 
 With which all things whatever are replete, 
 Cannot in its own nature be PO potent, 
 
 That it shall not its origin discern 
 
 Far beyond that which is apparent to it. 
 Therefore into the justice sempiternal 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 301 
 
 The power of vision that your world receives, 
 As eye into the ocean penetrates ; 
 Which, though it sees the bottom near the shore, 
 Upon the deep perceives it not; and yet 
 'T is there, but it is hidden by the depth." 1 
 
 We look next at the second of the two principles. When the 
 universe has come into existence, it has a reality and efficiency 
 of its own which must determine the effects which it is possible 
 to bring to pass in it or through its agencies. If this were not 
 so, God by his action would break in on the fixed course of na- 
 ture ; or rather there would be no fixed course of nature ; God's 
 action would be entirely above it and independent of it, and the 
 universe would be a mere illusion, seeming to be and act without 
 really being and acting. But God's action is not above the uni- 
 verse but in it and upon it, not irruptive into it but through its 
 beings and powers, not a miracle-working but a continuous action 
 progressively developing the higher from the lower. The effect 
 produced by a power however great in a finite thing must be 
 commensurate with the capacity of the thing. No power can 
 put a gallon of water into a pint-measure, nor move a stone by 
 argument or persuasion, nor deprive a free will of its freedom by 
 chains and fetters. And the effect produced by any power 
 through a finite agent must be commensurate with the power of 
 the agent. No power can produce an effect by a moving body 
 greater than is commensurate with its mass and velocity. 
 
 These two principles are a basis for the explanation of phys- 
 ical imperfection and suffering consistently with the supremacy 
 of reason in the universe. 
 
 The limitation of a finite being is imperfection, negatively as 
 the absence of good, positively as liability to evil. A mouse is 
 negatively imperfect in that, while it has a certain size, swiftness, 
 force and other qualities which are good, it lacks all higher de- 
 grees of those qualities. A stone lacks life ; a plant lacks feel- 
 ing ; a brute lacks reason. A finite being is positively imperfect 
 because it is liable to be overcome by the stronger. Through all 
 nature the law is that a weaker force must give way before the 
 stronger. Hence in all vegetable and animal life are the struggle 
 for existence and the survival of the fittest. So all beings on 
 earth are subject to overpowering cosmic agencies, to winter's 
 cold and summer's heat, to lightning, tornadoes and earthquakes, 
 to the miasma of pestilence, which no human power can resist 
 and no human skill escape. 
 
 1 Paradise, Canto xix. 40-63, Longfellow's Translation. 
 
302 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 This imperfection, negative and positive, is sometimes called 
 metaphysical imperfection to distinguish it from moral. Finite- 
 ness does not necessarily involve pain and suffering. These are 
 occasional and exceptional. But the liability to pain is insepa- 
 rable from a sentient organization and is an imperfection. And 
 as to the absence of good, in common speech we quite as often 
 characterize a being by its deficiency of good as by its possession 
 of it. A babe is called weak. Yet it has strength. A boy is 
 strong in comparison with the babe, but weak in comparison with 
 a man ; and the man is weak in comparison with an elephant, 
 the elephant in comparison with a steam-engine and so on indefi- 
 nitely. Of every finite being it is true that its strength is weak- 
 ness. 
 
 This imperfection is inseparable from finiteness. In mechanics 
 what is gained in power is lost in time. Light, if obstructed, 
 must cast a shadow, and if absent there must be darkness. Nerves 
 sentient to pleasure must be sentient to pain. Organic life must 
 be liable to death. Where one body is another cannot be. If it 
 is asked why the constitution of things and the course and laws 
 of nature might not be changed, the answer is that, however 
 changed, the universe and all in it must still be finite and there- 
 fore incomplete and imperfect. 
 
 The greater are the variety and range of the capacity for good, 
 the greater the variety and range of the liability to evil. A stone 
 cannot die ; a plant cannot suffer ; a brute cannot sin. 
 
 It is objected that God created the material of the universe 
 and therefore is himself responsible for its refractoriness under 
 his working. This objection goes back to the error that the ulti- 
 mate ground of the universe is an almighty and capricious will. 
 It is of no force against the theistic doctrine that the universe is 
 grounded in absolute Reason, and no power, not even almighti- 
 ness, can either create or annul any of its eternal principles or 
 give reality to that which contradicts them and is absurd. The 
 distinction between the absolute and the conditioned, the infinite 
 and the finite, rests on a primitive and constituent principle of 
 reason, which no power of will can create or annul. God there- 
 fore did not create it. He has simply created finite beings in 
 accordance with that eternal distinction. The impossibility oi 
 causing an effect, in a finite being or through a finite agency, 
 greater than its capacity is not created by any fiat of God's will. 
 
 The objection therefore involves the absurdity that God has no 
 right to create a finite being ; nor any being except an absolute 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 303 
 
 or unconditioned being. The objection is against the finiteness 
 of the creature, not against any particular degree of limitation, 
 whether more or less. 1 
 
 It follows that no degree of physical limitation or imperfection 
 is a valid objection against the supremacy of reason in the uni- 
 verse or against the moral perfection of God ; because the objec- 
 tion is not against the degree of limitation, but against finiteness 
 in the creature. It demands that every creature must be equal 
 with God. 
 
 Hence the finiteness of a creature, whatever its limitation may 
 be, is no just ground of complaint against the reasonableness of 
 the creation or the equity of God in creating. If a star-fish could 
 complain that it is not a trout, the trout might as well complain 
 that it is not a horse, the horse that it is not a man, the man 
 that he is not an angel, the angel that he is not a thousand times 
 greater. If I may complain that I live but seventy years, Me- 
 thuselah might with equal propriety complain that he lived but 
 a thousand ; and when told that I am immortal I might as well 
 complain that I was not brought into being a million of years 
 before. In their real significance these all are forms of the ab- 
 surd complaint that God did not make all creatures gods by one 
 instantaneous fiat of his will. And this limitation of God's reve- 
 lation of himself in the finite is not an imperfection of God, but 
 results from the perfection of absolute Reason regulating all the 
 divine action. 
 
 Here we see the significance and the wisdom of the Syrophoa- 
 nician woman's saying which our Lord commended : " Truth, 
 Lord, yet the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters' 
 table.'' ' 
 
 It is unnecessary to delay to consider in detail the various forms 
 of physical imperfection and evil which have been urged in ob- 
 jections ; such as the existence of pain and suffering, the fact of 
 death, the existence of carnivorous animals with weapons of as- 
 sault and defense. If all animals were immortal the number en- 
 joying life on earth would be immeasurably reduced. If all were 
 graminivorous there would be a diminution of the number which 
 the earth could support. So in all details, the removal of the 
 
 1 Using the word evil in the sense of metaphysical imperfection, we may say 
 with Biedermann that " it belongs essentially to the finite universe. ... A 
 universe without it is no longer a universe distinct from God, but would be 
 nothing but the universe taken back again into the absolute being of God." 
 Biedermann, Dogmatik, 723, p. 650. 
 
304 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 limitation at one point would make necessary an equivalent lim- 
 itation somewhere else. 
 
 The same principle answers all objections constituting what 
 Professor Haeckel has called dysteleology, from the existence in 
 living beings of rudimentary organs, simulating organs useful in 
 other organisms, but useless, so far as known, in the organism in 
 which they are found in their rudimentary forms ; from the ex- 
 istence of organs wasting away from disuse ; from the existence 
 of organs not only useless but dangerous to the organism in which 
 they exist ; an example of which is the cul-de-sac or pocket known 
 as the vermiform appendix in the intestines of man. As it has 
 no outlet, a hard substance slipping in may cause inflammation 
 and death. To this class of objections it may be answered that 
 some of these are known to be of use to the organism; in respect 
 to others there is evidence establishing more or less probability 
 that they are of use ; at least one writer, for example, has at- 
 tempted to prove that the vermiform appendix is useful. 1 If 
 they are organs wasting by disuse under new conditions, they 
 were useful in the former conditions ; and if under changed con- 
 ditions they are no longer useful, it is for the good of the organ- 
 ism that they should waste away ; and this wasting will not be 
 effected by a miraculous fiat of God, but by a process of nature. 
 It may be added that, if Darwinism is true, organs which per- 
 sistently survive must be useful to the organism ; otherwise their 
 continued existence would be contrary to the law of the survival 
 of the fittest. It may further be replied that the physico-theo- 
 logical argument does not rest exclusively on the discovery of 
 final causes ; but also on the discovery in nature of rational sig- 
 nificance, of order and law, of ideals of perfection. If, further, 
 we consider the whole system of things progressively realizing an 
 archetypal plan in and through finite beings and agencies, then 
 these dysteleological facts may be mere incidents in the develop- 
 ment of the system and reveal merely the necessary limitations 
 of the finite. If the universe is to develop higher and higher 
 orders of life in and through finite agencies, then the transition 
 from lower to higher forms must be expected to reveal traces of 
 former organs and functions now passing into disuse ; and this 
 would be no impeachment of the reasonableness and wisdom of 
 the system. Otherwise the transition must be made by a miracle 
 transcending all finite agencies. 
 
 The same principle answers all objections that the universe is 
 1 Paget, Hunterian Lectures. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 305 
 
 imperfect because at any point of time we can conceive of a bet- 
 ter ; that the evolution is not farther advanced ; that cosmic pro- 
 cesses are so slow. 
 
 It may be noted in passing that these principles are also appli- 
 cable to questions arising in the study of Christianity. The type 
 of the kingdom of God on earth is an organic growth ; first the 
 blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. It has succes- 
 sive dispensations, each lasting for ages. Its movement, like that 
 of the cosmic agencies, is slow. We ask why Christ did not come 
 earlier and why Christianity has not already transformed society 
 into the kingdom of righteousness. The answer is that God is 
 acting on and in finite free agents and through their limited and 
 imperfect agency ; and that in no other way is it possible to set 
 up a kingdom of God and to renovate, train and educate sinful 
 men to be its citizens. Christianity emphasizes the imperfection 
 of man's present condition ; but holds forth the never changing 
 promise that in the progress of Christ's kingdom the future shall 
 be better than the past, and progressively fulfils it from age to 
 age, and from dispensation to dispensation. 
 
 All right reasoning on this subject must recognize the funda- 
 mental fact that the universe is not governed by capricious al- 
 mightiness, but by reason illuminating and directing the almight- 
 iness which always acts in harmony with it. The universe is a 
 system constituted under principles and laws of reason which no 
 power can annul; it is composed of innumerable finite beings 
 that interact in the most intricate complications ; nothing exists 
 and acts of or for itself alone ; and at every period of time the 
 universe and everything in it are the complex result of the inter- 
 action of these beings through the ages. In this system almighty 
 power regulated by reason cannot work faster nor effect results 
 greater than are commensurate with the limits or finiteness of 
 the system and ordered under its laws. A power regulated by 
 reason acts always under the laws of reason. A locomotive con- 
 structed and guided by reason does not put forth its power at 
 random, running wild and terrific. It follows with regulated 
 speed the lines and curves of the rails which intelligence has laid 
 down, it stops at stations as rational guidance demands ; and so 
 with comparative slowness reaches its goal and accomplishes its 
 rational design. Or if stationary, it does not put forth the full 
 power pent up in it, which would be destructive ; but guides and 
 attenuates it with the utmost nicety and delicacy, drawing out a 
 wire as fine as a hair, cutting, bending and inserting the teeth of 
 
 20 
 
306 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 a card, twisting a braid or a fringe. So in nature almighty power, 
 acting under the guidance of reason, wields the worlds and moves 
 them with precision and continuity in their orbits, and also 
 etches the flowerlike tracery of the frost, models the delicate 
 snow-flakes in varied forms of beauty, and makes the nicest ad- 
 justments of vegetable and animal organisms. This regulated and 
 restrained and skilful action, ordered under law and adapted to 
 the limits of finite things, characterizes all God's action in the 
 universe. 
 
 " The way of ancient ordinance, though it winds, 
 Is yet no devious way. Straightforward goes 
 The lightning's path, and straight the fearful path 
 Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid, 
 Shattering that it may reach and shattering what it reaches. 
 
 " My son, the road the human being travels, 
 That on which BLESSING comes and goes, doth follow 
 The river's course, the valley's playful windings, 
 Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines, 
 Honoring the holy bounds of property ; 
 And thus secure, though late, leads to its ends." l 
 
 And such is the action of God in the universe, because he is a 
 rational being ; because he has created the universe in accordance 
 with reason, and it thus has a rational constitution and laws 
 which he cannot reasonably change; because all creatures are 
 limited in finiteness which power cannot annul; and because in 
 it are personality and freedom with rights which he is bound in 
 reason to respect. This gives a reasonable ground for explaining 
 imperfections and physical evil incidental to the finiteness of the 
 creature and to the progressive development of the system, with- 
 out impeaching the perfection of its plan and design. The ob- 
 jection has force only against the conception of God as arbitrary 
 and capricious Almightiness unregulated by reason. 
 
 Second Answer: Physical evil is subservient to the education 
 and development of man and thus to the ends of the higher spir- 
 itual system. Theism, recognizing the two systems, the physical 
 and the spiritual or moral, finds the unity of the two in one all- 
 comprehending system through the subordination of the former 
 to the latter. 
 
 The facts included under the name, physical evil, remain facts, 
 whether God exists or not. The limitation essential in finiteness 
 sufficiently accounts for them as facts incidental to the physical 
 1 Schiller, Piccolomini, act i. scene iv. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. SOT 
 
 system. But if we ask whether any end is accomplished by them, 
 which makes it worth while that this system, with the evil inci- 
 dental in it, should exist, the physical system itself presents no 
 adequate answer. The question now arises : Is there any higher 
 system to which the physical system is subservient ; and is the 
 existence of the so-called physical evil further accounted for to- 
 the reason by finding that it accomplishes worthy ends in that 
 higher system ? This subserviency of the physical to the spirit^ 
 ual is recognized by theism as a fact. 
 
 From the foregoing considerations it is already evident that, if 
 the universe exists for any reasonable end, that end cannot be 
 the immediate gratification of appetite and desire nor the mere 
 quantity of enjoyment empirically measured ; but must be an end 
 approved by reason as worthy of pursuit by rational beings and 
 estimated by reason as having worth according to its unchanging 
 truths, laws and ideals. Also the physical system by its all-per- 
 vading impersonality turns the thought to the existence of a 
 higher system presenting higher ends. Of this higher system 
 man has knowledge in his consciousness of himself and his ac- 
 quaintance with his fellow-men as rational persons. A being 
 existing solely in the physical system could have no knowledge 
 of a higher. But man, from his superior position as a rational 
 moral agent, looks on nature and in its all-pervading imperson- 
 ality sees that it is not the highest. He cannot find in it what 
 satisfies the intellectual demands of reason ; for it cannot show 
 within itself either the cause, the law or the end of its existence. 
 No more can it satisfy the moral and spiritual demands of reason. 
 Man knows himself subject to the law of love and so belonging 
 to a moral system. Nature does indeed reveal the fact that it is 
 a system in which nothing exists for itself alone. Thus it shows 
 in itself an analogy to the law of love. But pervaded with the 
 energy of physical force, everywhere and always in it the one law 
 is that the stronger must prevail. Thus the man finds himself 
 in contrast with the physical system, and in that very contrast 
 his mind turns to another and higher system. Unable to show 
 within itself its cause, or its law, or the end for which it exists, 
 unable to satisfy either the intellectual, the moral or the spiritual 
 demands of reason, it by its very deficiency points unmistakably 
 to a higher system on which it depends and to whose ends it is 
 subservient. 
 
 It is also a fact noticed already in presenting the evidence, that 
 the highest order of beings produced on the earth is man. The 
 
308 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 evolution has gone on until it has issued on this planet in the ap- 
 pearance of a being who knows himself to be a rational, free, 
 moral agent. The impersonal, by the action of a power above it, 
 ?has blossomed into the rational. The rational and moral system 
 ihas actually appeared and men know themselves as existing in it. 
 Since this is the highest result of all cosmic agencies, which has 
 thus far appeared on earth, we have seen that it is reasonable to 
 infer that the realization of this is the end to which these agen- 
 cies in the lower spheres of their action have been directed, and 
 its progressive development the end to which they are still sub- 
 servient. In a universe of inanimate matter there would be no 
 beings who could know God, or be the objects of his love and the 
 recipients of his blessing. There would be no end for which such 
 a universe could be rationally conceived to exist. The theistic 
 hypothesis is, that God created rational beings to be the recipi- 
 ents of his blessings and of the overflowing fulness of his love. 
 This commends itself to the reason as a worthy end for which the 
 physical system exists and to which it is always subservient. 
 Since all the resources and energies' of the inorganic world are 
 laid under contribution to the ends of organic life, it is not sur- 
 prising if the whole physical system is subordinated to the uses 
 and ends of rational and moral beings and of the system to which 
 they belong. 
 
 It is also found to be a fact that the physical system is fitted to 
 the support, education and development of rational beings and 
 does subserve that end. 
 
 It is evident from the observation of the physical system that 
 its dominant end is not primarily and simply the avoidance of 
 pain and the multiplication of pleasure. It is designed rather to 
 develop men to realize the highest possibilities of their being. 
 Parents cannot train their children to their highest power and 
 best character by coaxing them with sugar-plums. And God 
 does not train his children by coaxing them with sugar-plums. 
 He trains them to develop them, to make them strong, wise and 
 good. " Fortiter amat." Reason approves of this end ; .for it 
 its in judgment on pleasures and their sources and approves or 
 condemns them as worthy or unworthy of a rational being. The 
 good which God aims to realize for men is the perfection of their 
 being, their harmony with the constitution and laws of the uni- 
 verse, and such joys as result from these. 1 
 
 The physical system is fitted to promote this training and edu- 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, chap. xi. pp. 256-285. 
 
GOD EEVEALED IN NATURE. 309 
 
 cation. It is the sphere in which rational persons live and do 
 their work ; and thus in strenuous endeavor, in surmounting dif- 
 ficulties, in getting knowledge of the laws and possession of the 
 powers and resources of nature, in resisting temptation, in bear- 
 ing up under disappointment and sorrow, in self-control, in doing 
 Christian work for the needy, in standing for truth and righteous- 
 ness and God, they are trained, disciplined and developed to bring 
 out their hidden powers and all in them that is divine. It is the 
 sphere in which the kingdom of God is growing up, first the 
 blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. 
 
 The so-called physical evil is itself a means of discipline, train- 
 ing and education, by which the man's rational and spiritual pow- 
 ers are developed and strengthened, and he is advanced toward 
 his perfection as an individual and toward the highest civilization- 
 of society. 
 
 The facts which are regarded as natural evil are incentives 
 which call the energies into action. Such are hunger, thirst, cold 
 and other imperative needs. Their law is imperative ; work or 
 die. 
 
 They train to prudence and self-control. But for pain the 
 hand might lie in the fire till it was consumed, and the man be 
 unconscious of it. The evil is not the pain, but it is the pain- 
 lessness of the burning flesh. It is objected that pain does not 
 give warning beforehand of the approach of danger. No one ex- 
 periences pain when he breathes malaria or takes the measles or 
 the yellow fever. But because it does not do every thing is no 
 proof that it does not do any thing. It warns of present injury 
 and incites to prudence and self-control thereafter. 
 
 It is a discipline and development of the faculties. Labor in- 
 volves expenditure of energy ; it is fatiguing, sometimes painful. 
 Yet it is work which develops and strengthens the powers. With- 
 out work man would be morally, intellectually and physically 
 good for nothing. But nature imposes on us the law that we 
 must work for what we get. She offers her treasures to us with 
 one hand and fights us off with the other. It is only by long and 
 hard study that man slowly discovers her secrets, and only by 
 skill and labor after many failures that he gets possession of her 
 resources and the means of controlling her powers in his service. 
 But this very study and labor develop and strengthen him, make 
 him many-sided, capable of higher attainments and joys, and pro- 
 mote his civilization. 
 
 Physical evil is also a discipline purifying and developing moral 
 
310 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 and spiritual character. The natural wants of the family, the 
 helplessness of infancy, the presence of sickness and suffering 
 draw out our compassion and sympathy. Disappointment and 
 loss, adversity and sorrow draw out our moral and spiritual aspi- 
 rations and strengthen our moral purpose. 
 
 " Who never ate his bread in sorrow, 
 Who never spent the darksome hours 
 Weeping and watching for the morrow, 
 He knows you not, ye higher Powers." 1 
 
 It follows that an imperfect world is adapted to the training 
 and development of imperfect beings, and a progressive world to 
 the training and development of progressive beings. 
 
 It must be added that a considerable part of the suffering of 
 man is the result of violation of the moral law. Such are the 
 bodily infirmity and disease caused by drunkenness, gluttony and 
 licentiousness, the want and distress consequent on improvidence 
 and idleness. Evils thus caused are no proofs that God is not 
 good, but are penalties for vice and deterrents from its commis- 
 sion. 
 
 " Pain in man 
 Bears the high mission of the flail and fan." 
 
 To complete this line of thought it is important to notice that 
 the wellbeing of man in the spiritual system is attainable only in 
 the life of love, realized for the individual in his own personal 
 character and life and for society in the kingdom of Christ on 
 earth. And love in its essence involves the spirit of self-sacrifice 
 or self-devotement in bringing men into harmony with God in 
 his righteousness and grace, in maintaining his truth and law and 
 thereby promoting universal wellbeing in the kingdom of Christ. 
 But sacrificial love in a human being can reveal itself only in ser- 
 vice to others, which involves self -privation and, it may be, posi- 
 tive suffering. Hence Christ as the ideal man, in whom God 
 comes into humanity to reconcile the world unto himself, reveals 
 the divine love, under the conditions and limitations of man, in 
 his humiliation, suffering and death for men. Thereby in the 
 presence of the selfishness dominant among men and in the act 
 of redeeming men therefrom, he reveals, asserts and maintains 
 the law of love in its unchanging and universal supremacy and 
 inviolability. Here is the highest revelation of the subordination 
 of privation and suffering to the highest ends of the spiritual 
 system. And here, from a new point of view, we catch a glimpse 
 1 Wilhelm Meister, bk. ii. chap. 13. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 311 
 
 of that superiority to conditions and limitations which we have 
 repeatedly noticed in the personality even of finite beings. For 
 this self-sacrifice in privation and suffering for others is of the 
 essence of love, in which the man realizes at once his own high- 
 est good and the highest good of all in the kingdom of Christ. 
 We can only allude to this here. Its full elucidation must be 
 postponed till we study the revelation of God in Christ reconcil- 
 ing the world unto himself. In the light of that revelation we 
 may apprehend the significance of that central fact in human his- 
 tory that it is only he who was preeminently the man of sorrows 
 and acquainted with grief, in whom God comes to man and re- 
 veals the nature of his divine love, and who brings men to God 
 and transforms human society into his kingdom of righteousness 
 and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Third Answer : Notwithstanding physical evil, we find on 
 examining the physical system that it is promotive not only of 
 development but also of happiness. 
 
 Here the first thought to be considered is, that the perfection 
 of a being and its harmony with the constitution and laws of the 
 universe, that is, with its environment, constitute its wellbeing 
 or true good. In proportion as, under the discipline of life, how- 
 ever painful and trying for the time, a man is developed toward 
 the perfection of his being, he becomes capable of purer, greater 
 and more varied enjoyment. The lower joy lost is replaced by 
 joy of a higher character. As Paul describes his experience, the 
 loss is gain. 
 
 Besides this there is a keen strong joy in work and achieve- 
 ment, in conflict and conquest, in surmounting difficulties and 
 resisting evil. There is joy in the assertion of one's personality 
 against adverse circumstances, in standing strong and unsubdued 
 in the endurance of pain, in the consciousness of rectitude in a 
 firm and vigorous doing of duty and accomplishing of work under 
 obloquy, poverty and suffering. There is joy in suffering itself 
 when incurred in prosecuting a worthy work. There is joy in 
 the self-sacrifice of love to God and man, even though leading to 
 a martyr's stake ; joy which may mount to exultation and tri- 
 umph. Here is a strong, manly joy, stronger and purer and 
 nobler than any which a life of indulgence, luxurious ease and 
 self-gratification can give. No history presents more numerous 
 or more noble examples of this sublime joy, of men and women 
 rejoicing that they are counted worthy to suffer in support of 
 truth and righteousness, than the history of Christianity. 
 
312 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 This is not mere theory ; it is fact attested in the common life 
 of man. It is in these acts of energy and mastery that a man 
 feels his life to the utmost, that he feels its highest capacity and 
 intensity, and is exhilarated in the highest consciousness of 
 power. In vacation men find recreation in athletic achievements, 
 in risking life and limb in climbing mountains, in yachting to the 
 arctic seas, in tramping through forests, sleeping on the ground, 
 hunting and fishing, putting off the comforts of civilization and 
 enduring the discomforts of savage life ; and all for the exhil- 
 aration and enjoyment of it. Men propose the attainment of 
 release from labor and care, and the enjoyment of unbroken 
 peace and luxurious ease ; they hope for a time when they can 
 live not to minister but to be ministered unto. At last they get 
 riches ; the end toiled for through long years is attained ; but it 
 only disappoints them. They are oppressed with ennui ; for the 
 first time life becomes tasteless, monotonous, wearisome. Hence 
 it is that men, after getting riches, continue hard at work in busi- 
 ness and risk their gains in new enterprises ; it is not necessarily 
 through covetousness, but rather through the radical impulse to 
 exert their powers, through the necessity of action and achieve- 
 ment to the highest consciousness of life. So Carlyle truly says : 
 " It is a calumny to say that men are roused to heroic actions by 
 ease, hope of pleasure, recompense sugar-plums of any kind in 
 this world or the next. In the meanest mortal there lies some- 
 thing nobler. ... It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble 
 and true things and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a 
 God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show 
 him the way to do that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a 
 hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is seduced by ease. 
 Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements 
 that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, 
 you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations." 1 
 
 The theory that the universe exists to pour enjoyment into the 
 passive capacity of the soul, to make men happy by the gratifica- 
 tion of appetites and selfish desires, issues logically in pessimism. 
 The gratification of a selfish desire like covetousness or ambition^ 
 is but fuel to the flame. The desire grows by what it feeds on. 
 In that way it is impossible, for man to attain a satisfying life ; 
 the heart becomes but a nest of insatiate and stinging reptiles, 
 and life is not worth living. It is only in love to God and man, 
 in the " noble deeds and daring high " of self-devoting service^ 
 1 Hero-Worship, p. 237, ed. 1858. 
 
GOD KEVEALED IN NATURE. 313 
 
 that man finds the true worth and imperishable blessedness of 
 life, the fountain of living water opened within him, not flowing 
 in, but flowing forth unto everlasting life. 
 
 This aspect of life and its enjoyment is commonly overlooked 
 both by those who urge and those who answer the objection 
 founded on physical evil. When this is taken into account the 
 force of the objection is broken. If the world were so constituted 
 that happiness came only in a life of indolence and ease, of self-in- 
 dulgence and being ministered unto, pessimism would have been 
 the only true theory of the universe. On the contrary we live in 
 a rugged world and must work to subdue and possess it. But the- 
 ism makes the significance of it plain. Our lot in the world is 
 in harmony with our largest receptive capacities, our grandest 
 powers and our best impulses ; it is fitted to unfold all that is 
 best in us, and to inspire us to seek and to enable us to attain all 
 that makes life worth living. God has endowed us with reason 
 and free will, with conscience, energy and courage, with spiritual 
 capacities, aspirations and possibilities; he has given us free ac- 
 cess to him for inspiration, invigoration and support. And he 
 puts us in conditions which incessantly demand from us the exer- 
 tion of spiritual power rising above and controlling the fleshly in 
 us and the earthly about us ; which demand love, faith, hope, 
 courage, and ever renewed approach to the Spirit of God for fresh, 
 inspiration, guidance and spiritual power. Thus the very condi- 
 tions which limit us are the means of arousing and concentrating 
 our energies, developing our capacities and powers, directing our 
 action wisely to right ends, forming in us godlike characters, and 
 realizing the highest possibilities of our being. 
 
 A second consideration in this answer to the objection is, that 
 the laws and arrangements of nature are good. The evil comes 
 from disregarding them. And certainly the design of the Author 
 of nature must be inferred from its laws and arrangements, not 
 from evil incidental to the disregard of them. For the very rea- 
 son that the laws are good, the disregard of them must bring 
 evil. Because the laws are good, it is wise and right in the Au- 
 thor of nature to sustain them. If any one disregards them it 
 would not be wise or right to suspend the law to prevent injury 
 to one who disregards it. Hence it is the same arrangement of 
 nature which occasions evil to him who disregards the law and 
 good to him whose action is in harmony with it. The nervous- 
 system, which is the source of all the physical enjoyment of 
 health, is the same which, disordered by drunkenness, occasions 
 
314 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 all the horrors of delirium - tremens. The laws which insure 
 health to the community that conforms with them, occasion dis- 
 ease and pestilence to the community that disregards them by 
 neglecting drainage, cleanliness, ventilation and other requisites 
 to healthy life. Nature itself reveals the immutability and in- 
 violability of law and the dependence thereon of the universal 
 wellbeing. 
 
 A third point to be noticed in this answer is the adaptation of 
 the several species to their environment, and the approach of indi- 
 viduals to the ideal of their species as perfect in its kind ; so that 
 the constitution of a creature with all its limitation is best for it 
 in the circumstances of its existence. It would be no blessing to 
 an oyster, in its environment, to have the keen senses of a dog. 
 This would follow from the theory of evolution ; because the 
 modification and origination of species are supposed to be effected 
 by the environment ; and so far as they are so, they must be 
 adapted to it. Evolution does not destroy the force of our reply 
 to the objection. It only reveals a plan, receiving accomplish- 
 ment through all time, to secure the adaptation of the species to 
 its environment, and thus to secure the widest range of life and 
 the highest attainable good for the several species in the circum- 
 stances in which they live. It must be added that no brute is 
 aware of its limitations and discontented with its nature and en- 
 vironment, because, not being endowed with reason, it cannot 
 look over its own limits into any higher condition and compare 
 itself with beings of a higher order. 
 
 It is objected that with the progressive modification of their 
 environment species become extinct. But this merely refers us 
 back to the finiteness of the universe and its consequent imper- 
 fection and progressiveness. In any stage of its evolution after 
 it has become capable of sustaining sentient life, it is filled with 
 living beings adapted to it and of as high an order as could live 
 under the conditions then existing. As the world passes to a 
 higher stage, these, whose organisms are not adapted to the new 
 conditions, disappear and beings of a higher order succeed. The 
 gradual extinction of a species in this way is no more incompati- 
 ble with the goodness of God than their death in any other way. 
 It is simply incidental to the limitation and imperfection insepa- 
 rable from the finite, and to the necessary progressiveness of the 
 physical system. And it is certainly no injustice to the myriads 
 of supposable plesiosauri, megalosauri, pentacrinites, and the like, 
 that they have never been brought into existence. Certainly no 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 315 
 
 one will urge that, if the earth had remained till now inhabited 
 only by creatures of this low order, it would prove the wisdom 
 and goodness of God more than it does advanced to what it now 
 is. In the future, when man's selection shall have superseded 
 natural selection, noxious animals, insects and plants will disap- 
 pear. But that disappearance will be incidental to the progress 
 of the cosmos as a whole, in which the inferior and imperfect 
 must give place to that which is superior and better. 
 
 A fourth point to be noticed is the evident design in nature to 
 multiply life and its joys. The evidence of intelligent and be- 
 nevolent direction in nature does not require us to show that 
 everything exists for the welfare of man. In the bounty of the 
 universal Father there is provision both for man and beast. " He 
 giveth to the beast his food and to the young ravens when they 
 cry. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle and herb for 
 the service of man." The design is evident to fill the world as 
 full as it can hold with life and enjoyment. While it is a sphere 
 for the action of rational beings and opens to them the possibility 
 of attaining their true and highest good in the realizing of spirit- 
 ual ends, there is infused into every lower condition of matter, 
 not yet fitted to be the vehicle of rational intelligence, every 
 grade of sensitive life of which it is capable. As in a pile of can- 
 non - balls the interstices may be filled with smaller balls, and 
 again with musket bullets, and again with shot, and again with 
 sand, so all the interstices of the world are filled with successively 
 lower and lower forms of life so that its utmost capacity for life 
 and its joys may be filled. 
 
 It has already been said that the evidence of directive intelli- 
 gence, and especially of love, found in nature alone, is incom- 
 plete. But in nature we find evidence of directive intelligence. 
 And the evidence of subordination to spiritual ends, of progres- 
 sive realization of results of higher and higher order, and of mul- 
 tiplied adjustments and arrangements productive of happiness at 
 least precludes the belief that the directing power is malignant. 
 And a rational being, who knows moral distinctions and feels 
 moral obligation in his own conscience, must find in nature pre- 
 ponderant evidence that the power directive in it is righteous 
 and benevolent. 
 
 This is confirmed by the fact that from the observation of the 
 world men in all ages of civilization and of diverse philosophical 
 opinions have agreed in the conclusion, that the law of love is 
 supreme and universal ; " that the real nature of the universe is 
 
316 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 such that it warrants on our part unlimited love, and absolute 
 trust that the highest moral nature is nearest in accord with the 
 truth of things." 1 Thus not merely from the intuitions of our 
 rational and moral constitution, but also from the observation of 
 nature, we are justified in the faith that physical evils which we 
 cannot explain are, in some way not yet perceived by us, in har- 
 mony with the righteousness and benevolence of God. 
 
 VIII. OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE VALIDITY OF THE INFER- 
 ENCE. First to be noticed is the objection that order and law 
 prove the absence of will. Comte often appeals to this as a sort 
 of axiom ; and it is commonly urged as an objection entirely re- 
 futing the theistic inference from law and order in nature. The 
 objection is founded on a gross misrepresentation of theism. It 
 falsely assumes that according to theistic teaching the ultimate 
 ground of the universe is the almightiness of arbitrary and capri- 
 cious will ; that God is merely a power that arbitrarily breaks in 
 on the course of nature and is entirely exempt from all law. 
 Hence it infers that so far as the reign of law and order is found 
 in nature, God is excluded. So Leon Dumont says : " If the ex- 
 istence of a superior intelligence in the world can be demonstrated 
 by physical proofs, it is not by the spectacle of order and regu- 
 larity, which indicate on the contrary the absence of any dispos- 
 ing force, but really by abnormal and contradictory facts, in a 
 word by miracles." And A. Elley Finch in a Discourse on the 
 Inductive Philosophy before the Sunday Lecture Society, says : 
 " The scientific sense of the term Law is entirely opposite to that 
 of will. . . . Will, in the only intelligible sense, or of which we can 
 have any knowledge, namely, human will, is vengeful, arbitrary, 
 variable and capricious." Professor Tyndall in his Belfast Ad- 
 dress said : " Science demands the radical extirpation of caprice,, 
 and the absolute reliance upon law in nature." Immediately be- 
 fore he had said: "The state of things to be displaced may be 
 gathered from a passage of Euripides quoted by Hume, ' There 
 is nothing in the world ; no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss 
 all into confusion, mix everything with its reverse, that all of us, 
 from our ignorance and uncertainty, may pay them the more wor- 
 ship and reverence.' " And J. S. Mill says of God : " If it was 
 his will that men should know that they themselves and the world 
 are his work, he, being omnipotent, had only to will that they 
 should be aware of it." 2 That is, he could will knowledge into 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 212-224. 
 
 2 Three Essays on Religion, p. 179. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 317 
 
 men's minds without any action of their minds ; and equally, it 
 would seem, without their having any minds. He could as well 
 will knowledge into a stone. If not, he is not almighty. From 
 ithe same misapprehension arises the alleged dilemma : " Either 
 ,the world is a machine left by God to run of itself, or else it is a 
 .machine so clumsily constructed that its maker must stand by 
 and move its wheels." Hence the impression that so soon as we 
 know the laws according to which nature goes on we have no 
 more need to believe in God ; so soon as we know how a thing is 
 made we can no longer believe that it had any maker. Hence 
 " Copernicus is represented as the man who has withdrawn the 
 seat from under the ancient Hebrew and Christian deity," and 
 we are told that u Newton robbed the heavens of their gods and 
 disenchanted the world." 1 
 
 But the objection, being founded on a total misapprehension, 
 is of no force against theism rightly understood. This teaches 
 that the ultimate ground of the universe is not will alone, but 
 reason ; that God is Reason energizing ; that his will is a rational 
 will, not acting capriciously but in the light of reason and in har- 
 mony with its truths, laws, ideals and ends. Here is the basis of 
 order and law. The action of a will in conformity with the un- 
 changing principles of reason must in its very nature be orderly 
 and accordant with law. This is exemplified in human life. The 
 action of a man of fixed integrity is uniform in uprightness. The 
 actipn of a man devoted to a great cause, like Wilberforce, Clark- 
 son, Luther, Paul, is uniform and persistent against all obstacles. 
 Comte himself in his persistent devotion to the development of 
 his system of thought is a striking example. In fact the ultimate 
 basis of the unity of a system orderly under law is this, that it is 
 pervaded and controlled by thought which it reveals in principles 
 and laws to the studious observer. The objection on the con- 
 trary insists that order and law reveal the absence of a pervading 
 intelligence and a guiding mind. Applied to ordinary life it 
 would insist that while soldiers march keeping time with the mu- 
 sic there is no thought guiding their movements ; if they break 
 into disorderly movements that would prove the presence and 
 guidance of mind. If the railroad train comes in every day at 
 the same minute, that proves that no mind regulated it. Only 
 when it runs off the track and is delayed is the guidance of an 
 engineer revealed. If a merchant goes to his counting-room and 
 returns to his dinner at the same hours every day, he acts irra- 
 
 1 Strauss, Old Faith and New, Trans, p. 123; Jacobi, Werke,vol. ii. p. 52. 
 
318 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tionally ; it is only when he acts at hap-hazard that he reveals 
 intelligence. 
 
 Theism affirms that absolute and perfect reason is the ultimate 
 ground of the universe and consequently of its order and law and 
 its unity in a system. The objection is not against theism, but 
 against the objector's own unworthy conception of God. It must 
 be acknowledged, however, that some theologians have taught 
 that the universe is grounded in arbitrary will above all law, and 
 so have invited the objection. 
 
 It may be replied further to the objector, that while denying 
 the personal God, he ascribes to law and order the functions of 
 an intelligent person. 
 
 The objector surreptitiously brings into the idea of law the ex- 
 traneous idea of power. For example, Darwin says of Lamarck : 
 " He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the 
 probability of all change in the organic as well as in the inorganic 
 world being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposi- 
 tion." Here law is conceived as exerting both directive and ef- 
 ficient power and thus as exercising the functions of a personal 
 being. And this is a single example of a confusion of thought 
 common among skeptics. But a law of nature is merely the 
 statement of a uniform sequence of events in nature as a fact. 
 Mr. Darwin thinks he explains the fact by saying it is the " re- 
 sult " of a law which itself is merely a statement of the fact. Did 
 ever mediaeval schoolman more completely lose himself in words ? 
 
 On the other hand, in speaking of power, the objector surrep- 
 titiously brings in the idea of law. For example, it is announced 
 as a sort of axiom in science that every body must act according 
 to the law of its being. Physical science thus declares that the 
 action of every body is regulated by law. But the objector in ap- 
 pealing to this maxim silently assumes that the power exerted 
 by the being contains in itself law. But power and law are 
 totally distinct and cannot be identified. If, as science declares, 
 the power in acting is regulated by law, the law must either 
 be external to the power, and then it is necessary to refer it to a 
 directing mind above the power ; or else the power has its law 
 within itself and so regulates and directs itself, and then it is 
 itself a rational free will. 
 
 In fact the idea of power or force does not contain the idea 
 either of rational law or of uniform sequence. There is nothing in 
 force which explains why in any case the force is so much and no 
 more, why it acts now and not then, why it causes motion in this 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 319 
 
 direction rather than that, or why it acts in any uniform sequence. 
 The conception of power acting under the regulation of law can 
 be realized only in a rational free agent that is either the power 
 itself or else another that is above the power and directs it. Ac- 
 cordingly J. S. Mill affirms in his review of Comte : " The laws 
 Of nature cannot account for their own origin." 
 
 The same confusion of thought is exemplified in appealing to 
 the laws of natural selection and of the survival of the fittest. 
 In fact these phrases do not properly denote either the power 
 which acts or the uniform sequence in which it acts, but rather 
 the effect -or result of the power acting thus uniformly. And, as 
 Canon Mozley has said, it is a negative or privative result. The 
 survivor u does not owe to it its existence, but only its sole ex- 
 istence, as distinguished from the fate of a rival that perishes. 
 . . . Natural selection only weeds and does not plant ; it is the 
 drain of nature, carrying off the irregularities, the monstrosities, 
 the abortions ; it comes in after and upon the active develop- 
 ments of nature to prune and thin them ; but it does not create 
 a species ; it does not possess one productive or generative func- 
 tion." i 
 
 The objection therefore is refuted ; our inference is legitimate 
 that the order and law of nature reveal in it a directing mind. 
 Mr. Martineau has well said : " What have we found by moving 
 out along all radii into the infinite ? That the whole is woven 
 together in one sublime tissue of intellectual relations, geomet- 
 rical and physical the realized original, of which all our science 
 is but a partial copy. That science is the crowning product and 
 supreme expression of human reason. . . . Unless therefore it 
 takes more mental faculty to construe a universe than to cause it, 
 to read the book of nature than to write it, we must more than 
 ever look upon its sublime face as the living appeal of thought 
 to thought." And we may fitly conclude this discussion in the 
 words of Professor Asa Gray in closing his address before the 
 American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1872 : 
 " Let us hope and confidently expect that ... in the future 
 even more than in the past, faith in an order, which is the basis 
 of science, will not (as it cannot reasonably) be dissevered from 
 faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion." 
 
 A second objection is, that the inference from the evidence of 
 final causes in nature is not scientific. 
 
 Lord Bacon objected to the inference from final causes in the 
 1 Essays, vol. ii. pp. 387, 396, 399, 402, 406. 
 
320 ' THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 empirical study of nature, as misleading by turning attention 
 away from efficient causes and so hindering the progress of 
 science. He affirmed its validity in philosophical and theological 
 investigations, which he recognized as legitimate spheres of true 
 and scientific knowledge. Some years ago, when Comte's Posi- 
 tive Philosophy was regarded more than it is now as an authority 
 in the speculations of physical science, it was said, with an air of 
 triumph, that Bacon had excluded final causes from the sphere of 
 human knowledge and that Comte, in excluding efficient causes, 
 had only carried out the progress of scientific thought to its legit- 
 imate result. But with the rejection of efficient causes science 
 found very soon that it had no ground to stand on, and now in 
 the law of the persistence of force recognizes them more conspicu- 
 ously than ever. But final causes are still spoken against as 
 illegitimate for purposes of physical science. 
 
 As to this, the students of physical science are the proper judges 
 what methods are most available in its advancement. If they 
 find the evidence of final causes of little or no value in their in- 
 vestigations, the theologian has nothing to say against it. But 
 empirical science is but one grade of human knowledge. If final 
 causes are of little value in this, they may be effectively used in 
 the profounder inquiries of philosophy and theology, as to the 
 reasonableness of things, their ultimate ground, law and end, and 
 their unity in the all-comprehending system of the universe. 
 
 It must also be noticed that this objection and those which are 
 to follow are directed solely against the evidence from final 
 causes, which is but one of the five lines of evidence of the direc- 
 tion of mind in nature. The objector will hardly affirm that 
 science excludes the others ; that it takes no recognition of the 
 facts that nature has scientific significance in thought, that it is 
 orderly under law, that it is progressively realizing higher and 
 higher orders of beings, and that it, with all that is in the uni- 
 verse, is in the unity of a system under the law of continuity. 
 
 In the first place, we reply to the objection that scientists find 
 in nature arrangements and adjustments which they describe in 
 language implying final causes and the direction of mind ; and 
 probably it would be impossible to describe them correctly other- 
 wise. No other language would fairly and fully express the facts 
 observed. For, as Professor Agassiz said in the last year of his 
 life in a letter to the Duke of Argyll : " The truth is that life 
 has all the wealth of endowment of the most comprehensive men- 
 tal manifestations and none of the simplicity of physical phenom- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 321 
 
 ena." Mr. Darwin, in treating of the Fertilization of Orchids, 
 describes many and marvelous adaptations in plants. Describing 
 an arrangement to bring the insects into contact with the pollen, 
 he says: "Thus we have the rostellum partially closing the mouth 
 of the nectary, like a trap set in a run for game, and the trap so 
 complex arid perfect." And in all his descriptions of these ar- 
 rangements he uses the language of final causes. They are " con- 
 trivances " "in order that" the effect may be produced; "the 
 nectar is purposely so lodged that it can be sucked only slowly." 
 In treating of natural selection he uses language of the same kind. 
 It " effects improvement," " checks deviation," " develops struc- 
 ture," " acts for the good of each creature," is "always trying to 
 economize." He says : " It may be metaphorically said that 
 natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the 
 world every variation, even the slightest ; rejecting that which is 
 bad, preserving and adding up that which is good, silently and 
 incessantly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, 
 at the improvement of every organic being." Professor Tyndall 
 says : " The continued effort of animated nature is to improve its 
 condition and raise itself to a loftier level." Professor Haeckel 
 writes of the cells in an organized body as of intelligent individ- 
 uals in a community. He speaks of the cell as at first satisfied 
 with solitude ; then of many cells " gathered into communities ; " 
 *' devoting themselves " to special services, divided into " castes," 
 making progress through " the division of labor," " working to- 
 gether for the common end," becoming " more perfect or civil- 
 ized." l Mr. Spencer defines life as " the continuous adjustment 
 of internal relations to external relations." But "adjustment" 
 implies mental direction and arrangement. Hume says : " One 
 great foundation of the Copernican system is the maxim that 
 nature acts by the simplest methods and chooses the most proper 
 means to any end." This is " the principle of least action," often 
 appealed to in physical science; and it seems to have no mean- 
 ing except as implying intelligent direction. As Hume himself 
 says : " Thus all the sciences almost lead us insensibly to ac- 
 knowledge a first intelligent Author, and their authority is often 
 so much the greater as they do not directly profess that inten- 
 tion." 2 
 
 A second reply to the objection is that inferences from final 
 causes are common in physical science, and that many accepted 
 
 1 Evolution of Man, Trans., vol. i. pp. 152, 153, 161. 
 
 2 Natural Religion, part xii. ; Phil. Works, vol. ii. p. 523. 
 
 21 
 
322 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 conclusions rest on them. Fifty years ago there were theologians 
 living who contended that the fossil plants and animals were cre- 
 ated as they are and were not remains of once living organized 
 bodies. They were ridiculed without mercy. Yet the only pos- 
 sible refutation of them was the argument from final causes. The 
 eye of the trilobite was appealed to again and again as proving 
 that it must be the fossil of a once living eye made to see with. 
 On the same argument Cuvier built the science of comparative 
 anatomy, and by it Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. 
 From stone-implements science infers the existence and habits of 
 prehistoric men, an inference solely from final causes. If the in- 
 ference from the evidence of final causes is not scientifically legit- 
 imate, we have no proof that men, brutes or vegetables existed 
 before the beginning of human history. 
 
 A third answer is that all science recognizes nature in the unity 
 of a system, the cosmos. But it is involved in the idea of a sys- 
 tem that it is the realization of a plan and thus exists for an end. 
 The cosmos carries us back to the archetypal thought which it 
 expresses, and so to the absolute reason in which the archetypal 
 thought is eternal. But if there is in the universe a rational order 
 or plan apprehensible and formulated in science, there must be in 
 it also a final cause or an end to be accomplished. This end is the 
 realization of the archetypal plan. And all particular individuals 
 and processes must be directed according to the archetypal plan 
 and subordinated to its realization as an end. Wherever there is 
 action according to a plan, it must be action for a final cause or 
 end, which is the realization of the plan. Evolution brings this 
 out in bold relief. The universe is no longer regarded as a fin- 
 ished system in the unity of merely static relations in space, but 
 as a system in the unity of dynamic relations, progressive in time 
 toward the realization of an ideal. In an organism the parts are 
 in unity by subordination to the development of the whole. It 
 is in the sphere of organic life that final causes are most con- 
 spicuous; and objectors say that physical science has already shut 
 them up within that sphere, and that Mr. Darwin's discovery of 
 the survival of the fittest and of natural selection will thrust them 
 out from that and so from the universe altogether. But now Mr. 
 Spencer tells us that the growth of a living organism is the type 
 of the evolution of the universe. Then everything in the universe 
 is subordinate to its development MS a whole. Then just the con- 
 trary of what objectors have so loudly claimed is true, and evolu- 
 tion has taken the subordination of the parts to the development 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 323 
 
 t)f the whole in an organism and made it the type of the entire 
 development of the universe. It has thus established the prin- 
 ciple of final causes in the very constitution of the universe. 
 
 History gives no account of the origin of the idea of the uni- 
 verse, of all nature included in the unity of a system. Primitive 
 men must very early have derived an idea of the uniform course 
 of nature in some rude form from the regular course of the sun, 
 moon arid stars, from the alternation of day and night, the course 
 of the seasons, the leafing, flowering and fruiting of plants. And 
 the idea in some rude or legendary form has usually been found 
 among uncultivated tribes. It has survived the convulsions of 
 all the ages, and, after the labors of many generations, is brought 
 before us in all the complex unity and grandeur in which mod- 
 ern science apprehends it. The fact that the universe is known 
 in the unity of a system implies that it is the expression of an 
 archetypal plan. There can be no system without a plan. This 
 plan is set before us in the sciences, which are the mundus intel- 
 ligibilis, the universe translated into its intellectual equivalent in 
 the mind of man. But the existence of a plan implies the real- 
 ization of an end. The plan at once directs the action and sets 
 forth the end to be realized by it. An architect plans a building 
 and writes all the specifications. That plan sets forth the end 
 to be realized in the building ; and every timber and stone and 
 nail, every decoration, every stroke of hammer, saw and chisel, is 
 accordant with the plan and subordinate to its realization. So 
 the fact that science apprehends the universe in the unity of a 
 system reveals the plan according to which it is constituted and 
 the end for which it is designed. This end is not external to it, 
 but is the realization of its plan ; in other words, it is the per- 
 fecting of the universe according to the archetypal plan of the 
 nbsolute Reason. Therefore every being and process in it exists 
 and acts in subordination to the ends of the whole. Nothing 
 exists in isolation. Nothing exists by and for itself. Every- 
 where interaction, intercommunication all things in thousands 
 of relations and gradations acting together to evolve the universe 
 toward the realization of its ideal. No individual is separated 
 from the system so as to be without any agency in its evolution. 
 Everything has significance, not for itself only, but also for others 
 and for the whole. 
 
 If we pass from the physical system to the spiritual, we see 
 that no person lives in isolation by and for himself ; all persons 
 are subordinate to the ends of the system in the interaction and 
 
324 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 intercommunication of reciprocal service according to the law of 
 love, the deepest law in the constitution of things. 
 
 Thus the very fact that the universe is a system implies that 
 it and all in it exist for an end ; and this end is in the funda- 
 mental plan and ideal of the universe, for the realization of which 
 it is from age to age evolving and all things in it ceaselessly 
 acting. The mere mechanical interpretation of nature assumes 
 the interaction of the primitive elements for the development of 
 the universe to the systematic unity which science sets forth in 
 its formulas and systems. The ultimate atoms work together for 
 this end ; not one of them exists in isolation by and for itself. 
 And thus at the basis even of the mechanical interpretation of 
 nature the scientist tacitly and unconsciously lays the principle 
 of the final cause. In fact no finite whole can have its ultimate 
 ground, law and end within itself. It always carries the thought 
 beyond it; it always reveals the background of the absolute on 
 which it rests. And when the finite whole is found to be a rea- 
 sonable system, the background beyond itself which it reveals to 
 the thought is the absolute Reason. 
 
 A third objection is that the argument from final causes pre- 
 supposes a knowledge of the purposes of God which it is pre- 
 sumptuous in man to assume. Descartes says : " We shall 
 totally reject from our philosophy all investigation of final 
 causes ; for we ought not to be so presumptuous as to think that 
 God would make us participants in his counsels." The objection 
 is still insisted on. Descartes probably had reference to the de- 
 sign of the cosmos as a whole. But we have seen that even with 
 reference to that, through our knowledge of the spiritual system 
 and the relation of the physical system to it, we can say without 
 presumption that the cosmos as a whole exists for and is subor- 
 dinated to the higher ends of the spiritual system and of per- 
 sonal beings. But even if we had not knowledge of the design 
 of the cosmos as a whole, this would not prevent our observing 
 the adjustments and uses of particular objects and subordinate 
 systems. Though one is not taken into the counsels of God, he 
 <ian know him through the actions and works in which he reveals 
 himself. One may admire the skill revealed in the workman- 
 ship of a telescope and its adaptation to disclose distant objects 
 without being an astronomer and knowing all its scientific uses. 
 One may admire the skill in the machinery of a watch and infer 
 that it was made according to an intelligible plan and for a rea- 
 sonable end without having been taken into the counsels of the 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 325 
 
 watch-maker. So when the world is found to be the expression 
 of thought and the realization of a plan, so that it can be set 
 forth in exact science which is its intellectual equivalent, when it 
 is found to be ordered under law and progressively realizing 
 ideals, we may infer that it is the expression of intelligence ; and 
 when it is found to be crowded with adaptations and adjustments 
 fitted to effect and actually effecting specific results, we may in- 
 fer that they were designed for these ends, whatever other ends 
 unknown to us they also accomplish. This is only inferring the 
 character of a cause from the observed character of an effect* 
 And if this is not possible, it is impossible for God, if he exists, 
 to reveal himself in any way to man ; because, whatever he 
 might do to reveal himself, the man cannot infer from it any 
 intelligence or purpose whatsoever. So it is put in the Savoy- 
 ard vicar's profession of faith : " I judge the world by its order, 
 though I am ignorant of its design ; because it is sufficient to 
 compare the parts and note their concurrence, relations and con- 
 cert of action. ... I am like a man who sees for the first time 
 an open watch, who cannot refrain from admiring the workman- 
 ship, though he does not know the use of the machine and haa 
 not seen the dial-face. I do not know, he would say, what all 
 this is good for; but I see that each piece is made for the others; 
 I admire the workman in the details of his work ; and I am sure 
 that these wheels move in concert only for some common end 
 which I cannot perceive." 1 We find final causes in nature, even 
 when we cannot " scan the ultimate purpose of the whole." It 
 is not necessary to be taken into the counsels of the designer and 
 to find out all about him before we discover evidence of design ; 
 for the evidence of design lies immediately in the observed facts. 
 A fourth objection is that the evidence from final causes is 
 set aside as soon as the efficient cause and the law of its uni- 
 form action are discovered. Or, as Laplace puts it, final causes 
 disappear as soon as we obtain the data requisite for resolving 
 problems scientifically. This means, as soon as we discover the 
 efficient cause and the law of its acting. So Mr. Fiske says: 
 " The teleological hypothesis derives its apparent confirmation,, 
 never from the phenomena which were explained yesterday, but 
 always from phenomena which are awaiting explanation to- 
 morrow." 2 This objection is as old as Lucretius, who protests 
 against the belief that eyes were made to see with, " since noth- 
 
 1 J. J. Rousseau, "fimile, chap. iv. p. 324. 
 
 2 Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 385. 
 
3:26 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ing is born in the body in order that we may use it, but that 
 which is born in the body creates its use." It has been urged 
 more strenuously than ever in respect to the theory of evolution. 
 Mr. Fiske says that from the dawn of philosophic discussion 
 appeal has been made to the evidence of final causes. " Until 
 the establishment of the doctrine of evolution, the glove thus 
 thrown down age after age into the arena of philosophical con- 
 troversy was never triumphantly taken up. It was Mr. Darwin 
 who first, by his discovery of natural selection, supplied the 
 champions of science with the resistless weapon by which to 
 vanquish in this their chief stronghold the champions of theol- 
 ogy." 1 We may ask in passing what peculiar interest the cham- 
 pions of science, as such, have in vanquishing the champions of 
 theology, that they seize with such a shout of triumph a sup- 
 posedly effective weapon which generation after generation of 
 them have been looking for in vain. Professor Haeckel says : 
 "We discover therein the definite death of all teleological and 
 vitalistic judgments of organisms." 2 And Noire quotes Geiger : 
 *' Nature appears to be wise ; it surprises us by a reason surpass- 
 ing ours, that pervades it. Nature harmonizes with our reason, 
 not because Nature is rational or subject to reason, but because 
 reason itself is natural, developed from nature and in accordance 
 with it." 3 This, it will be noticed, asserts an effect transcending 
 its cause. And it is said, "the earth is suited to its inhabitants 
 because it has produced them, and only such as suit it live." 
 There is however nothing in the appeal to evolution more than 
 in the first statement of the objection. It is merely a supposed 
 more full exposition of efficient causes and their law. 
 
 We may reply, in the first place, that there is nothing in the 
 idea of a law of nature incompatible with final causes in nature : 
 for the law is merely the statement of a fact that certain physical 
 phenomena occur in a uniform sequence. So Lord Bacon, after 
 saying that too exclusive attention to final causes in the investi- 
 gations of physical science had tended to a neglect of the search 
 for the physical causes, adds : " Not because those final causes 
 are riot. true and worthy to be investigated, being kept within 
 their own province. . . . For, keeping their precincts and bor- 
 ders, men are extremely deceived if they think there is any en- 
 
 1 Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii. pp. 396, 397. Mr. Fiske now finds teleology in 
 evolution: The Idea of God, pp. 158-163. 
 
 2 Generelle Morphologic der Organismen, vol. i. p. 160. 
 
 3 Die Welt ais Entwicklung des Geistes, p. 105. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 327 
 
 mity or repugnancy at all between them. For the cause ren- 
 dered that the hairs about the eyelids are for the safeguard of 
 the sight, dqth not impugn the cause rendered that pilosity is 
 incident to orifices of moisture." l If this law of pilosity had 
 been established as an invariable sequence or law of nature, it is 
 impossible to see in it any conflict with the inference that, in 
 accordance with this invariable sequence in nature, the eyelid 
 has been intelligently adjusted to the eye for its protection. 
 
 In like manner, there is also nothing in the efficient cause of 
 any effect inconsistent with the observed evidence of a final 
 cause. The argument of the objector, stripped of all disguises, 
 is that whatever is the effect of a known power, for that reason 
 cannot be an expression of intelligence. But a purpose is not 
 the less a purpose after the agencies used in accomplishing it are 
 known. The discovery of all the action of the muscles and 
 nerves by which the arm of a man is moved does not disprove 
 the intelligent direction of them in the motion. The discovery 
 of all the muscles and nerves in the wing of a bird does not 
 prove that the wing was not made to fly with. So far from con- 
 flicting with the inference of final causes, the knowledge of the 
 efficient cause and its law of action is always presupposed in the 
 argument from them. Physical causes account for the motion 
 of matter, but not for the revelation therein of rational truths, 
 laws, ideals and ends. The principle on which the argument 
 rests is not merely that every beginning or change must have a 
 cause, but also that the cause must be adequate to the effect. 
 The question is not merely, is there a cause, but also what sort 
 of a cause must it be to be adequate to the effect. The gist of 
 the argument is that when a force acting according to a known 
 law is so adjusted to other forces acting in other invariable 
 sequences that their action in concert effects a result, that ad- 
 justment is evidence of intelligence, either in the causal agents 
 themselves or in some agency directing them. The physical 
 causes account for the motion. What accounts for the adjust- 
 ments and adaptations, and for the concerted action of many 
 agents, continued it may be for years and centuries, to effect a 
 complicated result? When you have described every piece of 
 material used in building a house and given the exact dimensions 
 of each, and have set forth in foot-pounds the exact expenditure 
 of force in every exertion of the workmen, you have not ac- 
 counted for the concert and direction of all the energies to the 
 1 Advancement of Learning, bk. ii. 
 
328 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 construction of the house. Much less have you done anything 
 which contradicts and annuls the inference that it was built 
 under the guidance of intelligence, according to an intelligible 
 plan and for a reasonable end. Dr. Beattie sowed flower-seeds 
 so that on coming up they revealed the initials of his little boy's 
 name. And the astonished boy laughed him to scorn when his 
 father asked him if they did not come so by chance. The phys- 
 ical forces in the plants and their environment acting according 
 to their laws could not account for the arrangement of the plants 
 in letters. So these physical forces in each plant do not account 
 for the concert of action of the innumerable molecules and cells 
 for weeks together in building the plant according to its type ; 
 and in successive plants in successive generations on the same 
 type through many thousands of years. Geoffrey St. Hilaire 
 insists that in making out the evidence of final causes we look 
 first at the function and then at the organ. But we see that 
 this is not true ; for the evidence of final causes presupposes a 
 knowledge of the efficient cause and of its laws of acting. It 
 has been said of this author that he "carried the art of shutting 
 the eyes to a high point of philosophical perfection." This seems 
 well established when we find him saying of the argument from 
 final causes that "in reasoning in this way you would say of a 
 man who uses crutches, that he was originally designed to lose a 
 leg " in order that he might use crutches. 1 
 
 The appeal of the objector to evolution presents no new prin- 
 ciple ; for evolution is only a disclosure of the efficient cause and 
 its law on a larger scale. It has already been shown that evolu- 
 tion, instead of nullifying the evidence of final causes, discloses 
 it in the universe as a whole and attaches it to the cosmic devel- 
 opment throughout all time and space. It sets it before us in 
 a grand cosmic panorama in which we see the universe moving 
 through all time toward the realization of an ideal. And thus 
 it only makes more conspicuous the fact that the cause which 
 through immeasurable time has been progressively evolving 
 higher and higher orders of being and conditions of existence, is 
 a cause adequate to the effect ; and therefore is not merely a 
 force but a force intellectually and wisely directed either by itself 
 or by a rational power above it. And to all who, with Spencer 
 and the agnostics and with scientists generally, admit that the 
 absolute is revealed in all the efficiency of the universe as Power, 
 the inference is legitimate and necessary, not merely that physical 
 1 Principes de Philosophic Zoologique, p. 66. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 829 
 
 force measurable by foot-pounds reveals everywhere the absolute 
 as Power, but also that the everywhere accompanying order and 
 law, progressiveness toward ideals, adaptation and adjustment to 
 ends, and intelligibleness to thought in the unity of a scientific 
 system, reveal the absolute as Reason. 
 
 This objection, then, when we come to examine it, is found to 
 be only the reiteration under scientific phraseology of the old and 
 obvious error that when we find out how a thing is done, we can 
 no longer believe that any intelligence directed in the doing of 
 it ; that as soon as we understand the construction of a steam-en- 
 gine we know that no mind directed its construction or guides its 
 action ; that in the universe, whatever the number of agencies 
 combined in interaction, whatever the intricacy of the combina- 
 tion and the delicacy of the adjustment, however perfect the order 
 and harmony of all in the unity of a system, these very facts, be- 
 cause they show us how the universe goes on, make it impossible 
 to believe that any intelligence directed in its constitution or 
 guides in its ongoing. 
 
 The foolishness and abortiveness of this objection is declared 
 by Kant: " To exclude the teleological principle on account of 
 the mechanical and, when the adaptation to an end shows itself 
 undeniably as a relation to a cause of another kind, still always 
 to insist on following the mechanism only, must be seen by the 
 reason to be a fantastic wandering under the lead of those chime- 
 ras of the brain, the powers of nature, which are entirely unthink- 
 able, as really as an exclusively teleological explanation, which 
 takes no notice of the mechanism of nature, is regarded by the 
 reason as fanatical." l 
 
 Recognizing the abortiveness of the objection from another 
 point of view, Mr. Huxley says: "The teleological and the me- 
 chanical views of nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 
 On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, 
 the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrange- 
 ment, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the conse- 
 quences ; and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of 
 the teleologist, who can always defy him to prove that this pri- 
 mordial arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena 
 of the universe. On the other hand, if the teleologist asserts that 
 this, that or the other result of the working of any part of the 
 mechanism of the universe is its purpose and final cause, the 
 
 1 Kritik der Urtheilskraft (Ausg. von Hartenstein), 78, Werke, vol. viu 
 p. 290. 
 
330 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 mechanist can always inquire how he knows that it is more than 
 an unessential incident, the mere ticking of the clock, which he 
 mistakes for its function." 1 He seems to mean that teleology in 
 its broader application to the universe is confirmed by evolution 
 and cannot be disproved; and that all which remains possible for 
 its opponent to do is to criticise its application to details and in- 
 quire whether the teleologist does not sometimes mistake an inci- 
 dental result, like the ticking of a clock, for the essential design 
 or end of the arrangement. And to this the teleologist will not 
 object. As has already been said, teleology has been brought 
 into discredit by errors of this sort in applying it to trivial details. 
 But occasional mistakes in applying the teleological argument to 
 details do not invalidate the principle on which it rests nor make 
 all applications of it worthless. Mr. Darwin himself says : " To 
 suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for ad- 
 justing the focus to different distances, for admitting different 
 amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and achro- 
 matic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, 
 seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." 
 Why then does he not recognize in the evolution a directing in- 
 telligence? By so doing he would remove what he himself sees 
 to be absurd, supply to the evolution that superior power and 
 intelligence which at every stage in its progress it imperatively 
 demands in order to escape absurdity, and so would make the 
 theory of evolution richer and more fruitful. 
 
 From still another point of view Hartmann is right in saying 
 that the efficient cause and the final are but different aspects of 
 the same thing, "according as thought logically reproduces the 
 process from later to earlier or from earlier to biter. The con- 
 ditionedness of the later by the earlier is called causality; that 
 of the earlier by the later is called finality. From the point of 
 causality the teleological order of the world is the product of the 
 order of the world by efficient causes under natural law; from 
 that of finality, the physical causes and laws are means to the 
 end." The one appears to exclude the other only so long as their 
 common genetic ground in reason energizing is overlooked. kl So 
 soon as the advocates of the mechanical view of the world are 
 brought to the concession that the regular order of nature is the 
 expression* of an immanent reason in the world, they can as little 
 withhold the admission that from it must result a teleological 
 order of the world, as the latter can deny that the order of the 
 1 Critiques and Addresses, p. 307. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 331 
 
 world by natural laws is its logically required means, so soon 
 as they are brought to see in the teleological world-order, not a 
 mass of divine arbitrary acts, but a result of the eternal reason 
 of God/' ! 
 
 In respect to evolution, another point to be noticed is, that, as 
 scientists infer, through the escape of heat all the forces in our 
 universe must eventually come into equilibrium and all life and 
 motion will cease. Once in this equilibrium there is no power 
 within it which can renew its action". It must remain a motion- 
 less solid mass forever. Here are two points bearing on the ques* 
 tion now under consideration. One is that nobody can believe 
 it. As the authors of the Unseen Universe say : " That this vast 
 store of high-class energy should be doing nothing but traveling 
 outwards in space at the rate of 188,000 miles per second is 
 hardly conceivable, especially when the result of it is the inevita- 
 ble destruction of the visible universe." 2 And it is impossible 
 to believe that all action in the visible universe is to end, and the 
 universe so full of energy is to become a lifeless, motionless mass 
 -and remain so forever. But all which makes it impossible to be- 
 lieve it is the principle of final causes. We cannot think that all 
 the energy expended in the universe has been expended only 
 to accomplish so meaningless and unworthy an end. The other 
 thought is that nothing can prevent this conclusion but the recog- 
 nition of the presence and action in the universe of the imma- 
 nent and inexhaustible power and wisdom of God. 
 
 Thus in every line of investigation science presently comes face 
 to face with mysteries which it cannot illuminate, problems which 
 it cannot solve and difficulties which it cannot remove. These 
 mysteries are understood and the difficulties removed only when 
 the absolute Reason is recognized as immanent in the universe 
 and energizing with inexhaustible power for rational ends. Sci- 
 ence in its difficulties, not less than faith, has occasion to lift up 
 its hands unto God. Science, not less than faith, has occasion to 
 cry : " Whither shall I go from thy Spirit ? Whither shall I flee 
 from thy presence ? " 
 
 Hume objects that, whatever the order and law, the adapta- 
 tions and adjustments observed in nature, we cannot infer from 
 them a directing mind in the author of nature, because we have 
 had no experience in world-building. On the contrary,' from the 
 
 1 Hartmann, Die Religion des Geistes, part B, pp. 129, 130. 
 
 2 Unseen Universe, p. 156. 
 
332 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 products of human art we can infer that a man was the maker r 
 because we know the products of human art by experience. 1 
 
 The answer is that Hume has misapprehended the real basis 
 of the inference. He supposes the inference to be the same in 
 kind with that of the geologist who infers the past existence of 
 certain kinds of animals from coprolites ; not from any marks of 
 design in these fossils, but simply because he recognizes them as 
 objects already familiar to him. So, as Hume would reason, if 
 one thrown by shipwreck on' an unknown island finds a human 
 footprint, or a circle with radius and tangent imprinted in the 
 sand, or a watch, he will infer that men have been there, not from 
 the evidence of intelligence in these constructions, but solely be- 
 cause he is already familiar with these things as made by man. 
 But he cannot infer an intelligent author from the contrivances 
 and adaptations of nature, because he has not been familiar with 
 them in his experience as made under intelligent direction. He 
 supposes the argument to be merely an analogy. 
 
 But this is not the ground of the inference from the law, order, 
 progressiveness and final causes in nature. The theistic inference 
 is from the peculiarity of an observed effect to the peculiarity of 
 the cause adequate to produce it. It is similar to the reasoning 
 by the Newtonian induction to discover what the cause is from 
 the observed effect. Through our familiarity with the products 
 of intelligently directed power in ourselves and others we recog- 
 nize their characteristics wherever we see them. When we see 
 arrangements in nature having these characteristics, we legiti- 
 mately infer that they are products of power directed by mind. 
 And the inference is as legitimate as that from any induction. 
 And it is not true even of artificial products that our infer- 
 ence of the intelligence of the maker is limited to constructions 
 with which we have been familiar in experience. If the ship- 
 wrecked mariner finds on the island a music-box, a quadrant 
 or any mechanical contrivance which he has never seen, he will 
 know it as a product of human workmanship from the evidences 
 of mind in it. From stone implements, the making of which we 
 have never observed and of some of which the use can only be 
 conjectured, we infer the existence of man, and add copious in- 
 ferences as to his habits and the history of his development. 
 
 In like manner from the evidence of mind in nature, we infer 
 intelligence in the author of nature. Accordingly J. S. Mill af- 
 firms : " The argument is not one of mere analogy. As mere 
 1 Natural Religion, part ii. ; Philosophical Works, vol. ii. p. 434. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 338 
 
 Analogy it has its weight, but it is more than analogy. It sur- 
 passes analogy exactly as induction surpasses it. It is an induc- 
 tive argument." l 
 
 If the objector denies that the universe is accounted for as the 
 revelation of absolute Reason, it devolves on him to declare how 
 he will account for it. But by his declaration that it is not ac- 
 counted for as a revelation of reason, he is shut out from profess- 
 ing or attempting to give any reasonable account of it. He may 
 fall back on complete positivism, or on Spencerian agnosticism, 
 or on pantheistic or materialistic monism. But whatever his the- 
 ory may be, it explicitly excludes reason. We can but wonder 
 that intelligent persons readily accept almost anything as the ul- 
 timate ground of the universe, provided it excludes reason ; are 
 satisfied with any explanation and earnestly defend it, provided 
 it leaves out that which alone can make the explanation reason- 
 able. The inadequacy of the above-mentioned theories of the 
 universe has already been exposed. There remain two others 
 which may receive a passing notice. 
 
 The objector may say that the universe is accounted for by the 
 fortuitous concurrence of atoms. This was the theory of Epicu- 
 rus and Lucretius. The latter, after setting forth the Epicurean 
 theory, adds : " If you keep these things in mind, nature is seen, 
 free immediately and rid of her haughty lords, to do all things 
 spontaneously of herself without the gods." 2 Mr. Hume says of 
 this theory : " This is commonly, and I believe justly, esteemed 
 the most absurd system that has yet been proposed ; yet I know 
 not whether, with a few alterations, it might not be brought to 
 bear a faint probability." 3 In the present revival of old atomic 
 theories this way of accounting for the universe has reappeared. 
 It is said that chance can do any thing if you only give it chances 
 enough ; and that with an infinite number of throws from a dice- 
 box one could throw the Greek alphabet into the Iliad. 
 
 But chance is not a power and cannot do any thing. Chance 
 and necessity are defined alike as describing the action of a power 
 unregulated by reason. Chance is necessity to that which is 
 effected by it, But neither chance nor necessity does any thing 
 or accounts for any thing. In each case it is the power, sup- 
 posed to act without the guidance of intelligence, which does 
 what is done. The supposition is also absurd ; for since the 
 
 1 Three Essays on Religion, pp. 170, 168. 
 
 2 De Rerum Natura, lib. ii. 1090-1093. 
 
 8 Natural Religion, part viii.; Phil. Works, vol. ii. p. 481. 
 
THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 throws are entirely unregulated by reason, there may be any 
 number of repetitions of the same " throw," and any inference 
 is just as valid as any other. 
 
 But we may dismiss these idle speculations about the infinite. 
 The decisive answer is that the objector assumes that the uni- 
 verse once existed entirely unregulated by laws of nature or by 
 principles of reason. He assumes a chaos in which there were 
 not only no regularity or uniformity of sequence, no fixed con- 
 nection between any event and any antecedent or consequent, 
 but, in a confusion entirely unregulated by rational intelligence 
 and entirely given up to chance, it might happen that there 
 should be motion without any cause or any effect, two straight 
 lines might sometimes happen to inclose a space, any absurdity 
 might be real and one thing would be just as possible and just as 
 probable as another. Such a chaos is contradictory to reason and 
 altogether absurd ; it destroys the foundation of all science ; it is 
 entirely unintelligible to human thought. And if the universe 
 has come out of such a chaos into its present systematic order, 
 the transition brings back all the evidence of the existence of 
 God which is set forth in the physico-theological argument. 
 
 In fact the objector assumes that these atoms are numbered 
 and adapted to one another and to the coming arrangements of 
 the system ; so that when those adapted to each other come to- 
 gether they cohere and abide, while those not adapted, if they 
 come together, do not cohere. Mr. Tyndall, accepting this ex- 
 planation of the universe, says : " The interaction of the atoms 
 throughout all time made all manner of combinations possible. 
 Of these only the fit ones persisted while the unfit ones disap- 
 peared." So in throwing the letters of the Iliad, there is the 
 presupposition of the letters of the Greek alphabet, of exactly as 
 many of each as the poem contains, and of the persistence of the 
 letters in combination when they happen to make a word and 
 their separation when they do not. Here again all the evidences 
 of adaptation, adjustment and design come back and prove a di- 
 recting mind under whose guidance all the elements have been 
 formed and adjusted for the purpose which they are to accom- 
 plish in the whole. 
 
 When challenged to account for the universe on the supposi- 
 tion that the evidence of mind in nature does not reveal the per- 
 sonal God, the objector may recur to the position of Hartmann 
 or Schopenhauer, that the universe is grounded in spirit, but im- 
 1 Address before the British Association at Belfast. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 335 
 
 personal and unconscious. So Noire* says : " All for an end is 
 the motto of nature, but only in unconsciousness. . . . Conscious 
 ends begin only from the beginning of life." Similar views are 
 held by Biedermann, Pfleiderer and some other theologians. 1 
 
 The untenableness of their position has already been exposed 
 in the discussion of the absolute Being and Theism. It was 
 shown that their error is in assuming that limitation and condi- 
 tionateness are of the essence of personality, but not of the es- 
 sence of spirit. But since they acknowledge that the absolute 
 is Spirit and thus assume unconscious reason or will in the abso- 
 lute, they cannot place the limitation of personality in these. 
 They must therefore suppose it to be either in the person's con- 
 sciousness or in his individuality and identity. It cannot be in 
 the consciousness as distinctive of a person ; for consciousness be- 
 longs to mind, will, spirit, in the same sense in which it belongs 
 to a person. A spirit or person is intelligent. But thought, 
 knowledge, intelligence involve consciousness. Take away the 
 consciousness and you take away the thought, the knowledge, 
 the intelligence. Unconscious knowledge is no knowledge. And 
 this remains true whether you call the subject of the knowledge 
 spirit or will or person. And a being without thought, knowl- 
 edge or intelligence, a being therefore inferior to conscious per- 
 sonal beings which it is supposed to create, is in its essence lim- 
 ited, conditioned, imperfect. Consciousness therefore cannot in- 
 volve limitation. The conscious is superior to the unconscious. 
 The absolute is said to awake to consciousness in man. Man then 
 is superior to the absolute Being. 
 
 To this it must be added that such an unconscious potentiality 
 of intelligence does not account for the universe. Hartmann 
 points out with remarkable clearness and force the evidences in 
 the universe of the presence and direction of mind. All the writ- 
 ers of this class insist on them. But these evidences reveal in- 
 telligence directing efficient power in the ordering arid ongoing 
 of the universe, not an undeveloped, unconscious and unintelli- 
 gent potentiality blindly moving in an aimless and unguided flow, 
 and coming at last to consciousness in man. They contradict 
 themselves, when recognizing the evidences of mind in the uni- 
 verse they still ascribe it to such an unconscious potentiality 
 as its cause. They contradict themselves again when they sup- 
 
 1 Biedermann, Dogmatik, 715-717, pp. 638-647; Pfleiderer, Religions- 
 philosophic, pp. 418-421; Noire, Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes, pp. 
 110, 111. 
 
336 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 pose man, the highest product of the development, to be the crea- 
 ture of this unconscious potentiality and to revere and worship 
 it as God. And Strauss emphasizes the contradiction by repre- 
 senting the spirit of man as having ordered and directed all the 
 arrangements and systems of the universe in his previous state 
 of existence as the unconscious potentiality of intelligence in na- 
 ture ; and his scientific discovery of the same is merely his awak- 
 ening remembrance of how he himself had ordered it at first. 
 And this brings in another contradiction, that a man remembers 
 that of which he had never had any consciousness. 1 
 
 Thus the active wisdom apparent in nature and recognized 
 by these writers cannot be accounted for by unconscious imper- 
 sonal spirit. This in reality is only the blind order of nature 
 designated by the name of spirit and itself requires to be ac- 
 counted for. It is unconscious reason only in the sense in 
 which a circle drawn on a blackboard is so. The circle is rea- 
 sonable in the sense that at every point it reveals reason and is 
 an expression of thought. But the circle does not account for 
 itself, nor is it accounted for by the blackboard and the chalk. 
 It compels our thought to pass behind all these to the guiding 
 mind that directed its construction according to a law and in the 
 expression of an archetypal idea. So the wisdom revealed in 
 nature carries us behind itself and the immediate agencies of 
 nature to an intelligent and therefore conscious spirit energizing 
 in nature. Spinoza says that thought is an attribute of the ab- 
 solute substance ; but he explains that it is thought which has 
 no likeness whatever to any thought or intelligence known to 
 man. It is then a word without meaning. So when we are 
 told that the Absolute is unconscious spirit or will or intellect, 
 these assertions denote spirit, will, intellect which have no like- 
 ness to any spirit, will or intellect known to us ; they are there- 
 fore entirely indeterminate and void of meaning. Therefore it 
 is only in the use of meaningless words that they who say that 
 the universe is grounded in unconscious and impersonal reason 
 make a seeming, but not real, advance beyond agnostics who 
 say the absolute is the Unknowable, or pantheists who say it 
 is pure being which is equal to zero, or even materialists who 
 say that the universe is the manifestation only of eternal matter 
 and force. The universe is grounded either in conscious per- 
 sonal reason or else not in reason at all, but in the irrational. 
 
 It is thus evident that consciousness would be no limitation o! 
 the absolute Reason or Spirit. 
 
 i r.^;,, f , qisnhenslehre. vol. i. p. 351. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 337 
 
 It may now be urged that a person is limited by his individ- 
 uality and identity ; and that therefore, the absolute, if personal, 
 would be limited. But these are equally essential in the idea of 
 a spirit or will. A spirit or will must be an Ego, an indivisible 
 one. And individuality, in its positive and proper meaning of 
 indivisible, is essential in the idea of the absolute Being. The 
 absolute Being is one and indivisible. It cannot be divided ; 
 there cannot be two. The absolute one must also be eternally 
 identical. Any change into another, any ceasing to be the same 
 demonstrates that it is not the absolute Being. But this is pre- 
 cisely what is meant by individuality and identity. Individuality 
 means indivisibility. An individual is a one that, so long as it 
 exists, is indivisible and the same. This is of the essence of 
 personality, and equally of the idea of absolute being. In this 
 respect also personality is not contradictory to the idea of the 
 absolute. 
 
 It follows that the whole evolution of the unconscious is in 
 necessity and not in freedom, and therefore affords no basis for 
 morals. And because communion with the unconscious is im- 
 possible and it cannot be the object of trust, love, worship and 
 obedience, it gives no basis for religion. 
 
 We welcome the testimony of these advocates of the uncon- 
 scious that they find the universe pervaded by reason, and the 
 multiplied evidences of it which they present ; but we insist 
 that these prove that the universe is grounded in conscious, per- 
 sonal reason. 
 
 God is the one only unconditioned, self-existent person. Man 
 is in the image of God so far as he is one indivisible being per- 
 sisting in identity and endowed with reason, free will and the 
 susceptibility to rational and spiritual motives. But he is a 
 person conditioned, limited and dependent. Neither condition- 
 edness nor unconditionedness is of the essence of personality. 
 In this, personality is analogous to power and being. Each of 
 these may be conditioned or unconditioned without losing its 
 essence as power or being. Personality in man is " but a pale 
 fcopy " l of personality in God, only in the sense that it is finite, 
 conditioned and dependent, not in the sense that it is different in 
 its positive essence. As Lotze himself explains', "the finiteness 
 of the finite is not a producing condition of this personality, but 
 a limit and hindrance of its development." 
 
 This theory of the unconscious may be resorted to in order, 
 
 1 Lotze, Mikrokosmus, bk. ix. chap. iv. 5, xii. 
 22 
 
338 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 while retaining the idea of the absolute as Reason or Spirit, to 
 escape the difficulty that if God is conscious while immanent and 
 energizing in nature, it implies that the fall of every rain-drop, 
 the dashing of every wave, the motion of every molecule are 
 each effected by an immediate and distinct volition of God. But 
 in escaping this difficulty the theory practically abandons the 
 rationality and personality of God and reduces him to blind un- 
 conscious nature moving in necessity. 
 
 We might further reply to the objection in this form, that we 
 do not know the modes in which God acts and may leave the 
 problem among the mysteries of the absolute Being which the 
 finite mind cannot penetrate. 
 
 But theism has another answer. Theism teaches that the 
 finite universe has real though dependent being, and that God 
 progressively realizes his archetypal idea by energizing on and 
 through the finite beings already existing. It recognizes real 
 powers of nature acting in necessity according to the law of their 
 being, and real powers of persons acting in freedom. Hence 
 theism does not imply that every motion and change is caused 
 by an immediate volition of God. It teaches that, though we 
 cannot know just how the divine infuses itself continually into 
 the universe, directing its forces and progressively developing it 
 to higher and higher forms, yet we know that God's action on 
 and through everything is accordant with the constitution and 
 laws of its being ; and that he respects the free will of man and 
 secures to his personality all its rights. 
 
 There may be in man the spontaneity of genius and power, 
 of habit and character, of enthusiasm and love, which seems to 
 lift ,him above the consciousness of his actions. In such seem- 
 ingly unconscious spontaneity our highest energy is put forth ; 
 in acts of seeming self-forgetfulness and self-abandonment our 
 powers are exerted in their fullest tension and concentration. Is 
 there here a glimpse of an analogy to what is immeasurably 
 above it, the unobstructed spontaneity and intensity of God's 
 energy working continuously and without effort from the fulness 
 of his wisdom, love and power ? 
 
 There are facts in our own experience sometimes spoken of 
 as unconscious mental action. Thoughts, lines of reasoning, con- 
 clusions, determinations spring into consciousness which seem to 
 have been elaborated in unconsciousness. There are depths and 
 heights in our own spiritual being which our consciousness can- 
 not fathom. How much more which we cannot comprehend 
 
GOD REVEALED IN NATURE. 339 
 
 must there be in God, the eternal Spirit. No finite mind can 
 ever fathom the full significance of those great words : By the 
 word of the Lord were the heavens made ; he spake and it was. 
 done. And in all his action immanent and energizing in the uni- 
 verse and acting on and in the human spirit, while he reveals 
 himself and we know him, he also reveals himself as the un- 
 known. It is with all his perfections as Paul says it is with 
 his love, they are known and yet unknown ; " that ye may be 
 strong to apprehend what is the breadth and length and height 
 and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowl- 
 edge." 
 
 From this discussion of the objections the necessary conclusion 
 is that they fail to break down the evidence in nature of a direct- 
 ing and intelligent power; they leave unimpaired the validity of 
 the inference, from the scientific intelligibleness of nature in the 
 unity of a plan or system, from its order under law, the concerted 
 and progressive action of its powers realizing ideals and its sub- 
 ordination to the uses and ends of sentient and preeminently of 
 spiritual beings and a spiritual system, that it reveals the abso- 
 lute Being, already known to be manifested in nature as power, 
 as the absolute Reason energizing in the realization of its arche- 
 typal thought. 
 
 Dr. Bushnell illustrates our knowledge of God through nature 
 by the supposition of our being inclosed in a succession of con- 
 centric hollow spheres, through which we indistinctly hear the 
 ringing of strokes on the outmost one. Cicero has the conception 
 of God as a sphere inclosing all the nature-gods : " Summus ipse 
 Deus arcens et continens ceteros." 
 
 This a young poet has happily expressed : 
 
 " The glowing map of night reveals 
 Its circling orbs upon their way ; 
 The world is turning; watch and pray; 
 Hear music in the mighty wheels. 
 
 " Let faith, fore-dreaming of the goal 
 That summons all the flying years, 
 Hear, round the vast mysterious spheres, 
 The outmost one forever roll, 
 
 "The God- sphere holding each in place; 
 So that the song rolls, and a jar 
 In earth or the remotest star 
 Can lend no discord, but a grace. 
 
340 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 " To Him who marks the sparrow's fall 
 Nothing is great, or small, or strange; 
 Death has its hour and life its change, 
 And runs the love of God through all. 
 
 11 Help us, O Lord, to bear thy love; 
 
 Thy love is great; bend thou our will 
 To thy own law that guides us still, 
 And guides the wandering lights above." Samuel V. Cole. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 GOD REVEALED AS PERSONAL SPIRIT IN THE CONSTI- 
 TUTION AND HISTORY OF MAN. 
 
 WE now proceed from the physical system to the spiritual, to 
 ascertain what additional evidence that the absolute Being is the 
 personal God may be found in the constitution and history of 
 man. 
 
 I. GOD REVEALED AS PERSONAL SPIRIT IN THE EXISTENCE 
 OF PERSONAL BEINGS. From the existence of personal beings 
 we rightly infer that the absolute Being must be a rational and 
 personal being, on the principle that the cause must be adequate 
 to the effect. 
 
 Man knows himself and his fellow- men as personal beings. 
 In discussing man's capacity to know God it was shown that 
 personality in its essence is supernatural. If the line dividing 
 nature from the supernatural runs between finite beings and 
 God, as many theologians assume, then man is shut' up in the 
 physical or natural and excluded from any participation in the 
 spiritual or supernatural, and from all knowledge of God or of 
 any spiritual or supernatural reality. But theism does not admit 
 any such rift between God and the universe, any such gulf which 
 thought itself cannot pass over to find God. It is of the essence 
 of theism that it declares the union and communion of God and 
 man. The philosophical basis of this is the fact that the line of 
 distinction between nature and the supernatural is the line of 
 distinction between rational and free personal beings and the 
 irrational and impersonal. Thus man is at once participant in 
 nature and the supernatural and has in experience contents for 
 the knowledge of both. 1 He is the bond of union between the 
 natural and the supernatural. In him the law of continuity 
 reaches unbroken from the spiritual into the physical, and they 
 are knit together in one all-comprehending rational svstem. The 
 consciousness of man is " the mirror of the universe," because in 
 it he sees both the physical and the spiritual in unity. 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, chap. xvi. pp. 408,411. 
 
342 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 If personal beings exist, then the absolute Being is God, the 
 personal Spirit. The cause must be adequate to the effect. Ra- 
 tional free persons cannot be accounted for as created or brought 
 into existence by irrational and insensate physical forces. Athe- 
 ism, therefore, must assume either explicitly or implicitly that no 
 rational free agent or personal being exists. The question with 
 the atheist is not so much, Does the personal God exist, as, Does 
 any personal being exist ? Is man a rational free agent ? 
 
 But it is beyond reasonable doubt that personal beings do ex- 
 ist. All knowledge implies a subject knowing, an object known 
 and the knowledge. The knowledge of myself knowing is essen- 
 tial to knowledge of the object known. If I do not know myself 
 as existing, I do not know anything ; all knowledge becomes im- 
 possible. All physical science rests on the immense assumption 
 that the physical world of matter and force exists and is known. 
 But if the scientist knows that the physical world exists, he 
 equally knows that he himself exists as a rational being who 
 knows it and describes it in science. 
 
 And man's knowledge of his own individuality and identity, of 
 his own rationality and free will is as certain as his knowledge of 
 his own existence. Man therefore in knowing himself knows the 
 personal, the spiritual, the supernatural. He finds in man that 
 which transcends the physical and the impersonal ; while in the 
 physical world he is also above it. 
 
 In explaining mental phenomena all proposed substitutes for 
 the personal self or ego have failed. Mr. J. S. Mill defines the 
 mind as a series of sensations and feelings. But he himself says 
 that this involves the paradox that a series of feelings is aware of 
 itself as past and future and as continuing through years in the 
 unity and identity of a series. 1 But it is more than a paradox ; 
 it is an absurdity ; or, if not, it is an agglutination of words, hid- 
 ing the absence of intelligible meaning, worthy of a mediaeval 
 scholastic. And there is the additional absurdity of affirming a 
 series of feelings with no being that is the subject of them. Mr. 
 Spencer, inconsistently with his agnostic realism, seems to accept 
 the same view. He defines the ego as " at each moment nothing 
 else than the state of consciousness, simple or compound, passing 
 at that moment." 2 The insufficiency of this and similar defini- 
 tions, the contradictions involved in them, and the impossibility 
 of explaining mental phenomena without the recognition of a per- 
 sonal mind are becoming more and more apparent. 
 
 1 Mill on Hamilton, vol. i. pp. 253, 261. 2 Psychology, vol. i. p. 501. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 343 
 
 And physical science is more and more making it evident that 
 physical force cannot account for the phenomena of mind. Facts 
 and laws supposed to disprove personality and to resolve all its 
 manifestations into physical phenomena are gradually being found 
 to have no such import. When the law of the Persistence of 
 Force was announced it seemed to be expected that it would re- 
 solve thought into a form of motor-force and completely explain 
 mental phenomena by physical processes. But this has been 
 found to be impossible. Scientists now hold that mental pro- 
 cesses can never be resolved into motion nor explained by the 
 molecular action of the brain. The physical action reveals an 
 agency beyond itself. 1 In Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural 
 Religion, Philo asks: "What peculiar privilege has this little 
 agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must make 
 it the model of the whole universe ? " 2 To this question physical 
 science now answers that thought is something other than the 
 agitation of the brain and cannot be identified with it. 
 
 So also, when the theory of evolution was propounded, it was 
 expected that, if proved true, it would disprove once for all the 
 existence of personality both in man and God, and establish ma- 
 terialism on a scientific basis and beyond all further controversy. 
 On the contrary it has been found that it presents new evidence 
 of the existence of personality, and reveals more clearly than ever 
 that the recognition of the personality both of man and God is a 
 necessity of physical science in order to the intelligibleness and 
 the comprehension in a rational system of the facts which science 
 discovers. 
 
 Mr. John Fiske, the ablest expounder and defender of Spen- 
 cerian evolution in this country, teaches that physical evolution 
 issues in the appearance of rational man ; that it can advance no 
 further, but gives place to a psychical progress. " When Hu- 
 manity began to be evolved an entirely new chapter in the 
 history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the 
 nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life 
 became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that, in this 
 direction at least, the process of zoological change had come to 
 an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its 
 place. Henceforth along this supreme line of generation there 
 was to be no further evolution of new species through physical 
 
 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 434-454. Also the materialistic argu- 
 ment founded on evolution, pp. 455-536. 
 
 2 Part ii. Philosophical Works, vol. ii. p. 438. 
 
344 THE SELF-EEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 variation, but through the accumulation of psychical variations 
 one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected and raised 
 to a totally different plane from that on which all life had hith- 
 erto existed. Henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evo- 
 lution was to be not the genesis of species but the progress of 
 civilization. As we thoroughly grasp the meaning of all this, we 
 see that upon the Darwinian theory it is impossible that any 
 creature zoologically distinct from Man and superior to him 
 should ever at any future time exist upon the earth. . . . Accord- 
 ing to Darwinism, the creation of man is still the goal toward 
 which Nature tended from the beginning. Not the production 
 of any higher creature, but the perfecting of Humanity, is to be 
 the glorious consummation of Nature's long and tedious work. 
 Thus we suddenly arrive at the conclusion that Man seems now,, 
 much more clearly than ever, the chief among God's creatures. 
 ... In the deadly struggle for existence which has raged through- 
 out countless aeons of time, the whole creation has been groaning 
 and travailing together in order to bring forth that last consum- 
 mate specimen of God's handiwork, the Human Soul. . . . The 
 materialistic assumption that . . . the life of the soul ends with 
 the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of base- 
 less assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. . . . 
 The doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic 
 view of the position of man. . . . The Darwinian theory, prop- 
 erly understood, replaces as much teleology as it destroys. From 
 the first dawning of life we see all things working together to- 
 ward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most exalted spiritual 
 qualities which characterize Humanity. . . . The more thoroughly 
 we comprehend that process of evolution by which things have 
 come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to 
 deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in Man 
 is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far toward 
 putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see 
 that any one has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a suf- 
 ficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative. For my 
 own part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul, not 
 in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, 
 but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work. 
 . . . According to Mr. Spencer, the divine energy which is man- 
 ifested throughout the knowable universe is the same that wells 
 up in the human consciousness. Speaking for myself, I can see 
 no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 345 
 
 evolution of Humanity this divine spark may have acquired suffi- 
 cient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of mate- 
 rial forms and endure forever. Such a crowning wonder seems 
 to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has 
 been ineffably beautiful and marvelous in all its myriad stages." 1 
 But if rational and personal beings exist, the absolute Being, 
 that is the ultimate ground of the universe, must be absolute Rea- 
 son as well as absolute Power. This is a necessary inference 
 on the principle that the cause must be adequate to produce 
 the effect. Rational persons have powers of which matter, in 
 any sense in which the word is legitimately used, is destitute. 
 It therefore cannot be their cause. The evolution of matter by 
 its own forces in purely physical processes into personal beings 
 would be an effect without a cause. Finite rational beings can 
 have the ultimate ground of their existence only in the abso- 
 lute Reason, the personal God who knows all the rational truths, 
 the rational laws, the rational ideals of perfection, the rational 
 ends which are constituent in the rationality of the personal be- 
 ings whom he has brought into existence. " He that teacheth 
 man knowledge, shall not he know ? " We have found in the 
 physical system evidences of a directing mind guiding the power 
 energizing in it and indicating that the universe is ultimately 
 grounded in Reason. Still more decisive and imperative is the 
 evidence of the same in the existence in the universe of rational 
 beings and a rational and moral system. We may reasonably 
 expect that the progress of thought, whether starting from the 
 psychical or the physical facts in the universe, will issue in the 
 decisive and agreeing belief that psychical acts and processes can 
 be accounted for only by referring them to psychical agents ; 
 that rational beings and a rational system exist, which transcend 
 the physical and cannot be accounted for by it, but which reveal 
 the absolute Reason, energizing in it in the expression of arche- 
 typal truth, in accordance with eternal and rational laws, and in 
 the progressive realization of rational ideals and good. 
 
 II. GOD REVEALED AS PERSONAL SPIRIT IN THE CONSTITU- 
 TIONAL RELIGIOUSNESS OF MAN. God is revealed in the reli- 
 giousness of man, which, with the included belief in a divinity, 
 is a common characteristic of humanity, is spontaneous, powerful 
 and persistent, and is thus found to have root in the common 
 constitution of man. 
 
 1. Religion, with the belief in a divinity, is a common charac- 
 1 The Destiny of Man, pp. 30, 31, 32, 110, 112, 115, 116, 117. 
 
346 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 teristic of humanity ; it is generic, spontaneous, powerful and 
 persistent. 
 
 Religion, with the belief in a divinity, is a common character- 
 istic of humanity. It has already been shown that there is no 
 religion without a divinity ; that in all religions, however rude 
 the worshipers' conceptions of their gods, some sense of the pres- 
 ence of an infinite spirit is always discernible; in their concep- 
 tions it is always possible to trace at least some rudiments of the 
 two distinctive characteristics of a divinity, that it is spirit, and 
 that it is absolute or infinite. In the powers energizing in nature 
 they saw powers thinking and willing like themselves ; they also 
 saw these mighty agencies acting beyond their reach and control, 
 and were awed before them as superhuman and mysterious 
 powers. In this awe their souls were already overshadowed by 
 the mystery of the Infinite. 
 
 Modern scientific theories imply that man at his origin was 
 neither savage nor civilized, but simply undeveloped. It is known 
 that whatever progress man has made in his development, there 
 have been degenerations from it. Many religions have been 
 known to be degenerate. Such was the religion of the Roman 
 empire as described by Paul in the opening of the Epistle to the 
 Romans. This fact must have its due weight in investigating the 
 characteristics of religions. But in all religions, even those which 
 are degenerated, some sense of the divinity as an infinite spirit, 
 as spirit above nature and above man, may always be found. 
 There is veneration, awe or fear of a supernatural and superhu- 
 man being or beings. Therefore the belief in a divinity, being 
 involved in all religions, is as universal as religion. 
 
 Religion with the belief in a divinity is a common and distinc- 
 tive characteristic of man. Plutarch says : " If you will take 
 the pains to travel through the world, you may find towns and 
 cities without walls, without letters, without kings, without 
 houses, without wealth, without money, without theatres and 
 places of exercise ; but there was never seen by ;my man any city 
 without temples and gods/' * Cicero says : " Among men there 
 is no clan so wild and savage as not to know that a divinity is to 
 be worshiped, although ignorant what the true God should be." 
 And Homer says : " All men long for the gods." 2 They are like 
 unfledged birds, by an impulse of nature opening their bills wide 
 for food which is to be brought from beyond the nest. 
 
 1 Against Colotes the Epicurean, 31; Morals, Goodwin's Trans., vol. v, 
 pp. 379, 380. 
 
 2 Cicero, De Legibus, lib. i. 8 ; Odyssey, iii. 48. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN, 347 
 
 Modern science confirms what has been the common testimony 
 from the earliest historical times, that religion has been a char- 
 acteristic of all races and tribes of men. The most advanced re- 
 searches in anthropology reach the conclusion that no tribe of 
 men has ever been found without religion. Tylor says : " So far 
 as I can judge from the immense mass of accessible evidence, we 
 have to admit that the belief in spiritual beings appears among 
 all low races with whom we have attained to thorough intimate 
 acquaintance." l Quatrefages says : " Little by little the light 
 has appeared, and the result has been that Australians, Melane- 
 sians, Hottentots, Kaffirs and Bechuanas have in their turn been 
 withdrawn from the list of atheist nations and recognized as re- 
 ligious. . . . We nowhere meet with atheism except in an erratic 
 condition. In every place and at all times the mass of popula- 
 tion have escaped it ; we nowhere find either a great human race, 
 or even a division, however unimportant, of the race, preferring 
 atheism." 2 Tiele says : " The statement, that there are nations 
 or tribes which possess no religion, rests either on inaccurate ob- 
 servation or on a confusion of ideas. No tribe or nation has yet 
 been met with destitute of belief in any higher beings ; and 
 travelers who asserted their existence have been afterwards re- 
 futed by the facts. It is legitimate therefore to call religion in 
 its most general sense a universal phenomenon of humanity." 3 
 Accordingly, Professor Tyndall and other modern skeptics of 
 science and culture admit the same ; they recognize religion as 
 constitutional in man, and requiring provision to be made for it ; 
 although they affirm that its object cannot be known but can 
 only be imagined. 
 
 The common belief of mankind in a divinity is also spontane- 
 ous. It is not the result of any generalization of particulars, nor 
 of any induction from facts, nor of reflective thought in any form. 
 There are no "Evidences" or " Apologetics " in the ethnic re- 
 ligions. On the contrary this belief springs up with the spon- 
 taneity of life. Man finds himself limited, dependent, face to 
 face with mighty and mysterious powers. He spontaneously looks 
 beyond himself to another. He feels rather than thinks the pres- 
 ence of a divinity in these mighty energies. As the impression 
 of the mountains, the sun, the sky, the lightning and the storm is 
 borne in on his senses, so on his spirit is borne in the impression 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 384 
 
 2 Quatrefaaes, The Human Species, pp. 475, 482, 483. 
 
 8 Tiele, History of Religion, Carpenter s Translation, p. 6. 
 
348 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of a spiritual and mysterious presence in these grandeurs of na- 
 ture. In his straits he feels his need and cries to the divinity for 
 help ; like a little child astray from its mother on the street and 
 in the sense of utter helplessness blindly crying for her return. 
 
 This common belief in a divinity is also powerful. Its influ- 
 ence has not been obscure and uncertain. It has been one of the 
 most powerful forces in human history. It has also been a cen- 
 tral agency in man's moral progress. The Christian religion,, 
 among others, and its historical influence must be accounted for. 
 It cannot be accounted for on the supposition of the atheist. The 
 mightiest and most beneficent agency in human progress cannot 
 be a delusion founded only on falsehood. 
 
 It must be added that this belief is persistent. It has the char- 
 acteristic of primitive belief that it persists in the face of unex- 
 plained difficulties. Tylor relates that certain African savagea 
 were asked how their divinities could partake of their offerings, 
 since the meats which they had set forth for them at night were 
 found unconsumed and unchanged in the morning. They were 
 not in the least shaken in their belief, but replied without hesita- 
 tion that the spirits licked them. 1 It persists also in spite of the 
 speculations and opposition of atheism. It has the characteristic 
 of a primitive belief that it persists in the feelings and spontane- 
 ous beliefs and actions, even when by intellectual questionings the 
 man has brought himself to speculative doubt or unbelief. So 
 the idealist practically treats outward things as objectively real. 
 So Madame De Stael said of ghosts, I do not believe in them, but 
 I fear them ; her spontaneous and true belief in spiritual and 
 supernatural beings persisting in the feelings and asserting itself 
 in consciousness at the very thought of supernatural manifesta- 
 tions even in forms admitted to be unreal. 
 
 Atheism has never been able to establish itself except within 
 very narrow limits. We find individual atheists, but not atheis- 
 tic races, tribes or peoples. And at no period has mankind ever 
 been atheistic. Quatrefages says : " Obliged as I am to pass in 
 review all races of men, I have sought for atheism in the lowest 
 and the highest, but nowhere have I met with it except in in- 
 dividuals or at most in some more or less limited schools, such as 
 those which existed in Europe in the last century, or which may 
 be seen at the present day." 2 
 
 In this sporadic existence atheism is manifestly a departure 
 
 1 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 351. 
 
 2 The Human Species, p. 482. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 349 
 
 from a primitive religiousness. It is the product of speculative 
 thought which has led some away from their primitive religious 
 belief, just as it has also led some to deny all knowledge of the 
 existence of the outward world. And where atheistic schools and 
 parties have appeared, as in the first French revolution and 
 among the Nihilists now, it has been brought about through some 
 revolutionary craze in which belief in God has been falsely iden- 
 tified with injustice and oppression, or through some other ex- 
 traneous influence falsifying the significance and influence of re- 
 ligious belief ; or through moral corruption, or anarchical fury, 
 which must first break down all belief in God in order to ac- 
 complish its evil designs. And even thus the number of atheists 
 has always been comparatively very small. The number of per- 
 sons who have come to a speculative disbelief of the existence of 
 a divinity and have avowed themselves atheists is probably not 
 greater than the number who have come to a speculative disbe- 
 lief of the existence of the outward world and have avowed them- 
 selves idealists or phenomenalists. The latter half of the last 
 century was a period noted for the prevalence of atheism. But 
 when David Hume was in Paris doing the duties of secretary to 
 the embassy, it happened one evening at the table of Baron 
 d'Holbach that the conversation turned on natural religion, and 
 Mr. Hume declared that in all his life he had never met an athe- 
 ist. The baron replied, You now encounter seventeen all in a 
 bunch. Hume did not ask to be counted as the eighteenth. He 
 had never seen an atheist in Great Britain. But at that time 
 atheism was spreading in France ; and it is a common impression 
 that a few years later, in the revolution, all France was atheistic. 
 Yet probably in the highest frenzy of the revolution the atheists 
 were a small minority of the population of that country. Some 
 years before this incident Mr. Hume's mother died. His friend 
 Boyle, finding him in the deepest affliction and in a flood of tears, 
 expressed regret that he had not the consolations of the Christian 
 faith. Mr. Hume replied : " Ah, my friend, I throw out my 
 speculations to entertain the learned and metaphysical world ; 
 yet, in other things, I do not think so differently from the rest of 
 the world as you imagine." * 
 
 Atheism is short-lived as well as circumscribed. No scheme 
 of thought, so earnestly advocated as atheism at times' has been, 
 ever makes so few converts or lasts so short a time. In the 
 
 1 Revue des Deux Mondes, 1856, \o\. vi. pp. 118, 119; Burton's Life of 
 Hume, vol. i. pp. 293, 294. 
 
350 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 French revolution the festival of Reason in Notre Dame, Novem- 
 ber 7, 1793, was followed in less than eight months by Robes- 
 pierre's scenic restoration of the Supreme Being in a festival in 
 the Tuileries and the Champ de Mars. When atheism has burned 
 over a communit} 7 and seemingly has consumed the very roots 
 and seeds of religion, presently religious belief reappears, as 
 vegetation springs up on burned land. And it springs up again, 
 not by force of argument but spontaneously ; because man can- 
 not get on without it ; because man's spirit asserts anew its es- 
 sential relation to God and dependence on him. It is the renewal 
 of the ancient cry, which utters the inmost need of the human 
 heart in every age : " As the hart panteth after the water- brooks, 
 so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for 
 God, for the living God ; when shall I come and appear before 
 God ? " 
 
 The same is true in the history of agnostic and monistic spec- 
 ulations, which, with intellectual assent to the existence of an 
 absolute Being, deny that it can be known as a personal Spirit 
 with whom it is possible for man to commune in acts of trust and 
 service. The objection is urged that hundreds of millions of 
 Asiatics are satisfied with the abstractions of Buddhism and 
 Brahmanism, without the worship of a personal divinity. Just 
 the contrary is the fact. The abstract speculations of Buddhism 
 and Brahmanism never satisfied the religious wants "of the peo- 
 ple ; but they are the worshipers of many gods. " Buddha (the 
 Enlightened), which was at first only a title given to the founder 
 of the religion, became in course of time the real substitute for 
 God in the minds of hundreds of millions of men ; and Buddha, 
 or Lama in Thibet, was any one who succeeded in making peo- 
 ple believe that he was a real incarnation of a previous Buddha ; 
 and for the mass of the people there was and there is yet no 
 other God." l Instead of recognizing no God accessible to wor- 
 ship and communion the Buddhists seem to be universal believ- 
 ers in prayer; one of their forms of prayer is probably repeated 
 more times every day than the Lord's Prayer or any other form 
 of prayer known to man. And not satisfied with the abundance 
 of prayer from their own lips, they are the only people that ever 
 resorted also to prayer-mills that they might be sure that their 
 petitions were being always presented before God. It is not true 
 therefore that four hundred millions of Asiatics are atheists or at 
 least pantheists believing in no personal God with whom man can 
 1 Gentilism, by Thdbaud, pp. 157, 158. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 351 
 
 commune in acts of trust and service. On the contrary, it is a 
 striking exemplification of the common historical fact that when 
 atheistic speculation has prevailed with a few and for a time, it 
 is speedily swept away among the people by the return of belief 
 in a divinity that can be the object of religious trust and service. 
 In view of such facts we may say with Kuenen : " The religious 
 faith that has once struck root in the heart of a people never 
 dies." i 
 
 It is also a significant fact that when the higher classes of so- 
 ciety in any country are sliding into skepticism and abandoning 
 religion, fantastic or fanatical superstitions break out among the 
 less educated, and even get control of the skeptics themselves. 
 The decline of religious belief in the Roman Empire was ac- 
 companied by a remarkable prevalence of magic arts and of be- 
 lief in them. The materialism and agnosticism of the present 
 time are accompanied by a wide-spread belief in spirit-rappings. 
 
 In individuals who have become skeptical or atheistic the sus- 
 ceptibility to religious sentiment survives and frequently reas- 
 serts itself and brings back belief in a God, sometimes in very re- 
 markable ways. Many agnostics, positivists and materialists of 
 the present day acknowledge that religion belongs to the consti- 
 tution of man and must have some object provided for it. Various 
 objects have been proposed, among which are the Unknowable, 
 the Great Human Being or Generic Humanity, the Universe it- 
 self, and even Physical Science. None of these can satisfy man's 
 spiritual needs, but the proposals are so many testimonies to the 
 universality of religious sentiments and wants and to the neces- 
 sity of some object of religious reverence and homage adequate 
 to satisfy them. The religious sentiment often asserts itself also 
 in persons who have long lived in apparent unconsciousness of it. 
 Comte, until after he published the Positive Philosophy, appears 
 not to have recognized religion as having any legitimate place 
 in the further development of individuals or of society. It had 
 played its part, had passed through all its necessary stages and 
 now must pass away. But when he was nearly fifty years old, 
 in his acquaintance with Madame Clotilde de Vaux and his grief 
 at her death soon after, sentiment and feeling burst through the 
 rocky strata of intellectuality which had repressed and concealed 
 them and flamed up in language expressing nothing less than 
 adoration of her. In this crisis of his life his religious conscious- 
 ness was awakened and he proposed Humanity itself as the Great 
 1 National Religions and Universal Religions, p. 40. 
 
352 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Being to be the object of religious worship and service. Another 
 example of the same is found in the life of John Stuart Mill. He 
 says explicitly that he was of the few who have never thrown off 
 religion because they had never had it. " I looked upon the 
 modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something 
 which no way concerned me." His education was chilling to all 
 sentiment and his life was preeminently a life of the intellect. 
 In his love for Mrs. Taylor, who became his wife, the emotional 
 forces of his being broke their long repression and asserted them- 
 selves with might. And in this and his grief at her death, which, 
 like Comte, he utters in language of adoration, he seems to have 
 become aware of religious sentiments and wants. In the case of 
 each of these men the woman seems to have exerted an influence 
 on his religiously benumbed and undeveloped soul analogous to 
 that exerted in the middle ages by the Virgin Mary. 
 
 These cases exemplify the fact that frequently what awakens 
 the unbeliever to the consciousness of the spiritual and the divine 
 is not argument nor clear and convincing presentation of truth 
 to the intellect. The human spirit is in its constitution adapted 
 to the spiritual system of which it is a member. In every soul 
 is a secret chord responsive to the touch of the spiritual and the 
 divine, as the strings of a violin respond to the touch of the bow 
 in the hand of a musician. Hence the slumbering religious sus- 
 ceptibility may be awakened by a vivid picturing of spiritual 
 realities to the imagination, or of the love of God in Christ to 
 the heart. It may be awakened by new emergencies, by bereave- 
 ment, by danger, as Volney at a time of expected shipwreck was 
 found praying. And, though according to my observation men 
 usually die in the belief and character in which they have lived, 
 yet sometimes the religious susceptibilities are awakened and 
 previous unbelief is swept away at the approach of death. That 
 which awakens these sensibilities and leads from unbelief to 
 belief may be something which judged by the logical understand- 
 ing seems trivial. Dr. George B. Cheever relates that a pastor 
 had long labored with a man to convince him of God's righteous 
 government and judgment of the world, but in vain. But this 
 man felled a tree and as it came crashing down and lay motion- 
 less where it fell, the words came to his mind, " Where the tree 
 falleth there it shall' be," with a force which carried away all his 
 unbelief, let in the flood of the divine argument upon his soul, 
 and brought him at length to Christian faith and repentance. 1 
 1 The Powers of the World to Come, p. 64. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 353 
 
 A most unreasoning and unreasonable change, it will be said. 
 Most reasonable, I answer, though unreasoning. It matters not 
 what awakens the spiritual susceptibilities of the soul ; once 
 awakened it must turn to God, its only satisfaction and rest, or 
 it must sink back into spiritual insensibility, fainting through 
 lack of the air by which alone the spiritual life can be sustained. 
 Hence comes such unexpected and seemingly inexplicable break- 
 ing down of unbelief in the great crises of life. And therefore 
 it is not strange, when the awful form of death is drawing near 
 and the shadow of his coming glooms upon the soul, that the 
 spiritual in the man awakes, as the body is sinking to its last 
 sleep, and finds itself, as the spirit when it awakes must always 
 find itself, face to face with God. 
 
 The present is commonly said to be a time of the suspense and 
 even of the decay of faith. On the other hand Mr. Lewes says : 
 u Ours is no longer the age described by Carlyle 'destitute of 
 faith yet terrified at skepticism.' It is an age clamorous for 
 faith, and dissatisfied with skepticism only when skepticism is a 
 resting place instead of a starting point, a result instead of a 
 preliminary caution. The purely negative attitude of unbelief, 
 once regarded as philosophical, is now generally understood to 
 be laudable only in the face of the demonstratively incredible." 1 
 The history of religion justifies the expectation that the present 
 time will prove rather to be a period of transition, and that be- 
 neath the earnest thinking which doubt and questioning have 
 called forth, the germs are already sprouting of a faith purer, 
 stronger and more comprehensive of all that is distinctively 
 Christian. And however science may emphasize the physical 
 origin and nature of man, it only presents in clearer light by the 
 contrast his spiritual being. As Dr. Thomson, Archbishop of 
 York, says : " You may lower the position of man by comparing 
 him to the apes and by chemical analysis of his brain ; all the 
 more wonderful is it that a creature in such sorry case should 
 pretend to hold communion with the divine. His feet are in the 
 earthy clay, but his head is lifted up toward heaven. Heir to a 
 hundred maladies, the sport of a hundred passions, holding on 
 this life, so checkered in its complexion, but for a few days, this 
 creature cries out of his trouble : 4 God exists ; and he can see 
 and hear me.' " 2 
 
 2. From the foregoing evidence of the universality, spontane- 
 
 1 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. i. pp. 1, 2. 
 
 2 Modern Skepticism, p. 18. 
 
354 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ity, power and persistence of religious belief, the inference is 
 legitimate and necessary that religion with the belief in a divin- 
 ity involved in it has root in the constitution of man and is an 
 essential and distinctive trait of humanity. 1 In other words, the 
 inference is that man is so constituted that when normally de- 
 veloped he finds himself in the presence of a divinity and con- 
 scious of religiousness. And this is inferred, not merely from 
 the prevalence of belief in a divinity in all tribes of men, but 
 also from its spontaneity, power and persistence. Men pray to a 
 divinity before they attempt to prove its existence. They are 
 religious before they are scientific either in empirical, philosoph- 
 ical or theological science. And their spontaneous belief in a 
 God is the basis of their theological knowledge ; as their spon- 
 taneous belief in the existence of the earth, the sun, moon and 
 stars is the basis of physics and astronomy. A belief thus per- 
 vasive, spontaneous, powerful and persistent can be satisfactorily 
 explained only as resulting from the normal development of the 
 constitution of man. When man's constitution is normally de- 
 veloped the idea of a divinity and the sentiments of religion will 
 reveal themselves in his consciousness. 
 
 On the contrary, atheism is not spontaneous ; it arises only 
 from reflective thought, after skepticism in its better meaning 
 has made its appearance and man has begun to investigate the 
 grounds of religious belief. In this respect man is found in three 
 stages. In the outset the child is destitute of religious feelings 
 and ideas; it knows no divinity. This is not atheism, but is 
 simply infancy, in which all the powers are undeveloped. The 
 second stage is that of spontaneous religious sentiment and be- 
 lief. The third is that of reflective thought on religion and its 
 object. This commonly confirms and purifies from error the spon- 
 taneous religion and its beliefs, and develops them into thought- 
 ful conviction that a divinity exists and is to be worshiped, and 
 into some definite apprehension of what the divinity is and what 
 service is acceptable to him. In some cases, however, though 
 comparatively few, the questioning and thinking issue in some 
 form of atheism. But in the second stage, that of spontaneous 
 belief, man is always religious and atheism is never found. 
 
 Not merely is the belief in a divinity the spontaneous result 
 
 1 " It will not do to say, we have no * organ ' for procuring us such and 
 such experiences ; we must first inquire what experiences we actually have, 
 and then will follow the question, what ' organs ' are those by which they are 
 procured." Philosophy and Science, Mind, vol. i. p. 234. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 355 
 
 of man's normal development ; the idea of a divinity when once 
 attained is one with which the mind has affinity as congenial 
 with itself, and in which it finds its own powers and susceptibil- 
 ities unfolded and revealed in consciousness. The knowledge of 
 God is a revelation of the human spirit to itself. 
 
 Here it is sometimes objected that the idea of God is transmit- 
 ted by tradition ; children are taught the faith of their parents. 
 This is true ; and when religious belief has once pervaded a com- 
 munity, the transmission of it from parents to children is inevi- 
 table. It is also true that it is according to the constitution of 
 man that children are born of parents and in their early year* 
 must breathe the atmosphere of parental influence. Moreover 
 this very fact implies in the child a constitutional capacity for 
 religion. A child cannot be taught any thing which it has no 
 constitutional faculty to know or susceptibility to feel. It is im- 
 possible to teach a dog the multiplication table or the binomial 
 theorem, or a person blind from birth what is the sensation of 
 light and color. It is impossible to influence a person to action 
 by motives which he has no capacity to feel. Education can do 
 no more than to draw out or develop what is already in the per- 
 son who is educated. Plato in the Meno represents Socrates as 
 questioning a boy who answers wrong, but after repeated ques- 
 tions he sees the truth and gives the right answer. Then Soc- 
 rates says : " You see I have told him nothing, and yet he an- 
 swers right now. The idea was in his mind and all I had to do 
 was to draw it out." He then proceeds to illustrate education 
 as a drawing out of the mind. And, though the idea was not 
 literally in the boy's mind, the capacity of knowing it was there, 
 by which, under the stimulus of the questions, he discovered it 
 himself. Even when information is directly imparted the pupil 
 must apprehend it by the action of his own faculties or not at 
 all. Equally impossible is it to impart to a child any idea of a 
 God or to awaken any religious sentiments, if the child is not con- 
 stituted with powers and susceptibilities for them. And we find 
 the minds of very young children active in laying hold of the re- 
 ligious ideas communicated to them and trying to frame to them- 
 selves the ideas of God and spiritual realities ; pondering not 
 merely God's love and the personal attributes revealed in the life 
 of Christ, but also the idea of the absolute, and wondering over 
 an existence without beginning or end, space without bounds, 
 power that is almighty, and knowledge of all things from which 
 nothing can be hid. The child's ideas are childlike. But they 
 
356 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 are ideas in the sphere of the divine and reveal a capacity to 
 know God. And in this activity of a child's mind we can see 
 some image of the action of the primitive men in the childhood 
 of the race trying to define to themselves, without a human 
 teacher, the idea of a god. 
 
 Seneca says : " Do you wonder that men go to the gods ? God 
 comes to men ; indeed, more exactly, God comes into men ; no 
 heart is good without God. Seeds of the divine are scattered in 
 human bodies, which, if well cultivated, spring up and grow in 
 the likeness of their original." l The earlier Stoics taught man's 
 self-sufficiency and denied the need of faith in a God in moral ac- 
 tion and character ; but the later acknowledged man's dependence 
 for right character and life on the indwelling God. Their ideal 
 wise man was a God man, in whom the Logos or absolute Reason 
 dwelt. In this and other passages in Seneca's writings this change 
 is noticeable. But the divinity cannot find entrance to the soul 
 of man and influence it for good unless man is constituted with 
 capacity for communing with God and receiving his influence. 
 This Seneca recognizes. The seeds of the divine must be in the 
 man or no culture can cause any thing in him to grow in the 
 likeness of the divine. And this must be acknowledged unless 
 we fall into pantheism, as the Stoics did, and recognize in man 
 no personality of his own, but only the absolute Reason itself 
 shining in the human being as the sunshine reveals itself tempo- 
 rarily on some angle of a diamond as a single point of light. 
 
 All this is illustrated in the education of the deaf and dumb. 
 The testimony of their most successful teachers has been that they 
 are less developed than pupils of the same age who hear ; and 
 that the absence of the idea of God is not atheism, but is merely 
 an incident of the undeveloped mind. One of them writes : 
 *' Our readers may be interested to learn the first steps of the 
 method pursued in imparting to the deaf and dumb a knowledge 
 of the soul, and of God and his attributes. . . . We have not to 
 construct an argument to which the mind of an inveterate skep- 
 tic, if there, could bring no objection, but rather to trace the path, 
 along which a mind anxious to know the truth might reach a sat- 
 isfactory conclusion. It is not so much, even to the deaf mute, 
 an introduction of new facts, as pointing out the relations of those 
 he already knows, although they have never excited his attention, 
 and leading him to draw the plain and obvious inference. ... In 
 order to introduce the idea of God to the mind of the deaf and 
 
 1 Seneca, Epist. 73 : 14. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 357 
 
 dumb, you have only to educate or develop the reflective power 
 to a certain point. ... As we should expect, in most cases the idea 
 of God would enter gradually. . . . With some individuals how- 
 ever it has happened that in following a course of thought like 
 that above suggested, the sublime idea of God has seemed to burst 
 at once upon the mind with overwhelming power. The temple 
 that before was tenantless and lonely is filled with glory and the 
 soul shrinks with awe and amazement before the presence of its 
 Maker, till now unknown. Similar to this was the experience of 
 Massieu, the celebrated pupil of the Abbe Sicard." The Abb6 
 relates that, when, after preparing his mind in the way already 
 adverted to, he announced to him God, the author of the beings 
 that he saw and the object of our worship, Massieu, awed and 
 trembling, " prostrated himself and thus offered to this great Be- 
 ing the first homage of his worship and adoration. When recov- 
 ered from this sort of ecstasy he said to me by signs these beau- 
 tiful words, which I shall not forget while I have life : * Ah, let 
 me go to my father, to my mother, to my brothers to tell them 
 there is a God ; they know it not.' " l 
 
 But we are concerned not merely with the origin and develop- 
 ment of the idea of a divinity. It is a fact that man has the idea 
 of God in all its fulness and majesty as held in Christian theism. 
 It is also a fact that from the ruder conceptions of a divinity held 
 in man's savage state, men have advanced till they have attained 
 the grand conception of God which Christianity presents. Men 
 have actually come to believe that God is the absolute Being, self- 
 existent, eternal, omnipresent, almighty, the absolute and univer- 
 sal Reason, the eternal Spirit perfect in wisdom and love. Mr. 
 Tyndall says man has no faculty and no rudiment of a faculty by 
 which he can know that a divinity exists. How then has he 
 come by the idea of God ? Why is the belief in the existence of 
 a God the common characteristic of humanity ? Why has it been 
 so spontaneous, powerful and persistent ? How comes man by 
 the ideas of eternity, immensity, unconditionedness? Some say 
 that they come from his knowledge of his own limitations. But 
 how can I have the ideas of finiteness, conditionedness and imper- 
 fection except as I contrast them with the ideas of the unlimited,, 
 the unconditioned, the perfect ? And if it is said that these ideas 
 and the idea of the all-perfect God have been communicated by 
 tradition, this only pushes us back on the question, How did it 
 
 1 American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, vol. vi. No. iii., April, 1854, pp. 
 139, 140. 
 
358 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Originate, so that man's ancestors had it to transmit? Certainly, 
 if the belief in a divinity has no root in the constitution of man, 
 if man has no rudiment of a faculty for knowing God, then this 
 grand idea of the absolute Spirit, infinite in power and perfect in 
 wisdom and love, could not have been originated by man nor 
 even communicated to him by instruction or revelation from with- 
 out. The idea would simply be impossible to him. 
 
 It is sometimes objected that the idea of God is a figment of 
 the imagination. The impossibility of this is now evident. The 
 imagination cannot create a new element of thought ; it can only 
 combine elements already given. The idea of a divinity contains 
 elements of thought which imagination could never have invented. 
 
 The belief in a divinity rises spontaneously in the religious 
 consciousness Of man. In attempting to define and develop in 
 thought the idea of God involved in this belief, man makes mis- 
 takes. Here the imagination comes in and combines the ele- 
 ments presented in the religious consciousness into various and 
 sometimes fantastic forms. This is very different from the thor- 
 ough-going imagination supposed by the objector, which creates 
 the idea itself and all the elements entering into it. And yet in 
 all the varied forms in which the divinity has been imagined es- 
 sential elements of the true idea are always found. The divinity 
 is always conceived as at least a supernatural and superhuman 
 power, transcending the thought that would define it. Schelling 
 speaks of the ethnic mythologies as religion growing wild. But 
 wild plants are living plants, and when developed under cultiva- 
 tion to greater beauty of flower and richness of fruit are still the 
 same plants developed. As Professor Pfleiderer says : " The im- 
 agination, in as it were instinctive rationality, anticipates the 
 highest truth of reason, to which philosophical thought always 
 monies back at last, that the world is the manifestation of the 
 same Spirit which in the Ego gives us immediate knowledge of 
 itself as our own essence ; " 1 or, as I should put it, as spirit in 
 essence like ourselves. And in studying the ethnic religions we 
 find their true significance only as we recognize in them attempts 
 more or less successful to define the idea of God as he reveals 
 himself in the universe and in the spirit of man, and the at- 
 tainment, with the progressive development of man, of ideas of 
 God more worthy of the approval of reason and more satisfying 
 to the needs of the unfolding spiritual capacities and life. Even 
 polytheism is not wholly unlike monotheism. The numerical 
 1 Religionsphil. p. 277. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 359 
 
 distinction does not tell all the facts. Professor Max Miiller has 
 shown that in some polytheistic religions, each god becomes to 
 the worshiper the representative for the time being of the supreme 
 God. " Each god is felt at the time as supreme and absolute, in 
 spite of the necessary limitation which to our minds a plurality 
 of gods must entail on every single god." l And in the most dis- 
 tinctive polytheism each god, presiding over some department or 
 power of nature, stands in the mind of the worshiper for one as- 
 pect of the divine. And when in the later religion of the Roman 
 Empire every condition and act of life had its separate divinity, 
 that seeming extreme of polytheism was really an approximation 
 to theism in recognizing the dependence of everything on God 
 and the presence and action of God everywhere. Polytheism con- 
 fronted with the necessity of an infinite number of gods was al- 
 ready demonstrating its own incapacity and falsity and pointing 
 to the one supreme and everywhere present God. 
 
 Here the objection is urged that historically religion does not 
 begin with the worship of a personal Spirit, but of physical ob- 
 jects and powers. This theory of the origin of religion has re- 
 cently been presented with learning and ability by Mr. Keary. 2 
 He argues that, as physical things and motions are supposed to 
 have been designated by words before the mind and mental proc- 
 esses were thus designated, so religion must have begun with 
 the worship of material things and physical powers. He sup- 
 poses that religion began as fetich-worship, and that the great 
 fetich-gods of the early world were three, and three only, the 
 tree, the mountain, and the river. His explanation of tree-wor- 
 ship is this: Primeval men lived on roots and berries or on the 
 smaller animals and the vermin which they gathered from the 
 soil, and so habitually kept their eyes fixed on the ground. In 
 their half glances upward they had not leisure to observe that 
 the tree-top was not really close against the sky. " They may 
 well have deemed that the upper branches hid themselves in in- 
 finitely remote ethereal regions." It appears, it may be re- 
 marked in passing, that these primitive men, who had never 
 learned that a tree does not touch the sky, had the idea of " in- 
 finitely remote ethereal regions." Fetichism, beginning with the 
 worship of an individual tree, " passed on to the worship of many 
 trees, of the grove of trees, and it soon proceeded thence to a 
 
 1 Hibbert Lectures, p. 285. 
 
 2 Outlines of Primitive Beliefs, ay Charles F. Keary, of the British Mu- 
 seum, pp. 37, 58, 59, 30, 31. 
 
360 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 worship of some invisible belonging of the grove. This might 
 be the sacred silence which seems to reign in the wood, or the 
 storm which rushes through it, or any of the dim, mysterious 
 forest sounds. From the visible and tangible things of earth re- 
 ligion looked farther away to the heavenly bodies or to the sky 
 itself. And then at last it emerged from the nature-worshiping 
 stage, and the voice of God, which was heard once in the whirl- 
 wind, was now heard only in the still small voice within." Others 
 have taught that man derived his idea of a spirit and ultimately 
 of a divinity from his own shadow. These are examples of 
 theories in various forms which agree in teaching that physical 
 things and powers are the primary objects of religious worship 
 and that from these man at last derives the idea of a personal 
 spirit and a personal divinity. 
 
 This theory of the origin of religion is philosophically improb- 
 able. Man knows himself as exerting power in moving outward 
 objects and knows them as resisting his exertion. In this his 
 idea of power and cause begins. He knows also that he can pro- 
 duce effects with an instrument external to his body, as when he 
 knocks off a nut with a stick or stone. He knows also that there 
 is in him in all these acts a power of unseen thought and will. 
 When he sees movements of bodies beyond the reach and control 
 of himself or any known living being, he naturally refers the 
 effect to some agent that thinks and wills like himself. Thus the 
 idea of a personal spirit, however imperfectly apprehended, must 
 have been one of the first instead of the last. It is going far 
 round-about to imagine that man gets his idea of spirit from 
 physical things after many generations of nature-worship, when 
 all the time he has the idea implicitly in his consciousness of 
 himself, and in this, after whatever delay, must find all the ele- 
 ments of the idea. 
 
 The theory is also contrary to facts, so far as known. The 
 rudest fetich-worshiper believes that the fetich is the shrine of an 
 unseen divinity. In all nature- worship it is found that man wor- 
 ships in nature an unseen power, resembling yet transcending 
 the intelligent and voluntary power of man, and while above 
 visible nature, directing and controlling it. This Mr. Keary un- 
 wittingly recognizes when he says that the nature-worshiper 
 " hears the voice of God in the whirlwind." Religion begins as 
 nature-worship, because the objects of nature, the sun, the 
 heavens, the dawn, the ocean and rivers, revealing powers be- 
 yond man's reach and control, are the revealers to him of a 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 361 
 
 power that is above nature and above man, a power that is di- 
 vine. And this power he conceives of as a power that thinks and 
 wills, that he can call on for help, that he can please or displease. 
 In all religions man recognizes in nature an intelligent, spiritual 
 power like his own. As Pfleiderer says : " The imagination of 
 the childlike man ensouls all nature ; that is, treats it, especially 
 the phenomena of motion, after the analogy of the human or 
 animal life, between which he does not discriminate; thus he 
 sees in every process the effect of a conscious and voluntarily act- 
 ing soul." l So Ulrici puts it : " The manifold nature-religions 
 (so called) from Shamanism and Fetichism up to the most de- 
 veloped mythical systems, in the last ground do not rest, as has 
 commonly been supposed, on a deification of mere objects and 
 powers of nature, but have gone forth from a perception of the 
 Divine, though dim and undefined ; of a Power working behind 
 the phenomena of nature. Not till afterwards do they come to 
 regard certain phenomena of nature as representatives of this 
 nameless, divine, original Power, or to identify them with it." 2 
 
 It must be added that the theory in question assumes what is 
 impossible. The idea of spirit cannot originate otherwise than 
 in man's knowledge of it in himself and in his fellow-men. If 
 man sees the spiritual revealed in nature it presupposes the 
 knowledge of the spiritual in himself. No lengthening of the 
 process of observing nature, as described by Mr. Keary, brings 
 him any nearer to the idea of spirit, unless he carries with him 
 the idea already derived from his knowledge of himself. Of a 
 theory of this class Burnouf says : " It still remains to ask how 
 mankind have effected this transformation of a metaphor or a 
 dream into a god, and what mysterious force has pushed them 
 into making the transition. ... In order to change any sensuous 
 impression into a god, there must have previously existed the 
 idea of a god." 
 
 With this the latest established conclusions of anthropological 
 investigations agree. The earliest form of religious sentiment 
 springs from the belief that in the activities and powers of phys- 
 ical things, at least in those which no agent is perceived to cause, 
 is a power intelligent and voluntary like man directing and con- 
 trolling them. The position of Comte, that religion begins in 
 fetichism, is no longer tenable. Facts abundantly prove that the 
 religions of the Greeks and Romans, the religions of India with 
 
 1 Religionsphil. pp. 277, 278. 
 
 2 Gott und der Mensch, vol. i. p. 697. 
 
362 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 their innumerable incarnations, the religion of Persia, recognize 
 personal divinities in and above the nature-powers in which they 
 reveal themselves. And the best established conclusion of anthro- 
 pology is that in fetichism and in all so called nature-worship, a 
 divinity that man can commune with, that he can please and dis- 
 please, is recognized in and above the phenomena and powers of 
 nature. 
 
 For every interest of science and religion we may willingly see 
 the intellectual rabies passing away which discovered profound 
 myths of nature-worship not only in the ethnic stories about the 
 gods, but also in folk-stories and nursery-rhymes, like those of the 
 Milkmaid and of Jack and Gill ; which discovered in the Odyssey 
 the adventures of the soul after death in seeking the abode of the 
 blessed, and in the Iliad the sun-myth, or, as it has also been in- 
 terpreted, a profound exposition in Helen of the nature and power 
 of Greek art. It supposes that the primitive peoples could not 
 tell a story or perpetuate a tradition which was not saturated with 
 the most profound religious and philosophical significance. They 
 who can believe all this cannot consistently regard it impossible 
 that the imaginings of primitive men respecting the divinity car- 
 ried in them anticipations and germs of rational truth and pre- 
 sentiments of the true knowledge of the spiritual and the divine. 
 
 Mr. Spencer rejects the theory that religion originates in the 
 immediate worship of natural objects and powers, and maintains 
 that it begins in the worship of the ghosts of the dead. Aside 
 from the impossibility, already alluded to, of accounting by this 
 theory for the worship of the divinity in the sun, the mountains, 
 the sky and other natural objects, the fatal objection is that man 
 cannot have the idea of ghosts of dead ancestors until he has first 
 the idea of the spirit in the living man. And it is going a very 
 roundabout way through this absurdity to suppose that man gets 
 the idea of a spirit from belief in the survival of the spirit of the 
 dead, instead of getting the idea of spirit and of its survival from 
 his implicit consciousness of the spiritual in himself. 
 
 It is objected by some that the knowledge of God originated 
 from a primitive revelation. This is true only in the sense that 
 the primitive knowledge of any object implies that the object has 
 revealed itself in some action on the man whereby he perceives 
 it. The same is true of the primitive revelation of God. But 
 this fact, instead of being an objection, is itself decisive proof 
 that man is constituted with capacity to know God. No object 
 can reveal itself to a being not constituted with capacity to know 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 363 
 
 it. The rose cannot reveal its sweetness to one destitute of smell, 
 nor its color and beauty to one who cannot see. God cannot 
 reveal himself to a dog by any action upon him, nor to any being 
 destitute of the spiritual capacity for religion and the knowledge 
 of God. Not even by any miracle or any Christ can he reveal 
 himself to such a being. 
 
 Miiller says that if you ask an Ashanti priest how he knows 
 that his fetich is not a common stone, he replies that the fetich 
 told him so. 1 And this is primitive revelation, as the objector 
 conceives it; man knows that the object of his worship is a god 
 because the god told him so. But this revelation by words pre- 
 supposes the idea of a god already known to the recipient of it. 
 Just as, if a scientist tells me that a cat is a vertebrate animal, 
 the communication presupposes my knowledge of a vertebrate 
 animal. The revelation is thus nullified. This comes from the 
 supposition that a primitive revelation must be made in words. 
 But it can be made only by the action of the object on the man 
 through which he apprehends the object, forms an idea of it and 
 then gives it a name. The object must be revealed before it can 
 be named. Hence a primitive revelation in words is impossible, 
 for it necessarily presupposes the knowledge of the object and of 
 the meaning of the words. 
 
 But primitive revelation in its true significance stands in no 
 contradiction to man's constitutional capacity to know God, but 
 is a concurrent factor with it in the knowledge. Revelation to a 
 being without capacity to know the object to be revealed would 
 impart no knowledge ; and equally man's capacity to know God 
 would give no knowledge of him, if God never revealed himself 
 within the consciousness of the man by any action of which the 
 man could take cognizance. Man has capacity to know a star ; 
 but he cannot know it if it has never revealed itself to his eye 
 or otherwise, by any effect of which the man can take cogni- 
 zance. As the star reveals itself to man by acting immediately 
 on his senses and by effects within the sphere of his observa- 
 tion, so God reveals himself by his action on man's spirit and 
 by effects within the sphere of spiritual cognizance. Thus reveal- 
 ing himself to the spirit of man, he calls into responsive action 
 the man's rational and moral powers and susceptibilities, his hid- 
 den sense of the mystery of the absolute and the infinite, and 
 all his spiritual capacities. Therein begins in man the implicit 
 consciousness of a divinity, and, at the same time, of himself as 
 1 Origin and Growth of Religion, pp. 163, 164, 118. 
 
364 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 having religious capacities, possibilities and needs. Nor does the 
 revelation cease ; it is continuous. God is always revealing him- 
 self in the constitution and course of nature and in the consti- 
 tution and history of man. It is a revelation, when man in the 
 fulness of time is prepared for it, culminating in Christ, and per- 
 petuated in the Holy Spirit poured out on all flesh to abide with 
 men forever. 
 
 The inference from the whole evidence which has been pre- 
 sented is decisive that religion and the belief in God have root in 
 the constitution of man ; that his normal development must bring 
 him to the consciousness of God. 
 
 3. Religion and the belief in God being thus constitutional 
 in man, the inference is legitimate and necessary that our be- 
 lief in God is a real, though inadequate knowledge of him. On 
 this point Janet says : " The only truly philosophical inquiry is, 
 whether religion is rooted in the very nature of man, or is but a 
 passing and ephemeral state, destined to disappear when a higher 
 degree of civilization is attained." l But the evidence already pre- 
 sented that religion is rooted in the constitution of man is deci- 
 sive and incontrovertible. God reveals himself in the constitution 
 and consciousness of man. In man's normal development he finds 
 himself in the presence of God. The inference is irresistible 
 that God exists, otherwise man's constitution normally developed 
 necessitates the belief of falsehood. The whole normal develop- 
 ment both of the individual and of society issues in falsehood. 
 And the falsehood is fundamental ; for what is really nonentity 
 must be believed to be the fundamental ground of the universe. 
 Necessarily, then, knowledge is impossible to man ; for the human 
 mind is discredited as false in its constitution, and therefore un- 
 trustworthy ; and since what we constitutionally believe to be 
 the fundamental ground of all reality is non-existent, all which 
 we believe to be reality is equally non-existent, and the whole 
 fabric of human knowledge dissolves into illusion. 
 
 If we ask what is the origin of our belief in the external world, 
 we cannot trace that belief historically to its beginning ; but we 
 know that the world reveals itself to man through the senses, 
 and that this revelation must have had its beginning with the 
 life of man because it is essential to his life on this earth ; the 
 knowledge is as real as the life. If we ask what is the origin of 
 the bodily appetites and the natural desires, we know that they 
 must be commensurate with the natural life which cannot go on 
 1 Theory of Morals, Trans, pp. 472, 473. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 365 
 
 without them ; they attest the laws that the waste of the body 
 must be replenished by food, that man is made for society and 
 the like. So religion and the belief in God are commensurate 
 with the spiritual life and attest the reality of its laws and of the 
 objects with which the spiritual life is correlated. From the 
 universality, spontaneity, power and persistence of the belief in 
 a divinity, we learn that it is a common characteristic of hu- 
 manity and is rooted in the constitution of man. For the reli- 
 gious person it is unnecessary to go further ; because in his own 
 experience he already knows God. The Christian believer's con- 
 sciousness of God's grace permeates his whole spiritual being, as 
 the blood-vessels permeate the body so that the prick of a pin 
 anywhere draws blood ; to renounce the faith which has been 
 quickened by it would be to renounce all that he esteems highest 
 and best in his history, all that is vitalizing in his spiritual life. 
 And now we see also that religious belief is a normal develop- 
 ment of the constitution of man as a personal being. 
 
 Of course it is not meant that every form in which men have 
 constructed in thought their idea of the. divinity is constitutional 
 in man and warranted as real knowledge ; but only those essen- 
 tial elements in the idea of a divinity already mentioned, the 
 absolute or infinite and the spiritual or supernatural. And these 
 are not at first apprehended as ideas and defined in thought, but 
 they are present submerged in feelings, impulses, wishes and in- 
 stincts, undiscriminated and undefined in the primitive conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 It follows that religion lives iri the personality and life of 
 man. If so, then religion will persist through all human prog- 
 ress, will survive all convulsions and catastrophes, will revive 
 after all degeneracy and be a power in some form in every con- 
 dition of society. 
 
 III. GOD REVEALED AS PERSONAL SPIRIT IN THE CONSTI- 
 TUTION OF MAN AS SHOWN BY ITS ANALYSIS. God is re- 
 vealed in the constitution of man as a personal being. The 
 existence of the personal God is presupposed in the normal exer- 
 cise of man's constitutional powers and susceptibilities, and the 
 belief of it is a legitimate and necessary issue of the normal 
 development of the constitution of man as a personal being. 
 
 From the fact that belief in a divinity is a common trait of 
 humanity and is spontaneous, powerful and persistent, it has been 
 inferred that it has root in the constitution of man and that our 
 belief in God is a real knowledge of him. We are now to exam- 
 
366 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ine the constitution of man itself to see if we find in it confirma- 
 tion of this inference and evidence of the revelation of God in the 
 constitution of man. 
 
 1. The personal God is revealed in man's intellectual or 
 rational constitution. 
 
 The existence of the personal God, the absolute Reason, is a 
 necessary postulate of all ratiocinated and scientific knowledge. 
 Its presupposition, explicit or implicit, is necessary to the human 
 intellect in order that it may complete its processes, solve its 
 inevitable problems and properly discharge its functions ; and 
 the reality of God's existence is necessary to the reality of the 
 knowledge thus attained. 
 
 Because nature comprises innumerable objects existing in the 
 unity of the physical system, which extends immeasurably in 
 space and time, physical science, which is the knowledge of 
 nature, must postulate, consciously or unconsciously, one univer- 
 sal reason regnant through all time and space, with which human 
 reason is in unison as the same in kind. If rational intelligence 
 is not the same throughout the universe, if the rational principles 
 on which human science rests its conclusions are not the same 
 through all space and time, if the mathematics by which it com- 
 putes are not the same everywhere and always, if the same com- 
 bination of causes does not always produce the same effect, then 
 physical science has no certainty and scientific knowledge is im- 
 possible. The 'spectroscope shows us that matter is the same in 
 the sun and stars as on the earth, the all-pervading ether binds 
 all the physical universe together in its all-penetrating action, 
 the laws of gravitation and of the persistence of force, of mechan- 
 ics and of chemistry are the same through all nature. But this 
 is so only if the principles of human reason are universal, regu- 
 lating thought and action throughout all space and time. Then 
 if physical science is real knowledge, the universe is pervaded by 
 Reason that is universal, that is everywhere and always the 
 same ; and this absolute Reason not only pervades the universe, 
 but is everywhere and always regnant in it, and all things reveal 
 its presence, direction and control. If, as we are sometimes 
 told, mind is the last and highest product of nature, evidently its 
 presence and direction in nature is also the first presupposition 
 in physical science. If evolution has culminated in evolving 
 rational man, it is evident that Reason, like man's, is revealed in 
 the whole process of the evolution, controlling and directing it. 
 This conclusion and how can any one who thinks avoid it? 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 367 
 
 is well expressed by Professor Benjamin Peirce of Harvard, at 
 the conclusion of his Analytic Mechanics : " In these researches 
 there is one lesson which cannot escape the profound observer. 
 Every portion of the material universe is pervaded by the same 
 laws of mechanical action, which are incorporated into the very 
 constitution of the human mind. The solution of the problem 
 of this universal presence of such a spiritual element is obvious 
 and necessary. There is one God and Science is the knowl- 
 edge of him." 
 
 In addition to this it may be said that man's consciousness of 
 himself seems to rest on a basis of universality ; for it is in the 
 perception of outward objects that he is awakened to conscious- 
 ness of himself. He knows the outward world as distinct from 
 himself, and at the same time as related to and acting on himself. 
 He thus is conscious of himself as a centre to the universe about 
 him. It encompasses him and from every side exerts its energies 
 upon him, while he at the centre reacts in every direction on 
 it, apprehends it in intelligence, illuminates it with science, and 
 effects changes in it. Man knows himself only as in the midst of 
 the universal system, himself and it in reciprocal action and re- 
 action. Science as knowledge is subjective within the mind of 
 man ; and as knowledge it is equally the knowledge of the uni- 
 verse as objective reality. The objective reality of the universe 
 is involved in man's knowledge of himself, and the reality of 
 of himself is involved in his knowledge of the universe. The 
 knowledge of both is given in one and the same act; if one is 
 real so must the other be ; if one is unreal, the other must be 
 unreal also, and all knowledge, scientific or unscientific, becomes 
 impossible. Thus the consciousness of self rests on a basis of 
 universality. The knowledge of the universal is involved in the 
 knowledge of one's self. And from this point of view, as always, 
 the mystery of objective knowledge, that a mind can apprehend 
 outward objects which are unlike itself, points unmistakably to 
 the fact that the universe is itself the expression of the universal 
 Reason, which is the absolute basis of all that is and in the light 
 of whose eternal intelligence man participates ; " the true light, 
 which lighteth every man." 
 
 It must also be noticed that the universal is always revealed 
 in the particular. It is not merely that the multitude of partic- 
 ular things in nature requires the postulation of absolute reason 
 universally the same ; it is not merely that the consciousness of 
 self involves the knowledge of the universal ; but in the com- 
 
368 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 pleted knowledge of every particular thing the universal is 
 presupposed. The particular cannot be known apart from the 
 universal; it must be known in its relations to the universal as 
 well as in its particular individuality. The individual is the 
 synthesis of the particular and the universal. In all particular 
 qualities we find the category of substance. Each reveals in the 
 consciousness the universal principle that all phenomena are the 
 'phenomena of being, or in other words the qualities of substance. 
 In every change we see the effect of a cause ; every change re- 
 veals in the consciousness the universal principle of reason that 
 every beginning or change has a cause. In every mechanical 
 adaptation the universal axioms and demonstrated conclusions of 
 mathematics are revealed. In every conscious free act of man 
 the universal moral law is postulated. Thus in all knowledge of 
 the particular or the individual, universal principles are involved 
 and the absolute and universal reason is revealed. 
 
 In previous investigations we have considered the fundamental 
 ideas of reason, which are the norms or standards of all rational 
 thought and action. 1 In every case in which any one of these is 
 regulative of thought and action, the universal is revealed in the 
 particular. 
 
 The first of these is the True, the contrary of which is the 
 absurd. This is the norm or standard of thinking and knowing. 
 In knowing the particular and the individual we come in sight 
 of truths universal and necessary, which no thought can overleap 
 and no power break down, which must be true of all reality to 
 which they pertain through all space and all time. In the con- 
 sciousness of these truths illuminating and regulating our thought 
 and action we find ourselves face to face with the universal rea- 
 son in the completed knowledge of every particular. Thus it is 
 true of our intellectual life that God is not far from every one 
 of us ; that in him intellectually we live and move and have our 
 being. 
 
 The second of the fundamental ideas of reason is the Right, 
 the norm or standard of all efficient action. What is true to 
 the reason is a law to action. The scientific knowledge of any 
 physical reality includes the knowledge both of it and the law of 
 its action. Every individual agency in the universe reveals to 
 science the reign of universal law. And in every consciously 
 free action the agent is conscious of obligation to do, right, and 
 therein is conscious of the imperative of absolute and universal 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 180-182. 
 
GOD EEVEALED IN MAN. 369 
 
 law. Therein the absolute Reason speaks within the soul of the 
 person and reveals itself in his conscience as authoritative. Every 
 moral act has immediate relation to the law of God. It is only 
 as we know that relation, it is only as thus the universal reveals 
 itself in the particular that the essential significance of the act is 
 known. There is philosophical truth in the bold personifications 
 of the Bible, that the blood of Abel crieth unto God from the 
 ground ; and that the hire of the laborers who have reaped your 
 fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries 
 of them who have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of 
 Sabaoth. In the moral consciousness of every man is the revela- 
 tion of God. In it appear in his consciousness the great realities 
 of his immediate relation to the universal, the eternal and the 
 absolute ; of his membership in the universal moral system ; of 
 his having to do with God in obeying or disobeying the eternal 
 law of divine wisdom and love which is the constitution of the 
 universe. Man's conscience is the reflex of God's law and of the 
 moral constitution of the universe. 
 
 The same is true of the rational idea of the Perfect. Beauty 
 is the revelation in some concrete object of an ideal of perfection. 
 An ideal can be realized only in the expression of rational truth 
 and in conformity with rational law ; with the norms or stand- 
 ards by which reason judges, as perfect or imperfect, all crea- 
 tions of thought and their realization whether in nature or art. 
 Thus in every beautiful object, in every noble character, in every 
 creation of art, the universal is essential in the significance of the 
 particular and the absolute Reason is revealed. 
 
 Plato says that God geometrizes. He creates the universe as 
 the expression of archetypal truth and in accordance with exact 
 laws. For the very reason that he does so, he creates it beauti- 
 ful. The beautiful is always the revelation of the ideally per- 
 fect ; and this is a creation accordant with rational law and 
 expressive of rational truth. If therefore God is a geometrician 
 he is in a similar sense an artist. Therefore nature is not only 
 the revelation of science but also of the ideal and the beautiful ; 
 and the science and the beauty are alike the revelation of the 
 universal in the particular. In the universe science reads God's 
 thoughts after him ; art expresses those thoughts in human cre- 
 ations, as God has expressed them in the divine. In this sense 
 there is truth in the seemingly extravagant assertion of Qui- 
 net : " The divine Spirit is the model which under one form 
 or another poses eternally before the mind of the true artist." 
 
370 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 True art must express the truth that is universal, in the finite, 
 the particular and the concrete. If the artist attends solely to 
 the universal, he creates nothing ; his work is void. If he con- 
 fines himself to the finite and particular, his creation reveals no 
 ideal significance and has no beauty. The creations of true art, 
 whether human or divine, are revelations of the universal truth 
 of reason in the particular and the individual. 
 
 " What here as beauty has been shown, 
 
 In some hereafter will as truth be known." * 
 
 Man finds relations between himself and the universe which the 
 senses do not perceive and which cannot be defined in the exact 
 formulas of physical science. The sun, .moon and stars, which 
 the astronomer describes in the exact results of mathematical cal- 
 culations, reveal to the soul a grandeur which no Me*canique Ce*- 
 leste defines, and which nevertheless without the underlying math- 
 ematical exactness would never have been revealed. The rainbow 
 and the soft and changing tints of the clouds, which the optician 
 analyzes in his prism, reveal to the heart a reality which prismatic 
 analysis cannot reveal or define. And because the universe is 
 full of beauty it is as truly apprehended in poetry as in science. 
 
 '* The world is full of poetry ; the air 
 Is living with its spirit ; and the waves 
 Dance to the music of its melodies 
 And sparkle in its brightness." 
 
 And what poetry finds in the universe is reality. It is the truths 
 of the eternal Reason revealed in the forms of the finite. Poetry 
 reading in the universe the ideals of the universal Reason finds 
 reality, as truly as science does in reading its principles and laws. 
 Each in its own way finds the truths which are universal revealed 
 in the forms and combinations of finite individuals. The flowers 
 which in their blended gold and purple repeat the colors of the 
 morning sky, reveal in their beauty the ideals of the eternal mind. 
 And when the flower " blossoming so meekly " is considered also 
 in the light of science, when we see the wonders of wisdom in its 
 organic structure and life, when we see it as the representative of 
 its species in its relations to all the orders and genera of plant- 
 life and in its place in the whole vegetable system, when we con- 
 template it as a product of all cosmic forces concentrated on ifc 
 during its growth, building its complicated and delicate structure, 
 
 1 " Was wir als Schonheit liier empfunden, 
 
 Wird einst als Wahrheit uns ent^egen gehn." 
 
 Schiller, Die Kunstler, stanza 5. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 371 
 
 painting it with harmonious colors, and infusing into it fragrance, 
 our feelings rise above the aesthetic to the religious. Then we 
 are ready to bow before the commonest plant, as Milton repre- 
 sents Eve bowing before the tree of knowledge, with 
 
 " low reverence done, as to the Power 
 That dwelt within, whose presence had infused 
 Into the plant sciential sap, derived 
 From nectar, drink of the gods; " 
 
 and we acknowledge that the words of Wordsworth are not ex- 
 travagant : 
 
 " To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 Here then is revealed a world within a world, a system within 
 a system, the spiritual system veiled by the natural yet revealed 
 through it ; and therein revealing to the spiritual eye the true 
 significance and worth of the natural. The heavens and the 
 earth declare the glory of God. The revealed glory is indeed 
 broken, obstructed and mingled with shadows and darkness, as 
 the light of the sun is broken, obstructed and mingled with shad- 
 ows and darkness by the earth and the opaque bodies on which 
 it falls, and refracted by the media through which it passes. But 
 the revelation, though never complete, is always progressive to- 
 wards the complete expression of the archetypal thought of the 
 absolute Reason, of the perfect wisdom and love of God. 
 
 So also as to the Good, as to all which may be acquired, used 
 and enjoyed, reason judges by its unchanging principles what is 
 worthy of the pursuit and enjoyment of a rational being and has 
 true worth. In all human enterprise and acquisition it is only in 
 the light of the truths, laws and ideals of reason that we can 
 know what is the true good ; and thus in the common pursuits of 
 life the universal is revealed in the particular and all are in im- 
 mediate connection with God, the universal Reason. 
 
 It has also been shown that the normal development of human 
 reason issues in the necessary belief that the absolute Being 
 exists. The existence of the absolute Being is a necessary postu- 
 late in all scientific thought and all rational knowledge. If any 
 being exists, some eternal, unconditioned and all -conditioning 
 Being must exist. If this is not so, rational knowledge is im- 
 possible. Thus the absolute and unconditioned is revealed in 
 everything finite and conditioned. 
 
 Another point to be noticed is that the existence of God, the 
 absolute Reason, is essential to the possibility of comprehending 
 
372 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 all reality in the unity of a rational system. It is the function of 
 thought to integrate or comprehend in a unity the objects which 
 it apprehends and distinguishes ; and it cannot rest till it compre- 
 hends all known reality in the unity of a rational system. This 
 is possible only in the recognition of the absolute Reason as the 
 ultimate ground of all reality and the universe as the manifesta- 
 tion or revelation of it. Without this, science remains incom- 
 plete, thought remains hopelessly disintegrated, and human rea- 
 son, unable to solve its necessary problems, is exposed as incom- 
 petent, untrustworthy and deceiving. 
 
 A further evidence that God exists, found in the intellectual 
 constitution of man, is the fact that theism alone gives the ra- 
 tional ground for the trustworthiness of the human mind and the 
 reality of human knowledge. 
 
 All science rests on certain immense assumptions. As we have 
 repeatedly had occasion to notice, science assumes that the uni- 
 verse is reasonable ; that it admits of being known and accounted 
 for by rational intelligence. The absurd cannot be real ; the real 
 cannot be absurd. Science also assumes the uniformity and 
 continuity of nature ; that the same complex of causes always 
 produces the same effect. Nature is in this sense truthful and 
 trustworthy ; the same observed facts justify the same inference 
 everywhere and always. Another assumption of science is that 
 rational intelligence is the same throughout all space and time. 
 Without these assumptions all rational knowledge of the universe 
 is impossible, and the attempt by investigation to get a scientific 
 knowledge of it is foolish. But how does this prove that the as- 
 sumptions are valid ? What warrant have we for believing that 
 we must be capable of knowing? The answer is that the reality 
 of knowledge is known in the act of knowing. But here again it 
 is not pretended that we prove the reality of knowledge. Knowl- 
 edge is verified only by knowledge. All we can do is to verify 
 knowledge derived from one source, by one mental act or process, 
 with knowledge of the same thing from other sources or by other 
 mental acts or processes of knowing. Thus we come back to a 
 primitive, immediate and ineradicable confidence in the trustwor- 
 thiness of the human mind as rational and intelligent and in the 
 reality of human knowledge. Whatever issues in universal skep- 
 ticism must be rejected as false. Or, as Mr. Fiske expresses it : 
 " It puts us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see 
 that any one has as yet alleged or is ever likely to allege a suffi. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 373 
 
 cient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative." l Science 
 without God can go no farther. We cannot but accept as true 
 what our whole mental constitution demands. We must accept 
 that, the denial of which implies that man's whole mental consti- 
 tution is untrustworthy. 
 
 Theism gives us a reasonable ground for all these fundamental 
 assumptions on which the possibility of science and the reality of 
 knowledge rest. It affirms that the universe is grounded in abso- 
 lute Reason, and in this rationality man as a personal being par- 
 ticipates. Then he knows that every part of the universe open 
 to his observation is the expression of rational intelligence like 
 his own ; that the universe is everywhere and always reasonable 
 and intelligible ; that nature as the expression of the thought of 
 perfect reason is uniform and continuous, and that thus nature is 
 truthful and trustworthy, its facts the data for legitimate and 
 conclusive reasoning and its phenomena susceptible of rational 
 explanation. Thus he finds an immovable basis for the reality 
 of human knowledge. The conclusion is inevitable, that, if the 
 universal Reason, which is the personal God, does not exist and 
 man is not endowed with reason the same in kind, then we are 
 put to permanent intellectual confusion. Thus the existence of 
 God is necessary to the possibility of science and to the trustwor- 
 thiness of the human reason and to the possibility of rational in- 
 telligence. 2 
 
 The ultimate ground of the universe cannot be truth or thought 
 abstracted from being. It must be Reason energizing, the per- 
 sonal Spirit, the personal God. A recent writer says : " The 
 skeptic has always instinctively posited Being as the ground of 
 thought. ... Its medicine and cure is Speculative Philosophy, 
 which, as immanent Logic, recognizes, not in Being but in 
 Thought, the ground of all natural objects and of all conscious 
 subjects ; which sees that it is Thought from whose fulness Be- 
 ing is projected as an isolated radius or single moment, and that 
 this single moment comes to actuality only in connection with all 
 the other moments of the inclusive Totality." But in seeming 
 contradiction to this the writer says in the same article : u If only 
 we were able to realize that Thought is the purest transfigura- 
 tion and clearest self-explication of Being that in it Being 
 comes to itself by turning itself inside out and reflecting itself in 
 itself ; if we could become conscious of thought in its height and 
 
 1 The Destiny of Man, p. 116. 
 
 2 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 8, 82, 143-151, 182 f., 198-203. 
 
374 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 depth and fulness, we could never question whether to this in- 
 most thought belonged the outwardness of being. ... He who 
 has learned to think Thought as the coming to itself of Being can 
 never doubt that the thinking subject belongs essentially to 
 and is inseparable from Thought ; without the thinking subject, 
 Thought cannot be." 1 This can be consistent with the passage 
 first quoted only on the supposition that thought is the original 
 and being the derivative from it. But if thought is the transfig- 
 uration and self-explication of being, then being as transfiguring 
 and explicating itself is prior to the thought. If thought cannot 
 be without a thinking subject, then the thought must be pred- 
 icated of the thinker not the thinker predicated of the thought ; 
 it is the thinker who puts forth the thought not the thought 
 which develops the thinker. The thought may reveal to himself 
 the being who thinks, but it cannot create the being. The hu- 
 man mind must revolt from the Spinozism which postulates sub- 
 stance alone as the ground of the universe, or being that is inde- 
 terminate and identical with nothing. But the postulating of 
 thought as the ground of all being is using words without intelli- 
 gible meaning. It exemplifies the common error of Hegelianism 
 in confounding real being and its energies and activities with 
 processes of logic, and makes the ultimate ground of the universe 
 to be a general notion or name. Thus it loses itself in a maze 
 of logical processes and abstract words. In the present case the 
 fallacy seems to be that because logically the definition of thinker 
 includes and presupposes the idea of thought, therefore the 
 thought must precede the thinker and be the ground of his being. 
 
 If thought could be the ground of the universe, we could no 
 longer recognize a God who has any real being, but instead of 
 God we should have only abstract thought and laws, subjective 
 in human intelligence ; for there would be no absolute Reason 
 to which they could be referred ; and this grandiose philosophy 
 issues in dissolving the universe into a mental illusion, with no 
 person that is the subject of the illusion. 
 
 The necessary conclusion is that the ultimate ground of the 
 universe is not abstract substance or indeterminate being, nor is 
 it abstract thought or intelligence ; it is the two in unity, the 
 absolute Reason, the eternal Spirit, the personal God. All finite 
 beings are derived from him and reveal his thought and power. 
 Material things and physical forces are products and manifesta- 
 tions of the eternal Spirit and reveal his power and intelligence, 
 
 1 Goeschel in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Jan. 1884, pp. 27, 24 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 375 
 
 his wisdom and love. Thought is before all finite beings, but it 
 is eternal in the absolute Being who is God. In him all truth, 
 all law, all ideals of perfection, and all rational forms of worth 
 which determine what is the true good, are eternal. Eternal in 
 him are also the power which energizes and the wisdom and love 
 which guide and characterize his energizing in the progressive 
 realization of all archetypal truth, law, ideals and good in the 
 finite universe and the progressive revelation thereby of himself 
 as perfect in power, wisdom and love. So Bossuet, after speak- 
 ing of mathematical and other necessary and universal truths of 
 reason, says : " Were all which I see in nature destroyed, except 
 myself, these principles would be preserved in my thought ; and 
 I see that they would be always true were I annihilated. If I 
 now ask where and in what subject these eternal and immutable 
 truths subsist, I am obliged to admit a Being in whom truth is 
 eternal. It is from him that the truth in all the universe is de- 
 rived. It is in him, in some manner incomprehensible by me, 
 that I see these eternal verities. To see them is to turn myself 
 to him who is immutably all truth, and to receive his light." l 
 
 2. In the moral constitution of man as a free agent there is 
 a revelation of God. The existence of God is necessary to any 
 reasonable explanation of man's free will. 
 
 The evidence of the existence of God already found in man's 
 rational constitution reappears in his constitution as free will. 
 Man is constituted free by his rationality. By virtue of this he 
 is able, in the light of reason and under the influence of rational 
 motives, to determine the ends to which he will direct his ener- 
 gies and his exertion of them for the determined end, and thus 
 is self-directive and self-exertive, and therein is free. Will is 
 reason energizing, and reason is will potential. If, then, human 
 reason and rational knowledge presuppose the existence of God, 
 the absolute Reason, so also the will, which is free only as it is 
 rational, must presuppose the same. 
 
 1 Traitd de la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi mSnae, chap. iv. CEuvres, 
 tome x. p. 82. 
 
 " The ultimate point on which all necessity" (must be) "rests is there- 
 fore a partnership of thought and being. What is an element of the thought 
 must be conversely an immediate element of being. We could call this ulti- 
 mate point, if the expression were not used in manifold meanings, the iden- 
 tity of thought and being." " Hegel calls the Ego the universal because the 
 particular objects fall into his consciousness, and he thinks, because the man 
 thinks the universal, that the man himself is the universal." Trendelenburg, 
 Logische Untersuchungen, vol. ii. pp. 116, 122. 
 
376 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Further, if the universe is not ultimately grounded in free- 
 dom, it is impossible that freedom should ever come into it. If 
 the universe is ultimately grounded in necessity, everything in 
 it must also be under necessity. If it is grounded in the im- 
 personal and the non-rational, rational persons could never have 
 appeared in it. The appearance of a rational being would then 
 be an effect without a cause. 
 
 A third evidence is found in the fact that the consciousness of 
 free will involves the consciousness of moral responsibility and 
 obligation. So soon as one knows that he has anything at his 
 own free disposal, he is conscious that he is responsible for his 
 disposal of it. When he is conscious that he is free to choose or 
 refuse, he is conscious of responsibility for his action and of obli- 
 gation to act reasonably. Here we are brought again to the full 
 force of the ethical evidence of the existence of God. Man finds 
 himself in a moral system under the government of God. In the 
 sense of moral responsibility and obligation he is brought into 
 immediate consciousness of the absolute moral law and of the 
 presence and command of the absolute Reason. He hears within 
 the voice of conscience : 
 
 " As God's most intimate Presence in the soul, 
 And his most perfect image in the world." 
 
 In the consciousness of freedom man also becomes conscious of 
 the world as hemming him in, limiting and hindering his action. 
 As free he finds himself in conflict with necessity, imprisoned 
 within physical limits and overpowered by physical forces, sub- 
 jected to privation and evil, tempted to wrong-doing, conscious 
 of himself as a sinner and the subject of self-condemnation. He 
 feels the need of God, as a rescuer and helper in the free con- 
 duct of his lifp, to deliver him from subjection to necessity under 
 nature, and to lift him to the higher sphere of spiritual life in 
 which he may find harmony and peace and real freedom. In the 
 consciousness of freedom man must assert and maintain it against 
 restraining and constraining powers and against hindrances within 
 himself to carrying into effect all that reason commands and the 
 will determines to do. And this reveals to him his need of divine 
 help and drives him to God for redemption. Religion is a neces- 
 sity to bring into reconciliation man's consciousness of himself as 
 free and yet as dependent on nature, held down and resisted by 
 its forces, tempted to sin and plunged into evil. 
 
 Finally, in hio choice of God as the supreme object of trust and 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 377 
 
 service, the man finds himself inspired with divine influence and 
 quickened to new and spiritual life ; in faith in God his spirit 
 glows with universal love. As in his own reason he participates 
 in the light of the divine reason, so in the new spiritual life he 
 participates in the love of God, and thus knows in his own spirit 
 what is highest in the divine. And complying with an apostle's 
 injunction, " Keep yourselves in the love of God," he overcomes 
 the world, he wins the victory over its opposing forces, he finds 
 reconciliation and peace, and the freedom wherewith Christ 
 make th free. 
 
 3. That man is constituted for the knowledge and service of 
 God is evident from his susceptibility to spiritual motives and 
 emotions. God reveals himself to man through his feeling. 
 
 A boy was flying his kite at dusk, and in the gathering dark- 
 ness it soared out of sight. A by-stander told him it was lost ; 
 but the boy replied : " No, I feel it pull." And from beyond our 
 sight the invisible things of God have hold on us and in our 
 hearts we feel them pull. 
 
 In a former chapter we have seen that the susceptibilities to 
 motives and emotions are the sensitive points through which 
 what is without us can affect us and make us aware of its pres- 
 ence. The sunshine falling on the eye reveals itself as light ; 
 vibrations of air falling on the ear reveal themselves as sound ; 
 falling on any other parts of the body they cannot make these 
 peculiar revelations of themselves in the consciousness. So the 
 other senses and all natural appetites, desires and affections are 
 sensitive spots through which outward objects can reveal them- 
 selves in the consciousness. God and the system of spiritual 
 beings are man's spiritual environment. His susceptibilities to 
 rational and spiritual motives and emotions are the points of 
 spiritual sensitivity through which God and spiritual beings can 
 make themselves felt and present themselves as spiritual in the 
 consciousness. To change the figure, they are the windows and 
 doors through which the light of the eternal Reason can shine in 
 and the vitalizing warmth and air of heaven can quicken the 
 spirit. 
 
 For this reason knowledge comes in and through feeling ; and 
 in the primitive and implicit consciousness, belief, feeling and 
 preference exist undiscriminated together. The same is true of 
 the primitive spiritual consciousness, in which beliefs and ques- 
 tionings, fears and hopes, aspirations and affections, purposes and 
 preferences lie undiscriminated together, a seed-plot full of di- 
 
378 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 verse seeds, each of which in the process of germination will come 
 to light in its specific character. It is this primitive spiritual 
 consciousness which Wordsworth presents : 
 
 " those obstinate questionings 
 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 
 Fallings from us, vanishings; 
 
 Blank misgivings of a creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realized, 
 High instincts before which our mortal n-ature 
 Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised; 
 
 . . . those first affections, 
 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master-light of all our seeing; 
 
 Uphold us, cherish and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake 
 
 To perish never." 
 
 We are now to examine what are the susceptibilities to re- 
 ligious motives and emotions in the constitution of man, and to 
 consider whether these give reasonable grounds for believing that 
 man is constituted for the knowledge and service of God and that 
 God manifests himself in human consciousness through them. 
 
 God is the absolute Spirit. The feelings which are distinc- 
 tively religious are those arising in response to man's conscious 
 relation to a divinity. They will therefore have reference to the 
 divinity as absolute Being, and also as personal Spirit. It has al- 
 ready been shown that in all religions some traces of the con- 
 sciousness of the divinity in both these aspects have been found. 
 
 We begin with feelings responsive to the presence of the in- 
 finite and absolute. 
 
 Man must have been far advanced before the idea of the ab- 
 solute or infinite was expressed in language or apprehended in 
 thought. But the reality denoted by the words must have im- 
 pressed itself on him from the beginning. When man found 
 himself naked, without shelter or defense, without tools or 
 weapons amid the mighty powers of nature, he must have been 
 conscious of the presence of beings and agencies beyond his com- 
 prehension and transcending his power. Miiller in explaining 
 the origin of the sense of the infinite supposes a man living on 
 a high mountain, or in a vast plain, or on a coral island sur- 
 rounded by the sea and sky. The supposition is unnecessary. 
 Wherever primitive man may have dwelt, he found himself in 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 379 
 
 the midst of agencies, whose power so far as he could see was un- 
 controlled and unlimited ; and these must have impressed him. 
 with some sense of the superhuman, the immeasurable, the in- 
 finite as the ever-present background of his life. 
 
 One sentiment awakened would be wonder. Plato says that 
 wonder is the origin of philosophy. He thinks that he was not 
 a bad genealogist who said that Iris, knowing all the secrets of 
 the gods and bearing their messages, was the daughter of Thau- 
 mas (Wonder). 1 It is a feeling in which the soul responds to 
 the presence of the absolute or infinite, and a presentiment of the 
 idea not yet formed. 2 We see it still in the freshness with which 
 life and nature present themselves to a child and in the wonder 
 awakened by it. In the cradle-song, 
 
 " Twinkle, twinkle, little star, 
 How I wonder what you are,'* 
 
 the wondering child utters in view of the starry heavens one 
 of the feelings in which religion began. And in its craving for 
 something above its earthly life it delights in myths and fairy- 
 stories, peopling the earth and heavens with superhuman beings, 
 whose place no history, however interesting, not even Robinson 
 Crusoe or other fictions of strange adventures of men can fill. 
 J. S. Mill, with all his hard and practical views of life, intimates 
 as occasion of alarm that in this generation the young are for the 
 first time growing up unromantic. 
 
 So in the primitive men there must have been a sense of the 
 infinite in the feelings before the idea was defined in thought or 
 named in language; a sense of a, presence in nature above and 
 beyond all that was perceived through the senses, above and be- 
 yond man himself. In the progress of man there was wonder 
 at the vastness of the world before geometry ; poetry before sci- 
 ence ; the sense of obligation felt as law in the heart before the 
 law graven on the tables of stone or in any way formulated in 
 words ; spontaneous religion before theological definition ; and 
 in numberless forms the dumb consciousness of the absolute be- 
 fore the idea was defined or even named. This is set forth by 
 Schiller : " What first after thousands of years had passed the 
 aging reason found out, from the beginning lay revealed to the 
 
 1 Thesetetus, 155. 
 
 2 We need in English a word corresponding with the German " ahnung." 
 " Presentiment " refers only to what is future. The German word denotes 
 any intimation of reality in any obscure and indefinite feeling or state of con- 
 sciousness, without reference to time. 
 
380 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 childlike understanding in the symbols of the beautiful and the 
 grand. Its gracious form called us to love virtue, a tender feeling 
 rose up against vice, before a Solon wrote the law which slowly 
 urges on the languishing blossoms. Before the bold idea of eter- 
 nal space presented itself to the thinker's mind, who that looked 
 up into the starry heavens did not already feel a presentiment of 
 it?" 1 
 
 The feeling responsive to the absolute as it is always manifest- 
 ing itself in the universe is not mere wonder. In the presence 
 of the transcendent and resistless powers of nature, the wonder 
 must have deepened into awe. 
 
 Another feeling awakened must have been fear. Humboldt 
 says: "It lies deep in the troubled mind of man, in his gloomy 
 view of "things, that the unexpected and extraordinary excite only 
 fear, not hope or joy." 2 It is a remark of Comte that the most 
 terrible feeling of which man is capable is consternation, the feel- 
 ing arising when the uniform order of nature seems to be inter- 
 rupted. Such is the peculiar feeling occasioned by an earthquake, 
 when all which we have regarded as most stable is shaken, and 
 the man feels himself torn from his fixed moorings and helpless 
 in the power of unknown, unmeasured and incalculable forces. 
 This feeling must have been common among the primitive men. 
 Scarcely knowing a uniform course of nature, ignorant of the 
 causes of almost all changes, everything must have been to them 
 strange and incalculable. Surrounded by savage beasts, amid the 
 primeval forest which they could not cut down, hemmed in on the 
 uncultivated and intractable earth by impassable rivers, moun- 
 tains and seas, suffering the extremes of heat and cold, trembling 
 before the lightning and the thunder, smitten by the force of fierce 
 and invisible winds and by the rain, the snow and the hail, pros- 
 trated by unseen and unaccountable powers in disease and sink- 
 ing in death, they must often have felt terror and consternation 
 at the resistless powers acting upon and about them. 
 
 1 " Was erst, nachdem Jahrtausende verflossen, 
 Die alternde Vernunft erfand, 
 Lag im Symbol des Schonen, und des Grossen, 
 Voraus geoffenbart dem kindischen Verstand. 
 Ihr holdes Bild hiess uns die Tugend lieben, 
 Ein zarter Sinn hat vor dem Laster sich gestraubt, 
 Eh noch ein Solon das Geetz geschrieben, 
 Das matte BHithen langsam treibt. 
 Eh vor des Denkers Geist der kiihne 
 'Begriff des ew'gen Raumes stand 
 Wer sah hinauf zur sternenbuhne, 
 
 Der ihn nicht ahnend schon empfand? " Die Kiinstler. 
 2 Cosmos, vol. i. p. Ill, Otte's Translation. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 381 
 
 And the sense of the absolute is always present to man in the 
 mystery of the universe. Mystery presses close upon the primi- 
 tive man ; it envelops him like a fog. As he advances towards 
 civilization, though the mystery recedes, it never passes out of 
 sight. If the fog lifts a little, a larger circle of it is seen. Every 
 advance which discloses a larger area of the known, discloses also 
 a proportionally larger horizon of the unknown. Through all his 
 progress from savagery to the highest civilization man has always 
 the mystery of the infinite and the absolute in full view. The 
 more the finite universe is disclosed to his knowledge, the larger 
 is the horizon along the circuit of which he looks on the mystery 
 of the absolute, and the grander his appreciation of its signifi- 
 cance. Hence Miiller does not speak too strongly when he says 
 of the perception of the infinite : " From the first flutter of human 
 consciousness that perception underlies all the perceptions of our 
 senses, all our imaginations, all our concepts and every argument 
 of our reason. It may be buried for a time beneath the frag- 
 ments of our finite knowledge, but it is always there, and if we 
 dig deep enough we shall always find that buried seed, as supply, 
 ing the living sap to the fibres and feeders of all true faith." 1 
 
 There is therefore no reason to expect that man in the growth 
 of knowledge and culture will ever outgrow his religion. The 
 religious sentiment has a perennial root in his wonder, awe and 
 fear in the presence of the infinite and the absolute. Man wonders 
 at first at the extraordinary and the incomprehensible. As in his 
 progress the unknown becomes known, in all which is known he 
 wonders at its continuity and uniformity, its order and law ; and 
 in all that is explained, he wonders at the significance disclosed 
 in the explanation. This all-encompassing mystery, enlarging its 
 circuit with the enlarging area opened to human knowledge, can 
 be neither removed, nor transcended and explained by physical 
 science. In its attempts to explain even the physical universe by 
 empirical methods and to comprehend it by physical agents and 
 processes and their factual sequences, physical science ultimately 
 breaks down in contradictions, and reveals its own insufficiency, 
 and the necessity of recognizing spiritual powers and a spirit- 
 ual system transcending matter and its forces and processes, and 
 transcending the factual sequences and the empirical methods of 
 physical science. 
 
 Of such higher powers man is conscious in himself ; for he is 
 conscious of himself as person or spirit. As spirit he is conscious 
 1 Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 48. 
 
382 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 of himself as supernatural, as in some sort a miracle-working 
 power. As Goethe says: "Man alone can effect the impossible." 
 When confronted and confounded by what is impossible to sense 
 and empirical thought and to the unconscious forces of nature, 
 as by a dead wall which he cannot scale, he looks on himself as 
 a rational spirit and sees himself as a power that can transcend 
 it. In his reason he can know what it is impossible for sense and 
 empirical thought about sensible objects to know; in his freedom 
 he can do what it is impossible for the unconscious forces of 
 nature to do. He is above nature, supernatural. While he has 
 not power, even as spiritual, fully to comprehend what the abso- 
 lute Being is, and can never transcend the horizon of the mys- 
 terious, yet he can know the absolute as absolute Spirit; he can 
 recognize spiritual energies and spiritual truths, laws, ideals and 
 ends pervading and regulating the physical system ; he can 
 comprehend the universe as the progressive expression in the 
 finite of the archetypal thought of the inexhaustible wisdom and 
 love of the absolute Spirit ; and thus he attains a rational expla- 
 nation why it is that man's knowledge of the universe must be 
 always bounded by mystery. 
 
 We proceed to inquire what spiritual sentiments in man are 
 responsive to the presence of the absolute Spirit. For the abso- 
 lute is not an abstraction and cannot be revealed as such. It is 
 revealed as absolute Being. Hence it is only in view of the 
 concrete realities of the universe that the sense of the absolute 
 and infinite is felt, as of absolute Power and Being beneath all 
 that is known as finite. In man as himself spirit, God is re- 
 vealed as absolute Spirit. 
 
 The sentiments responsive to the presence of the absolute 
 Spirit are, first, those motives and emotions which correspond 
 with the four fundamental ideas or norms of reason ; the true, 
 the right, the perfect and the good. 
 
 The first class of these is the scientific motives and emotions, 
 the desire to know the truth and joy in its discovery, not for its 
 uses and gains but for the truth itself. It is the yearning of the 
 soul to know the secret of the universe, to find its origin and 
 author, its significance and laws and end, and to comprehend it 
 in the unity of a rational system. It is the longing of man that 
 the mute forces of nature would break their eternal silence and 
 tell him whence they are and for what end they work and rest 
 not through all the ages, and to what destiny they are bearing 
 him. It is his longing as he gazes wistfully on the firmament to 
 see that 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 383 
 
 " All heaven bursts her starry floors, 
 And strews her light below, 
 And deepens on and up," 
 
 till it reveals the secret of the universe. Professor Tyndall tells 
 us that from the beginning man has been seeking the origin of 
 things, and that the desire impelling to this search has been the 
 great motive to intellectual activity and scientific investigation. 
 And Mr. Tylor says : " Man's craving to know the causes at 
 work in each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of 
 things he surveys is such as it is and no other, is no product of 
 high civilization, but a characteristic of his race down to its 
 lowest stage. Among rude savages it is already an intellectual 
 appetite, whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not en- 
 grossed by war, or sport or sleep." 1 
 
 Hence the sense of intellectual suffocation under materialism 
 and atheism, in the consciousness of the restriction of the range 
 and freedom of the intellect and the suppression of its energy. 
 Atheism belittles man and the sphere of his knowledge. It was 
 a great enlargement of the range of human thought when astron- 
 omy burst the crystal firmament and opened the depths of space 
 crowded with suns. But if science shall shut out God and all 
 spiritual realities, then it contracts the sphere of thought more 
 than it had enlarged it ; then science itself comes down on us as 
 a solid firmament, and shuts us closely in. A -solid firmament, 
 with God and heaven above it, his law and love and redeeming 
 grace revealing him beneath, is a grander theatre of thought, as- 
 piration and endeavor, in which the soul can expatiate with a 
 larger freedom and a nobler development, than the open and sun- 
 thronged vast of space in which no supreme reason guides, no di- 
 vine love rules, no aspiration to know God and to be like him 
 inspires the animated clods which for a little time eat, drink 
 and propagate, enjoy and suffer, and then crumble into dust. 
 Then man himself is, as Pindar calls him, " a dream about a 
 shadow;" 2 and we must adopt as scientific truth the pathetic 
 words of Burke after the death of his son : " What shadows we 
 are and what shadows we pursue." Professor Tyndall in his 
 Belfast Address tells of a man who said to him : " Did I not 
 believe that an Intelligence is at the heart of things, my life on 
 earth would be intolerable." The author of The Keys of the 
 Creeds says that he has had himself, and that it is not unusual 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 332. 
 
 2 Pindar, Pyth. viii. 135. 
 
384 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 for persons to have such intense longing to know the secrets of 
 the universe as to feel almost irresistibly prompted to hasten the 
 termination of life in order to penetrate, unrestrained by the lim- 
 itations of sense, the world that lies beyond. 1 And ingenuous 
 minds, when they have found their belief in God giving way, 
 have in many instances given utterance to the deepest sadness 
 as they have seen the shades of their prison-house closing on them 
 and the light of all their day shut out by the dead walls in which 
 they were finding themselves immured. 
 
 This undying and urgent desire to know the secret of the 
 universe is inherent in the constitution of man and is one of the 
 roots of his religiousness. Through it God reveals himself in 
 the human soul as rational Spirit, awakening the spontaneous 
 and ineradicable belief that the universe is rationally intelligible 
 and explicable, and the inextinguishable desire to know its 
 rational ground, law, unity and design ; a desire which can be 
 satisfied only in knowing God, the absolute Reason, whose wisdom 
 and love the universe expresses. 
 
 The next class of feelings in which the spirit of man is responsive 
 to the presence of the absolute Spirit is the moral sentiments ; the 
 sense of obligation, remorse for wrong-doing, and the peace which 
 suffuses the soul in the consciousness of doing right. Schenkel 
 says : " In the conscience the human spirit is conscious of itself, 
 but of itself in its relation to God. It is the place in the human 
 spirit in which it finds in itself the absolute Spirit, in which it is 
 conscious of itself in that." 2 In the moral sentiments man feels 
 the pressure of absolute law, the imperative of an absolute au- 
 thority. As he not merely knows his connection with the phys- 
 ical system but also feels it in the weight of his body, in its 
 resistance to his action, in cold and heat, so he not only knows 
 his connection with the spiritual system and with God but he 
 feels it in all his moral sentiments. This appears not only in the 
 sense of obligation but also in the prevalent consciousness of sin 
 and guilt. The prominence in the religions of the world of acts 
 of penance and sacrifice, of expiation and propitiation, reveal a 
 prevalent consciousness of guilt and a fearful looking for of judg- 
 ment. The worshipers feel their immediate relation to the di- 
 vinity as their moral lawgiver and judge. Lenormant thinks 
 that we can also trace in these religions a consciousness of the 
 need of redemption from guilt and sin, and a hope of it. He re- 
 fers to the common mythical conception of a young god appear- 
 
 1 Pages 4, 5. 2 Quoted by Voigt, Fundamentaldogmatik, p. 73. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 385 
 
 ing as savior and mediator, allying himself with man and con- 
 summating his work of salvation by passing through suffering and 
 death. While admitting that these myths have a reference to 
 changes in nature he adds : " One cannot but acknowledge that 
 they also include ... a feeble reflex of the divine promise made 
 to man immediately after the fall. The Christian cannot afford 
 to despise a single one of these intuitions, which are vague and 
 incomplete, but not the less providential for that reason, and 
 which shine out here and there amid the darkness of paganism. 
 It is always this expectation of a redeemer, this aspiration toward 
 a higher spiritual law, toward the reign of a juster and more 
 merciful god, which was never completely extinguished in the 
 souls of the nations crushed beneath the weight of bloody, mate- 
 rialistic and fatalistic religions." l Thus, in the moral motives 
 and emotions, is a root in the human constitution of the religious- 
 ness of man. 
 
 Man's constitutional religiousness has a root also in the feelings 
 which pertain to the idea of the Perfect. 
 
 Man admires in his fellow-man power and excellence of any 
 kind when it approaches to his ideal of perfection. He admires 
 courage, fortitude, energy, self - forgetf ulness and self-sacrifice, 
 magnanimity and gentleness in the use of power, the whole assem- 
 blage of qualities which constitute heroism. 
 
 In the earliest times physical strength and agility were most 
 admired, and the strong, swift man was the hero. In all ages 
 men admire power of intellect and achievement, irrespective of 
 moral character. The man of power is the hero and hero-wor- 
 ship never ceases. The weak gravitate toward the strong ; the 
 admiration passes over into reverence and the reverence into trust 
 and service. The powerful man has always a following. In this 
 way the Nimrods, the mighty hunters of men, command adher- 
 ents who do their bidding in their schemes of self-exaltation, and 
 while assisting them to desolate the earth, are themselves led to 
 destruction. 
 
 But as man advances in development, the intellect gradually 
 
 1 Beginnings of History, pp. 170, 171, Trans. 
 
 Rev. Dr. W. Ashmore, a missionary in China, in a recent public address as 
 reported, testified of his long experience as to common ground in natural reli- 
 gion between the Christian missionary and the heathen about him. He testi- 
 fied to the belief of the Chinese in divine mercy, and to some vague idea of 
 redemption from the divine punishment of wrong-doing. He expressed the 
 conviction that the heathen have not only the law of nature, but to a certain 
 degree the gospel of nature. 
 25 
 
386 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 rises above the physical strength, and the moral more and more 
 takes precedence of both. Then wisdom and incorruptible integ- 
 rity become essential elements in the hero. Man admires hero- 
 ism in virtue. This indeed he has always done , but the virtue 
 becomes more and more prominent and is coming to be demanded 
 as essential. Man admires the martyr who values truth and 
 righteousness more than life. He admires the good man in the 
 beauty and nobleness, the purity and sweetness, the beneficent 
 self-devotion and energy, the truthfulness and strong integrity of 
 his character. In the progress of man he more and more de- 
 mands these qualities in the person whom he is to admire as a 
 hero. This admiration may easily pass over into reverence, trust 
 and service. And he naturally ascribes in full perfection to the 
 divinity the qualities which he admires as perfections in men. In 
 the lower stages of development physical strength and agility are 
 most admired and the strong man is the hero ; then the god may 
 be Thor with his hammer. As he advances heroes of all kinds 
 may find place in his pantheon. But in the progress of man he 
 comes to appreciate intellectual skill and moral excellence ; and 
 at last forms the idea of God as the all-perfect Spirit. 
 
 Man feels also aesthetic admiration of the beauty and grandeur 
 of nature. In the emotion of sublimity, in which some sugges- 
 tion of the infinite and absolute in its mysterious grandeur comes 
 upon the soul, the admiration passes into awe. In the emotion 
 of the beautiful it is an ideal of the rational spirit which is re- 
 vealed. To feel the beauty of the waving wheat is to be con- 
 scious of other interest in it than that it is food for the body. 
 The emotion of beauty does not unfold into the religious and im- 
 ply a consciousness of God so obviously as do those which we 
 have considered. Yet the religion of the Greeks was largely a 
 religion of beauty. In beauty of form and of combinations in 
 nature and in the human body they saw the divine. And in 
 every age admiration of beauty is closely akin to reverence and 
 adoration, and may lead to it. It is mistaken for it, or perhaps 
 is really an obscure form of religious reverence, in those who 
 " Worship nature in the hill and valley, 
 
 Not knowing what they love." 
 
 There is a philosophical ground for this. Beauty is the revela- 
 tion of an ideal of perfection ; and the ideally perfect has no 
 meaning except as related to some standard of truth and law ii? 
 the reason. And because beauty is unintelligible except as man- 
 ifesting an ideal, all beauty implies the looking on us through 
 
GOD EEVEALED IN MAN. 387 
 
 nature of the rational mind that pervades all nature. The emo- 
 tions of the beautiful are a response in the soul of man to a reve- 
 lation of God. And as all ideals of the beautiful as well as all 
 principles of truth and laws of action are eternal and archetypal 
 in the absolute Reason, it was with true philosophical insight as 
 well as with true religious fervor that Augustine apostrophized 
 God : " O Beauty, ancient yet ever new, why have I found thee 
 so late?" 
 
 The fourth fundamental idea of reason, the Good, arises on? 
 occasion of man's experience of pleasure and pain, of joy and sor- 
 row. Here perhaps his most remarkable characteristic is his dis- 
 satisfaction and discontent. He is always reaching out for some- 
 thing beyond what he has. In the life of selfish desire, however 
 successful in his pursuit, he is never satisfied ; however great his 
 acquisitions he has never enough. Desire is an uneasiness in the 
 sense of want. But the desire is intensified in the exertion to 
 gain its object ; its gratification is but fuel to a fire ; it grows by 
 what it feeds on. For this reason it can never be satisfied ; its 
 uneasiness can never be removed. Therefore if the man, who 
 lives only to gratify selfish desire, is not disappointed of the ob- 
 jects of his pursuit, he is disappointed in them ; vanity of vani- 
 ties, all is vanity, is found imprinted on all his acquisitions, and 
 pessimism becomes his legitimate theory of life. Philosophy, 
 poetry and religion in all ages have united in declaring man's 
 dissatisfaction and discontent, in bewailing the emptiness and 
 transitoriness of earthly good, and in picturing man as a stranger 
 and a pilgrim on earth. But the brutes are contented with their 
 earthly condition and satisfied with the gratification of their 
 sensuous wants. " Doth the wild ass bray when he hath grass ? 
 or lovveth the ox over his fodder ? " 
 
 In this discontent with his condition and acquisitions, this felt 
 insufficiency of all which satisfies the natural desires, we see 
 man's obscure consciousness that he has powers for a higher 
 sphere of action and capacities for a higher good ; that he is re- 
 lated to something that transcends sense and the limits of an 
 earthly life. In the development of animal life we see the crea- 
 ture moved by impulses the meaning of which it does not under- 
 stand, but which are necessary to the preservation and growth 
 of the animal or the continuance of the species. Such is the un- 
 easiness impelling a bird to build its nest, and the uneasiness 
 which afterwards impels it to brood on the eggs ; the uneasiness 
 which impels a duck to go into the water, and the new-born 
 
388 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 mammal to suck. Hunger is the witness in the sensorium to the 
 law that in organic beings food is necessary to repair waste and 
 to sustain life. So in the spirit of man uneasiness and restlessness 
 amid the satisfaction of sensuous and physical wants are impulses 
 to that which is essential to the spiritual life ; and this can be 
 satisfied only in communion and harmony with God. Religion 
 has root in the contradiction between the insufficiency of earthly 
 and sensuous good and the aspirations of the spirit for what is 
 untransitory, spiritual and divine. It has root in man's discon- 
 tent, and is inherent in his personality ; it is a necessary result 
 of his being a spirit or person who distinguishes himself from 
 nature and knows himself above it. 
 
 An example of this spiritual instinct is the aspiration for ex- 
 istence after death and the spontaneous belief in it. The senses 
 show that all that have organic life, from man to the lowest 
 fungus, die. Yet man longs and hopes and expects to live be- 
 yond the grave. He may try hard to convince himself that no 
 such existence awaits him ; but the belief of it or at least the 
 hope or the fear of it persists. He thinks himself convinced that 
 there is no existence and no righteous retribution for sin after 
 death ; he persuades himself that it is only 
 
 " The giant-shadow of our awful fear 
 Upon the mirror of our conscience thrown." 1 
 
 But before he is aware his thought is again struggling to pene- 
 trate the dimness of the hereafter and his soul is gloomed with 
 the shadow of eternity. 
 
 " Who forged that other influence, 
 That heat of inward evidence, 
 By which he doubts against the sense ? 
 
 " Here sits he shaping wings to fly; 
 His heart forbodes a mystery; 
 He names the name Eternity." 
 
 Connected with the idea of the Good are the feelings of self- 
 respect, of honor and shame, of the worthy and unworthy. Even 
 the desire of happiness must be estimated in the light of reason, 
 and enjoyment and its sources judged as worthy or unworthy of 
 the pursuit of a rational being. In the light of reason man is 
 ashamed of himself for seeking unworthy objects and finding en- 
 jovment in them. He rejects with scorn the greatest pleasures, 
 
 i " Der Riesenschatten unsrer eignen Schrecken 
 Im hohlen Spiegel der Gewissensangst." 
 
 Schiller, Resignation. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 389 
 
 if they are derived from unworthy sources or are obtained by un- 
 worthy actions or on unworthy conditions. Tertullian, replying 
 to slanders commonly reported among the heathen that the Chris- 
 tians mingled the blood of infants with their sacramental bread 
 and committed incest at their solemnities, and that they believed 
 that for so doing they would be rewarded with eternal bliss, said 
 with noble scorn, that the eternal blessedness of heaven is not 
 worth having at the price of committing these crimes. 1 In this 
 sense of nobleness and worth is the consciousness of spiritual be- 
 ing above nature and of relationship with the divine. 
 
 Humor seems to carry in it some consciousness of man's spirit- 
 ual superiority alike to the joys and sorrows of his merely natural 
 and earthly life. In the light of reason and the consciousness of 
 spiritual capacities and powers he can lift himself above himself ; 
 he condemns himself for wrong -doing, he despises himself for 
 meanness, he laughs at himself for folly. Humor is that which, 
 always with tender sympathy for man, sees something to smile 
 at in human life ; it sees the comedy mingling with tragedy in 
 all conditions. When we contrast man's spiritual being, his di- 
 vine relations, his immortal destiny with the emptiness of the 
 joys of sense and the transitoriness of his earthly life, we see that 
 his eagerness in pursuing these transitory things, his anxiety lest 
 he fail to attain them, his triumph when dazzled with the shim- 
 mer and glamour of success, his anguish at disappointment and 
 loss are out of all proportion to the importance of the objects. 
 And in wrong -doing there is also folly along with the wicked- 
 ness. It is in some consciousness of man's spiritual superiority 
 to the life of sense that man sees the humorous side of life. As 
 a mother, from the height of her superior knowledge and with all 
 a mother's tenderness, looks down on her little child and sees 
 something to smile at, not only in its childish pleasures but also 
 in its perplexities and its sorrows and even in its faulty deeds, so 
 the spirit of man in its humor, conscious of spiritual powers, re- 
 lations and destiny, looks down from that height on the eager life 
 of man with smiles which are not far from tears. 
 
 It must be added that in all the emotions pertaining to the 
 true, the right, the perfect and the good, there is a revelation 
 within the human consciousness, not only of rational spirit, but 
 also of spirit that is absolute as well as rational. This appears 
 in the strength and boundlessness of the aspirations and the in- 
 tensity of the emotions. In science man is impelled to explore 
 
 1 Apologeticus, 8. 
 
390 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the universe to its outmost bounds and its inmost constitution, 
 outward through all space and backward and forward through all 
 time, and with an intensity which fears not arctic cold nor torrid 
 Jieat nor pestilential climates ; which risks and sometimes sacri- 
 fices life in pursuit of knowledge. In the moral emotions are 
 fears and aspirations reaching into eternity, intensity of shame 
 jmd remorse driving to despair, and blessedness in doing right 
 which fills the soul as the sunshine fills the concave of the firma- 
 ment with solid light. And as to the perfect and the good, man 
 aspires to nothing less than to be like God and to be blessed 
 eternally with him. Pfleiderer says: " Mosaism has an absolute 
 principle of morals : ' Be ye holy for I am holy.' The basis of 
 the Old Testament morality is the belief in a holy God. In the 
 holiness of God lies his exaltation above the finite and the nat- 
 ural, above all beginning, changing and passing away ; in it lies 
 the absolute." l And Kant holds that in the practical reason 
 man has immediate consciousness of God revealing himself in the 
 moral law within him. In the moral feelings the imperative of 
 the absolute Reason is revealed and felt within the consciousness 
 of man. The same is equally true of each of the other funda- 
 mental ideas of reason. In the scientific motives and emotions 
 connected with the rational intuition of the necessary and uni- 
 versal principles regulative of all thinking, man finds revealed in 
 his own consciousness the absoluteness and unchangeableness and 
 universality of the eternal Reason. In the ideals of the perfect 
 the soul thrills with aesthetic joy in the presence of beauty, is 
 awed before the sublime, aspires to a perfection above all that is 
 seen on earth, and thus is conscious of a perfection and a glory 
 that is divine. And in our sense of honor and worth we meas- 
 ure what is good by standards above the mere quantity of en- 
 joyment, above all empirical measurements ; we find within us 
 standards of unchanging reason in which we are conscious of the 
 presence of the Reason which is absolute and divine. 
 
 The absolute Spirit reveals himself in the feelings, not only as 
 absolute Reason, the eternal seat of all truth, law, perfection and 
 good, but also as Reason energizing, as the almighty Will that 
 creates and sustains the universe and reveals in it his power. 
 Responsive to this is man's feeling of dependence, his conscious- 
 ness of weakness, limitation, insufficiency, of need of one wiser 
 and mightier than himself, a Father in Heaven. Heinrich Heine 
 said : " I am no child ; I do not want a heavenly Father any 
 1 Moral und Religion, 19, p. 32. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 391 
 
 more." Yet in the last days of his out-door life, in the sad sense 
 of dependence and need, he falls at the feet of the Venus of Milo, 
 his loved ideal of beauty, sees her looking on him with divine 
 pity, and seems to hear her response : " Dost thou not see that I 
 have no arms and therefore cannot help thee?" 1 Comical in- 
 deed, and yet the deepest tragedy ; a soul awakening from its 
 self-sufficiency to the sense of dependence and need, and, with the 
 revelation of the God of love lying like the sunlight all about 
 him, crying for help to an illusion, u a false creation proceeding 
 from the heat-oppressed brain." 
 
 Schleiermacher gives the sense of dependence as the one root 
 of religion ; as in fact being religion. But this is impossible. 
 One may have the most urgent sense of complete dependence 
 without any religious feeling towards the object on which he 
 depends ; as a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a floating spar. 
 Religion implies not merely the sense of dependence, but of 
 dependence on some power beyond nature and man. And so 
 far as even this is the sense of dependence on power only, it 
 is but one among many religious feelings. Religion is the re- 
 sponse of the soul to the presence of the absolute Spirit ; to the 
 spiritual and the personal in the absolute, and not merely to the 
 power. It is consciousness of needing the guidance of wisdom 
 and the upholding of love, and not merely the support of power. 
 The latter, when alone, is the consciousness only of being help- 
 less in the grasp of unintelligent and resistless fate ; it therefore 
 lacks elements essential in the religious consciousness and is not 
 properly called religion. 
 
 Another feeling in which religion has root is the peculiar im- 
 pression under which the soul thrills at the contact or the im- 
 agination of contact with spirits from the world unseen. The 
 imagined appearance of a visitant from the spiritual world fills 
 the mind with awe. " In thoughts from the visions of the night, 
 when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me and trem- 
 bling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed 
 before my face ; the hair of my flesh stood up." 2 It is not the 
 dread of danger. The same man might march to the cannon's 
 mouth without trembling. It is a peculiar awe under which the 
 man quivers at the approach of the spiritual world. Warriors, 
 who never feared in battle, quake at their own fancies when they 
 fancy they see a spirit. 
 
 One cannot even hear of such apparitions without a peculiar 
 
 1 Stedman, Victorian Poets, pp. 18, 19. 2 Job iv. 13. 
 
392 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 terror, such as no other cause excites. That keen observer of 
 human nature, Sir Walter Scott, remarked that when any com- 
 pany are in an evening listening to stories of ghosts, however con- 
 vinced that the stories are false, they instinctively draw their 
 chairs nearer together and exhibit signs of awe. The idea of the 
 unseen world, entering the mind through the imagination, makes 
 the soul quiver at its coming. So in Tennyson's Harold, when 
 the kingdom has been put under an interdict by the Pope, Harold 
 is represented as saying : 
 
 " Fool and wise I fear 
 This curse and scorn it." 
 
 The very thought of a spiritual presence, when vivid, produces 
 a similar impression. Experiences in thoughts and visions of the 
 night analogous to those recorded ages ago in the book of Job, 
 are not uncommon now. One wakes from deep sleep ; in the 
 darkness, the loneliness, the silence, he thinks of the world of 
 spirits, its reality, its nearness, his own inevitable approach to 
 it ; he thinks of the great God looking on him out of the dark ; 
 he imagines spirits of the dead near him. Who has not felt at 
 such hours the peculiar and thrilling awe of the unseen and spir- 
 itual world ? 
 
 This is why proximity to the dead inspires men with fear, and 
 a corpse, silent and still, daunts the soul that never feared the 
 living. Hugh Miller in his boyhood was one night shut up by 
 the rising tide in a cave. He says : " The corpse of a drowned 
 man had been found on the beach about a month previous, some 
 forty yards from where we lay. I had examined the body, as 
 young people are apt to do, a great deal too curiously for my 
 peace ; and though I had never done the poor nameless seaman 
 any harm, I could not have suffered more from him during that 
 melancholy night, had I been his murderer. Sleeping or waking 
 he was constantly before me. The near neighborhood of a score 
 of living bandits would have inspired less horror than the recol- 
 lection of that one seaman." 1 
 
 There is often power in a single word, striking the soul's sensi- 
 tiveness to spiritual realities, to rouse to intense emotion. Han- 
 nah More relates that a lady just returned from a ball saw the 
 word Eternity on an open page on her toilet-table ; its signifi- 
 cance rushed upon her mind, awakening her spiritual suscepti- 
 bilities, and this was the beginning of an earnest spiritual life. 
 
 This power on the spiritual susceptibilities exerted by the very 
 1 My Schools and Schoolmasters, p. 77. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 39& 
 
 thought, the imagination even, of spiritual realities is the reason 
 why superstition finds currency among the ignorant and those 
 who are wrongly taught. This is no argument against the re- 
 ality of God and the spiritual world, but is a decisive argument 
 for it. It is only the deepest sentiments of the heart which can 
 be aroused by a fancy. The bare suspicion that her absent child 
 is in danger, even a dream of it, may rob the mother of peace. 
 It simply shows how strong and true the instinct is, although, on 
 hurrying home, she may find that, in the particular case, the 
 danger fancied or dreamed of was unreal. So the ease with which, 
 superstition is propagated and the power which even through the 
 imagination it exerts, are proof that the spiritual sensibilities are 
 strong and true in revealing God and the spiritual world, though 
 man err in his judgments in the interpretation of them in detail. 
 
 4. The foregoing analysis proves that the spontaneous belief 
 in God has root in the constitution of man ; that therefore it 
 gives a real and rational knowledge of God ; and if not, then, 
 falsehood is ingrained in the whole personal constitution of man,, 
 and knowledge is impossible. 
 
 It was ascertained in the outset that belief in a divinity is a 
 common characteristic of humanity, and is spontaneous, power- 
 ful and persistent. From this it was inferred that it is rooted in 
 the constitution of man. 
 
 We have now analyzed the human constitution and have found 
 that this spontaneous belief has root in the personality of man 
 and in all its capacities and powers. It has root in the reason 
 and is involved in all its fundamental ideas ; it has root in the 
 free will ; and roots ramified through the sensibilities. The be- 
 lief springs not from a single tup-root, but from roots complicated 
 and ramifying through man's entire personality. In unfolding- 
 man's consciousness of personality, from whatever side, this hid- 
 den element of belief in God comes to light, and reveals that its 
 presence is indispensable to the completed consciousness. So 
 Julius Miiller says : " In the depths of our own self-conscious- 
 ness, as its concealed background, the God-consciousness reveals 
 itself in us ; the descent into our own inmost spirit is at the same 
 time an ascent to God. Every deep reflection on ourselves 
 breaks through the crust of the mere world-consciousness, which 
 separates us from the inmost truth of our being, and brings us 
 face to face with him in whom we live and move and have our 
 being." 1 Tertullian seems to have had the same thought in his 
 1 Christian Doctrine of Sin, bk. L part i. chap. ii. 
 
394 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 mind when he said : " This is the crowning guilt of men, that 
 they will not recognize One of whom they cannot possibly be 
 ignorant. Would you have the proof from the works of his hand, 
 so numerous and so great ? ... Or would you rather have it from 
 the testimony of the soul itself ? Though under the oppressive 
 bondage of the body, led astray by bad teaching, weakened by 
 lusts and passions, in slavery to false gods ; yet whenever the 
 soul comes to itself as out of a surfeit or a sleep or a sickness 
 and attains something of its natural soundness, it speaks of God ; 
 using no other word because this is the peculiar name of the true 
 God. < Great God ! ' 4 Good God ! ' 4 May God grant it ; ' are 
 the words on every lip. The soul also calls on God as Judge : 
 ' God sees,' 4 To God I commend it,' ' God wilt repay.' O noble 
 witness of the soul, Christian by nature." l That belief in God 
 and a divine law wells up spontaneously from the depths of the 
 human spirit seems to be taught in Deuteronomy ; " For this 
 commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden 
 from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou 
 shouldest say, Who shall go for us to heaven and bring it to us, 
 that we may hear it and do it ? Neither is it beyond the sea, 
 that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us and 
 bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it ? But the word is 
 very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou 
 mayest do it." 2 
 
 To our senses the earth does not seem to be one of the heav- 
 enly bodies belonging to the solar system ; yet when we know it 
 as it really is, we know it as one of them, moving among them, 
 and like them drawn by the sun's attraction and shining with its 
 light. So in the life of sense man does not see himself as belong- 
 ing to the spiritual world ; yet when he knows himself as he 
 really is, he knows himself in the spiritual system, one among 
 the many there, luminous with the light of the universal Reason, 
 moving amid the grandeurs and glories of eternity, and touched 
 at every point of his personality by the drawing of God. 
 
 We see therefore the mistake of those divines who with 
 Schleiermacher maintain that this spontaneous belief in a God 
 has its origin in the single feeling of dependence. For some im- 
 plicit consciousness of God is involved not only in this feeling 
 but also in all the rational motives and emotions ; and also in 
 the practical side of man's personality, as free will acting under 
 moral responsibility. They also err who find the consciousness 
 1 Apologeticus, 17. 2 Chap. xxx. 11-14. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 395 
 
 of God in the emotional and practical sides of personality, but 
 exclude it from the intellectual. For reason scrutinizes man's 
 belief in God and affirms it to be a rational and reasonable belief, 
 in fact the attestation of reason itself to the existence of God. 
 Reason finds that in all its acts its own trustworthiness depends 
 on the reality of the absolute Reason, and its assent to this re- 
 ality is implied. And the mistake of-resting this belief on feeling 
 and the practical side of man's personality to the exclusion of 
 reason is fatal. If religious faith has no root in intelligence, if it 
 is not an outcome of reason, grounded in its principles and con- 
 firmed by its scrutiny, it is powerless in the face of skepticism 
 and of too little value to be worth contending for. " The en- 
 tire surrender of the soul which is the very essence of religion, 
 can only be distinguished from superstition when regarded as in 
 the highest sense a rational act. On any other supposition re- 
 ligion must be viewed as a form of mental disease." l A promi- 
 nent preacher says in a published sermon : " The ordinary func- 
 tions of thought require to be replaced by a revelation that is 
 from above. . . . When once it has been allowed by the advo- 
 cates of the gospel that reason is an incompetent authority in 
 matters of the soul and immortality, the less they have to do 
 with reason, either as witness or judge, the more will it comport 
 with the dignity of the proceeding and the validity of the judg- 
 ing. Having discarded reason as umpire in the premises (and 
 along with reason of course the other lower intellectual agencies) 
 what have we left on which to rely for persuasion in the matter ? 
 ... I know of no way that is completely satisfactory except 
 through a conviction that is supernaturally bestowed." Here 
 then we have " validity of judging " and " conviction " without 
 reason or intellectual agencies. It seems not to have occurred to 
 the writer that it requires reason to receive and interpret a rev- 
 elation of God not less than to give it. Christian divines who 
 thus flee from the assaults of skepticism to a faith founded on 
 feeling only and divorced from reason and intelligence, concede 
 all which the skeptic asks. They acknowledge that theistic be- 
 lief is neither rational nor reasonable, and cannot stand in the 
 light of reason. 
 
 On the other hand, this belief is not the speculative creation 
 
 of reason alone apart from the emotional and practical side of 
 
 man's personality. Reason finds in the feelings evidence of the 
 
 existence of God. They are evidence of the existence of God on 
 
 1 Professor Diman, The Theistic Argument, pp. 73, 74. 
 
396 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the principle on which evolution rests, that a being must be in 
 harmony with its environment or perish. The instincts of ani- 
 mals point to a corresponding reality in their environment. But 
 here we find a common characteristic of humanity to be reli- 
 giousness, with its spontaneous belief, its impulses and aspira- 
 tions, its varied emotions pointing to a divinity. Why must not 
 it also reveal a correspondirig reality in man's spiritual environ- 
 ment? A rabbit's fearfulness indicates the reality of its de- 
 fenselessness and danger. So " the fear of the wicked it shall 
 come upon him." The thirst of the deer corresponds to the ex- 
 istence of water to quench it. And " as the hart panteth after 
 the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, my God. My 
 soul thirsteth for God, for the living God." A nestling feels 
 the impulse to fly. Could it reason it might remember that it 
 had always had the solid support of the nest and conclude that 
 if it threw itself out it would fall. But when it spreads its 
 wings it finds the atmosphere in which it can fly. So following 
 its spiritual impulse, the soul throws itself upon the unseen in 
 prayer and finds itself borne upward in communion with God. 
 Thus reason finds evidence of the existence and presence of God 
 in the spiritual instincts ; in those motives and emotions which 
 lift it above itself and have no significance except as revealing 
 the presence of a spiritual environment; in the spiritual expe- 
 rience and consciousness expressed by the Psalmist : " Thou 
 compassest my path and my lying down and art acquainted with 
 all my ways. Thou hast beset me behind and before and laid 
 thine hand upon me." 
 
 Religious feeling also confirms the insight of reason and the 
 speculative conclusion of thought. As the spontaneous belief in 
 God springing up with and in the religious feelings is found also 
 to be implied in the principles of reason and is vindicated and 
 verified by the scrutiny of thought, so the insight of reason and 
 the conclusions of thought are filled with significance and con- 
 firmed by the religious feelings. The belief in God which 
 springs up spontaneously in the feelings, the belief which is im- 
 plicit in the principles of reason regulating all thought, and the 
 belief infolded in the ratiocinated conclusions of thought are one 
 same belief issuing from all these several processes which sustain 
 and confirm each other. We see all the powers and susceptibili- 
 ties of the human personality consenting and concurring in the 
 belief that God exists and in this consilience of evidence estab- 
 lishing it firmly. In whatever operations and states the person- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 397 
 
 ality of man reveals itself in the consciousness, it reveals itself as 
 related to and dependent on the personal God. 
 
 In the feelings and the practical side of human personality 
 contents are given to the idea of God in the speculative reason. 
 Kant has shown that the idea of God is a necessary idea of pure 
 reason. Without it the mind cannot comprehend all things in the 
 unity of a universe, nor solve its own necessary problems, nor bring 
 its thinking to a conclusion in knowledge. Without it thinking 
 is but weaving a Penelope's web ; with however fine a texture 
 woven it immediately unravels. It is indeed legitimate to hold 
 for true whatever reason sees to be a necessary truth. Kalmis 
 truly says : u Reason renounces itself if it does not hold for real 
 what it demands with inward necessity." But Kant objects 
 that though the idea of God is necessary to the speculative rea- 
 son, we cannot know that it has objective reality unless it has 
 contents in consciousness. These contents he finds only in the 
 consciousness of moral law. But it is now evident that con- 
 tents in consciousness for the idea of God are found in all the 
 rational emotions and motives, in all the spiritual instincts and 
 impulses, and in all the activities of our personal susceptibilities 
 and powers. Thus alike in reflective thought, in the rational 
 intuitions and the religious experience we know God. And this 
 accords with the ancient maxim : " Philosophy seeks for the 
 truth, theology finds it, religion takes it into possession." 1 
 
 It follows that the belief in God does not rest on a special 
 faculty weak in isolation from the intuitive and reflective powers 
 through which other objects are known. The belief in God 
 rests on and is interwoven with the entire personality of man. 
 The knowledge of God, like all knowledge, begins in experience 
 and is elaborated in thought. If this were not so no arguments 
 could prove his existence. Thus the belief in God, rooted in the 
 whole personality of man, is real knowledge. And if it is not, 
 the rational and personal constitution of man is deceitful and un- 
 trustworthy and all knowledge is impossible. 2 
 
 5. Religion with the spontaneous belief in a God involved in 
 it exists antecedent to and independent of scientific thought, 
 empirical, philosophical and theological. This is a necessary 
 inference from the constitutional religiousness of man which has 
 now been established. 
 
 1 " Philosophia quaerit, theologia irrvenit, religio possidet veritatem." 
 2 " Wer Gott nicht fiihlt in sich und alien Lebenkreisen, 
 
 Dem werdet ihr nicht Ihn beweisen. mit Beweisen." Riickert. 
 
398 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GODi 
 
 The outward world reveals itself through impressions on the 
 sensorium and through them we perceive it and believe that it 
 exists. This belief is not originated by scientific thought, is not 
 dependent on it and cannot be disproved by it. On the con- 
 trary all physical science assumes the unproved belief to be real 
 knowledge and depends on it for its own reality as knowledge. 
 As Lotze says : " Something like what we here experience under 
 the influence of physical excitements we may experience under 
 the immediate working of the divine power within the soul. 
 Religious belief would thus be an intuition of the supersensuous 
 power revealed to us by this inworking." 1 And as we have 
 seen, there is a wealth of spiritual experience in the human soul 
 in which the belief in a God spontaneously arises. And, like 
 the belief in the external world, this belief in God does not orig- 
 inate in scientific thought nor depend on it, nor can it be dis- 
 proved by it. All philosophical and theological thought assumes 
 that the belief in God is real knowledge and depends on it as 
 such, just as physical science assumes that the belief in the out- 
 ward world is real knowledge and depends on it as such. 
 
 As the soul of a musician has susceptibility which thrills re- 
 sponsive to the sounds of a musical instrument and perceives and 
 feels the music, so man has spiritual susceptibilities which thrill 
 responsive to the touch of spiritual realities. A child puts its ear 
 to a sea-shell and thinks it hears the roaring of the sea whence 
 the shell was taken ; but in the soul of the child whispers the vast 
 and far eternity, to which the child belongs. 
 
 You see a sun-picture forming on a prepared plate, and you 
 know that it is a picture of some real object touched by the light 
 of the sun. The religious consciousness is a picture of the reality 
 of the spiritual and the unseen forming within the soul by the 
 light which shines from beyond the range of sense and lighteth 
 every man, revealing God. 
 
 Jacobi, recognizing in man a power of knowing God and spirit- 
 ual realities, analogous to his power of perceiving outward things 
 through sense, insists that it is the reason in its highest signifi- 
 cance. It "is the spiritual eye for spiritual objects, and we call 
 it reason. Some who are called philosophers have sought to dis- 
 pense with this organ, thinking they could see their one truth 
 clearer with one eye. So they put out the eye for the super- 
 sensible, insisting that it is only a delusive eye, a seeing double. 
 It should be noticed how the one eye, after this operation, gets 
 1 Mikrokosmus, vol. iii. bk. ix. chap. iv. 1. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 399 
 
 into the middle of the forehead and no trace of the second eye 
 remains. These Polyphemuses find credence among too many. 
 . . . Socrates, and Plato after him, oppose this one-eyed wisdom, 
 and prove in many ways that if a man is ever to attain the truth, 
 he needs to have both eyes and to keep them both wide open." 1 
 And from a point of view at the extreme opposite to Jacobi 
 we find Professor Le Conte affirming the same conclusion : " As 
 there must be objective reality in the things which constitute 
 the material of knowledge, so there must be objective realities 
 corresponding to fundamental and universal religious beliefs. It 
 is impossible to avoid this conclusion except by an agnosticism 
 which destroys science as well as religion." 2 And does not Paul 
 also, with equal decisiveness, recognize in man an eye which sees 
 the invisible, when he says : " The invisible things of God from 
 the creation of the world are clearly seen " ? And the same is 
 recognized by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he 
 says of Moses that "he endured as seeing him who is invisible." 
 
 It follows that the spontaneous belief in God thus inwrought 
 into the personality of man is a reasonable ground of religious 
 service and life, even though the man has not as yet defined and 
 verified it in scientific thought. It is reasonable for a person to 
 act on the belief that the sun exists, though he has never proved 
 it and has never studied astronomy. It is reasonable for him to 
 believe in the reality of music, though he knows nothing of the 
 undulations of the air and the mathematics of the musical scale 
 by which science explains it. So it is reasonable for a person to 
 believe in 'God and to serve him religiously, though he has never 
 attempted scientifically to defend or formulate his belief. The 
 same is true of belief in Christ and Christianity as set forth in 
 the Bible. Christ, his life and spiritual power, are the great 
 demonstration of Christianity. When God as revealed in Christ 
 touches and rouses to action the spiritual susceptibilities and 
 capacities of a man, when he meets and satisfies his spiritual 
 aspirations and needs, when in his religious consciousness the 
 man finds him quickening, renovating, nourishing and purifying 
 his soul, then he believes in him. And this belief, springing 
 from his very constitution as a personal being and living in the 
 inmost life of his spirit, is a reasonable and trustworthy belief. 
 
 And if this is not so, then the great majority of human beings 
 can never attain a reasonable belief in God and a trustworthy 
 
 1 Jacobi, Werke, vol. ii. pp. 74, 75; David Hume iiber den Glauben. 
 8 Princeton Rev., April, 1881, p. 172. 
 
400 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ground of religion. It is true the heavens declare the glory of 
 God, all nature is crowded with the evidence of his existence, 
 physical science is daily revealing new wonders of his wisdom, 
 and the constitution and history of man proclaim his moral law 
 and reveal his perfect love. But in this day skepticism is equally 
 all-pervading, putting its interrogation-point after every declara- 
 tion of God's glory. It calls to us with its questions and doubts 
 from the misty heights of pantheistic speculation and from the 
 shining path of physical science through all space and time. In 
 studying the evidences of Christianity we have to trace out the 
 labyrinths of history, to dig up ancient and buried cities, to deci- 
 pher hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions, and to master a 
 Babel of strange languages. The mass of men cannot do this. 
 What then ? Are they shut out from the possibility of knowing 
 God ? or must they receive their belief on the authority of learned 
 men? Neither the one nor the other. They are to find him 
 touching their own hearts and revealing himself in their own 
 lives. They may say with a true meaning : 
 
 " Away, haunt thou not me, 
 Thou vain philosophy. 
 Little hast thou bestead 
 Save to perplex the head 
 And leave the spirit dead. 
 Unto thy broken cisterns wherefore go, 
 While from the secret treasure, depths below, 
 Fed by the skyey shower 
 
 And clouds that sink and rest on hill-tops high, 
 Wisdom at once and power 
 Are welling, bubbling forth, unseen, incessantly. . . . 
 
 " Why labor at the dull mechanic oar, 
 When the fresh breeze* is blowing 
 And the strong current flowing 
 Right onward to the eternal shore? " 
 
 It is evident, therefore, that the faith of an unlettered Christian 
 is a reasonable faith. In a time of persecution a young woman 
 was assailed by her persecutors with arguments to unsettle her 
 faith. She heard them patiently and replied, I am unlearned and 
 cannot argue for Christ, but I can die for him. 
 
 And in the perplexities and difficulties of thought and the 
 objections and doubts incident to its investigations, it is reason- 
 able to keep fast hold on this spontaneous belief, which comes 
 from the depths of our personal and spiritual being. This hope 
 " we have, as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast and 
 
GOD KEVEALED IN MAN. 401 
 
 entering into that within the veil." Also in the gathering shad- 
 ows of death it is reasonable that men hold fast upon this living 
 faith, above all theological formulas. Jean Paul Richter says : 
 "When in your last hour all faculty in the broken spirit shall 
 fade away and die into inanity imagination, thought, effort, 
 enjoyment then will the night-flower of belief alone continue 
 blooming and refresh with its perfume in the closing darkness." 
 This living faith is the fountain of living water springing up 
 within the soul and flowing forth unto everlasting life. 
 
 Because belief in #, divinity springs spontaneously out of the in- 
 most personality of man, it must be persistent in human history, 
 and its suppression by speculative skepticism can be only local 
 and temporary. For this belief exists before physical science, 
 philosophical investigation or theological thought ; and though it 
 can be verified by these and shown to be a reasonable belief, yet 
 it exists spontaneously independent of them. In fact it is the 
 beliefs, welling up spontaneously in our very constitution and 
 living in the feelings and will as well as in the intellect, which 
 call forth in their defense the devotedness of self-sacrificing love. 
 An opinion held merely as a result of argument or a balancing of 
 evidence is not secure. A new fact, a new argument, a suggestion 
 of doubt from one whose opinion has weight, may shake it and 
 cause it to fall. If religious belief is to rule our lives, if it is to 
 be the motive that impels and the standard by which we judge 
 our actions, if it is to demand self-devotedness and self-sacrifice 
 and the martyr-spirit in allegiance to it, it must be more than an 
 opinion founded on a balance of arguments and evidence, it must 
 spring from our constitution as personal, it must live as a real 
 communion with God, a real experience of his presence and his 
 love. But when thus rooted in the personality and living in the 
 spirit's life, it persists in the face of scientific and philosophical 
 speculation, and if temporarily suppressed returns with power. 
 
 " One day they will return in shining forms, 
 These fair ambassadors of the Infinite; 
 And when they come, the rosy-fingered dawn 
 Will show the nothingness of churlish Science 
 Feigning void heavens above a lawless world." 
 
 And these principles must guide us in teaching men the knowl- 
 edge of God. If the belief in God is not already germinal in the 
 personality, if there has been no experience of God's influence in 
 the soul, no spontaneous belief welling up from it, there is noth- 
 ing for education to draw out nor for culture to enrich and cause 
 to grow. 26 
 
402 THE SELF-EEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 And this is the source of many errors in teaching men to know 
 God. We attempt to put the belief in God into the mind, but 
 we should rather draw it out. We try to teach men that there 
 is a God by argument addressed to the intellect, but we should 
 rather teach it by awakening and inspiring the dormant suscepti- 
 bilities already in the spirit. We teach religion didactically ; but 
 we must first teach, as our Lord did, presenting spiritual realities 
 to the spirit in the expectation that it will spiritually respond. 
 As Boethius says, if there were not already tinder in the soul the 
 spark of divine truth would not kindle. 1 As Mr. James Marti- 
 neau says, our Lord was accustomed to "draw forth into con- 
 sciousness those divine and primitive truths which have been set 
 from the beginning in the firmament of the soul, but, for want of 
 an interpreter, have been taken for sparkles instead of suns/' 2 
 
 IV. GOD REVEALED IN THE PRACTICAL POWER OF FAITH 
 IN HIM. The knowledge of God is necessary to the progress of 
 man, whether as an individual or in society, toward the realiza- 
 tion of the highest possibilities of his being. God is revealed in 
 the practical needs of man which God alone can meet. 
 
 1. In the first place, the knowledge of God is necessary to 
 religion. Belief in God springs from the constitution of man. 
 From the depths of his personality and from all its powers and 
 capacities the spirit of man cries out for God. If there is no 
 God, then man is endowed with powers for the exercise of which 
 the universe presents no sphere, and susceptibilities for the sat- 
 isfaction of which the universe presents no object. Then the 
 constitution of man as personal is in direct contradiction to it- 
 self and to the constitution of the universe. He is constituted 
 spiritual with no spiritual environment. Therefore he can never 
 realize his complete development. He lives in but one side of his 
 being; the other is smitten with paralysis, yet always reveals its 
 presence by its painfulness. 
 
 All the richness and strength of character which come dis- 
 tinctively from religion would then be lost. The tenderness and 
 depth of repentance for sin as against God, the faith in God by 
 which in the consciousness of weakness and dependence man lifts 
 himself above himself, becomes strong in God and is able to 
 
 1 "Hreret profecto semen introsum veri, 
 Quod excitatur ventilante doctrina. 
 Nam cur rogati sponte recta censetis, 
 Ni mersus alto viveret fomes corde? " 
 
 Boethius, De Consolntione Philos. lib. iii. metrum xi. 
 * Hours of Thought on Sacred Things, p. 270. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 403 
 
 stand, in the panoply of purity and truth, of faith and love, even 
 to death against all unrighteousness, would give place to the 
 spirit of self-sufficiency which is the basis of all selfishness. The 
 spirit of reverence toward God and humility before him would 
 disappear. We should lose the ennobling conception of man as 
 in the likeness of God, subject to his law and the object of his 
 loving care ; the inspiration of communing with God and work- 
 ing with him for the advancement of a kingdom of God on earth ; 
 and the conceptions of the worth and dignity of man, of the sa- 
 credness of his rights, of the brotherhood and equality of men 
 before God, the common Father of all. We should lose the con- 
 ception of the universe as the manifestation of God in the pro- 
 gressive realization of the ideals of his wisdom and love, and of 
 man as in the spiritual system, in which God is progressively ad- 
 vancing his reign of righteousness and grace and transforming 
 human society into a kingdom of God, always with a promise of 
 a future better than the past. And the great hope and inspira- 
 tion of the life immortal would fade away from human life and 
 death. 
 
 But this is not all. Man finds himself dependent on the resist- 
 less forces of nature; and thus, without God, subject to a blind 
 fate. The consciousness of helpless subjection either to blind or 
 to arbitrary and capricious power is debasing ; it is a conscious- 
 ness of slavery. And it is a source of continual unrest and dis- 
 satisfaction. In his subjection to these resistless forces, in the 
 consequent restriction, disappointment, suffering and death which 
 they bring on him, he begins to ask, Is life worth living? he 
 falls into pessimism ; he is driven it may be to suicide ; or, if not, 
 he begins to justify it as the only relief from the ills of life. He 
 can be raised into freedom from the galling of this conscious de- 
 pendence on the forces of nature only by his conscious depend- 
 ence on God, and the knowledge that nature with all its forces 
 is dependent on God and controlled by him in perfect wisdom and 
 love. In this he finds peace. So Mrs. Browning puts it : 
 " Oh, the little birds sang east and the little birds sang west ; 
 
 And I said in underbreath, All our life is mixed with death, 
 
 And who knoweth which is best? 
 
 " Oh, the little birds sang east and the little birds sang west; 
 And I smiled to think God's greatness flows around our incompleteness; 
 Round our restlessness his rest." 
 
 Physicns, the author of A Candid Examination of Theism, 
 concludes his volume with this testimony to the truth of what I 
 
404 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 have said : " Whether I regard the problem of Theism on the 
 lower plane of strict relative probability, or on the higher plane 
 of purely formal considerations, it equally becomes my obvious 
 duty to stifle all belief of the kind which I conceive to be the no- 
 blest, and to discipline my intellect with regard to this matter 
 into an attitude of the purest skepticism. And forasmuch as I 
 am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the 
 twilight doctrine of the 'new faith' is a desirable substitute for 
 the waning splendor of ' the old,' I am not ashamed to confess 
 that with this virtual negation of God the universe to me has lost 
 the soul of loveliness ; and although from henceforth the precept 
 to 4 work while it is day,' will doubtless but gain an intensified 
 force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words that ' the 
 night cometh in which no man can work,' yet when at times I 
 think, as at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the 
 hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely 
 mystery of existence as now I find it, at such times I shall ever 
 feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature 
 is susceptible. For whether it be due to my intelligence not be- 
 ing sufficiently advanced to meet the requirements of the age, or 
 whether it be due to the memory of those sacred associations 
 which to me at least were the sweetest that life has given, I can- 
 not but feel that for me and those who think as I do, there is a 
 dreadful truth in those words of Hamilton, Philosophy having 
 become a meditation, not merely of death, but of annihilation, the 
 precept, Know thyself, has become transformed into the terrific 
 oracle to OEdipus : 
 
 1 Mayest thou never know the truth of what thou art.' ' 
 And the late Professor Clifford, of England, said : " It cannot be 
 doubted that the theistic belief is a comfort to those who hold it, 
 and that the loss of it is a very painful loss. It cannot be doubted, 
 at least by many of us in this generation, who either profess it 
 now or have received it in our childhood, and have parted from 
 it since with such searching trouble as only cradle-faiths can 
 cause. We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty 
 heaven to light up a soulless earth ; we have felt with utter lone- 
 liness that the Great Companion is dead." And M. Renan is re- 
 ported to have said : " We are living on the perfume of an empty 
 vase." Such confessions and they are numerous are testi- 
 mony from the best witnesses that science without God cannot 
 help men over the contradiction which, if there is no God, exists 
 between man's spiritual aspirations and his animal nature, be- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 405 
 
 tween man's personal constitution and his environment, nor de- 
 liver him from the consequent unrest and dissatisfaction. They 
 give pungency to Mr. Arnold's demand : 
 
 " For the world cries, Your faith is now 
 But a dead time's exploded dream; 
 My melancholy, sciolists say, 
 Is a passed mode, an outworn theme. . . . 
 
 " Ah if it be passed, take away, 
 At least the restlessness, the pain ; 
 Be men henceforth no more a prey 
 To these outdated stings again. 
 The nobleness of grief is gone; 
 Ah, leave us not the fret alone." 
 
 2. The power of faith in God appears in its practical influence 
 penetrating every sphere of human activity and development. 
 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor Royce and others have given 
 grand descriptions of what religion, if it is to exist, must be. It 
 must harmonize with and support our largest knowledge and our 
 deepest convictions. It must give the philosophy of human life 
 on which to believe, to feel, to hope, to act, in a word to live and 
 to die. It must quicken us to our most unselfish and noblest ac- 
 tion. It must be the vitalizing principle of the purification and 
 progress of society. 
 
 The theist accepts the description and the challenge which it 
 carries in it. He affirms that faith in God, the eternal Spirit, 
 the God of love in his highest revelation of himself in Christ, is 
 necessary to the realization of these noble ends. He affirms that, 
 in the power of faith in God progressively realizing these ends, 
 God is always revealing himself to man. The change from be- 
 lief in God to atheism will not merely set aside what is distinc- 
 tively religious, but will exert a disastrous influence in every 
 sphere of man's activity and development. If all which is dis- 
 tinctively religious is to be swept away, if all the powers and sus- 
 ceptibilities of the personality of man in which religion has root 
 and which must have God for their development and satisfaction 
 are abortive, having no object on which to act and no reason for 
 their existence, if all consciousness of spiritual relations and des- 
 tiny, all hope of immortality are delusions, it will be the most 
 fundamental change possible in our conception of the universe, 
 and of man, his history and destiny. If there is a God known to 
 man, this must be the fundamental fact from which all which 
 pertains to human action and interest must take its coloring and 
 
406 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 direction. If that knowledge is annulled, the change must be 
 radical and immense in every sphere of man's personal action. 
 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, in a recent article, shows with 
 much force that a religion must have a supernatural basis, and 
 that theology, that is, a doctrine of God, is essential to religion ; 
 religion will die, if the belief in a divinity ceases. If human life 
 is what atheistic science describes it, there is no object or ma- 
 terial for religion. He also takes the bold position that there 
 would be no need of it. " We can get on very well without one, 
 for though the view of life which science is opening to us gives 
 us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things 
 to enjoy. . . . We should have to live on different principles 
 from those which have usually been professed ; but I think that, 
 for people who took a just view of their position and were moder- 
 ately fortunate, life would still be extremely pleasant." 1 So we 
 may say that a dog, though incapable of religion, has a multitude 
 of things to enjoy. Without doubt man might enjoy much with- 
 out religion. But the question is. Could he enjoy all which his 
 constitution shows him capable of enjoying ? Could he realize 
 the highest possibilities of his being and attain what his constitu- 
 tion shows must be the ideal of man ? When Mr. Stephen says 
 that we should have to live on different principles, his words have 
 a terrific significance which he seems not to be aware of. If, as 
 we have seen, belief in God springs spontaneously from the con- 
 stitution of man, then satisfaction in a life without a God would 
 imply that man is unmanned ; that he is reduced to a plane of 
 life below the personal and human. For God is the centre of all 
 the radii of the spiritual sphere. 
 
 We proceed to consider some exemplifications of the practical 
 influence of the denial of God in spheres of the indirect and re- 
 moter action of the power of faith in him. 
 
 It would tend to hinder the investigation of truth. 
 
 Mr. Stephen thinks that man might still enjoy scientific 
 studies. But it must be remembered that the fact that a man 
 denies God does not change his constitution as a personal being, 
 and he can still use and enjoy his personal and spiritual powers 
 and susceptibilities in spheres of action which are not religious. 
 Therefore one who denies God may be interested in science. 
 But, as we have already seen, the denial of God narrows the 
 range of scientific thought and lessens the grandeur of its results; 
 it annuls powerful motives to scientific investigation ; by deny- 
 
 1 The Unknowable and the Unknown ; Nineteenth Century, June, 1884. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 407 
 
 ing that the universe is ultimately grounded in reason it makes 
 it impossible to comprehend all things in the unity of a rational 
 system or to find for it rational significance and design ; and by 
 denying that the universe is pervaded and regulated by one uni- 
 versal reason, in the light of which man's reason, as the same in 
 kind, participates, it makes all the conclusions of science untrust- 
 worthy and all scientific knowledge impossible. 
 
 If there is no God there must be also a fundamental change in 
 ethics and morals. Man's constitution remaining the same would 
 indeed as now spontaneously awaken the sense of obligation, of 
 duty and of moral law. But this constitution itself would have 
 no rational justification or explanation. And the law would no 
 longer be of absolute authority. As each person would be auto- 
 nomic, the law could never be known as universal and supreme, 
 but only as subjective in an individual. There would be nothing 
 above man by which he could erect himself above himself. Moral 
 freedom and responsibility would be no more. In the denial of 
 God, the universal and everywhere energizing Reason, there would 
 be no basis for a moral system and a moral order of the universe ; 
 and therefore no basis for the law of love comprehending all vir- 
 tues. Duties would take the place of love, and right character 
 would be disintegrated into a doing of duties piecemeal. More- 
 over, in the absence of the absolute Reason and the absolute law 
 eternal therein, what is right could only be determined empir- 
 ically from the idea of the good and would be only that which 
 most promotes happiness, and thus the very idea of the right 
 would be lost in that of the expedient. Thus we are brought 
 back to the old pagan conception of life, that its highest law is 
 to follow nature, and its highest ideal is to gratify impulse ; "to 
 warm both hands at the fire of life, but with prudence, so as not 
 to burn one's fingers ; " or, as Cicero said, so to go through life 
 that when the inevitable hour of departure comes we may quit it 
 like a guest satisfied with the banquet of which he has partaken. 
 What a strange idea it is, says Fourier, to maintain that God has 
 given us passions in order that we may repress them ; as though 
 a father were to develop vices in his child so that he may after- 
 wards have the glory of overcoming them. And I see no escape 
 from these conclusions and no way of retaining the moral law and 
 duty with any distinctive significance, except as we recognize the 
 moral law eternal in God, the absolute Reason, and man's mem- 
 bership in a rational and spiritual system under the law of God. 
 The sense of duty, the recognition of man as a personal being, 
 
408 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 endowed with inviolable rights, the object of service only, never 
 to be possessed and used, these have their origin only in God and 
 in the spiritual system in which man is under the law of God 
 and lives in close relations to him. Into that u realm of ends," 
 that divine and spiritual sphere, the sense of duty, living and 
 growing wherever man is found, stretches deep its noble root, 
 and from it draws its life and nourishment. 
 
 All the reasons for denying theism are equally reasons for de- 
 nying morality. To attempt to develop an ethical philosophy 
 without God must be as fruitless as an attempt to develop an as- 
 tronomy of the solar system without the sun. It is because there 
 is a sun that the planets exist in a system in their common rela- 
 tions to it ; and it is because there is a God that men exist in a 
 moral system in their common relations to him. 
 
 Accordingly we find that it is in man's highest moral feeling 
 that the belief in God commends itself to him ; it is in his high- 
 est selfishness, sensuality and vice that God and religion are re- 
 pugnant to him. So Renan argues : " Were religion simply a 
 mistake of mankind, like astrology, sorcery and other chimeras 
 which have commanded belief, science would already h;ive swept 
 it away. Were religion only the fruit of a, childish calculation, 
 by which man hopes to receive beyond the grave a return for his 
 investment in virtue here below, he would be most taken up with 
 it in his most selfish moments. Now, it is in his best moments 
 that the man is religious; it is when he is good that he will have 
 virtue correspond to an eternal order ; it is when he contemplates 
 things disinterestedly that he finds death revolting and absurd. 
 Must we not suppose that in these moments man's vision is the 
 clearest? Which is right, the selfish and dissipated, or the good 
 and self-possessed man ? . . . Let us then stoutly say that religion 
 is the product of the normal man, that man is most truly himself 
 when he is most religious and the most assured of an infinite des- 
 tiny." i 
 
 Skeptical scientists think that science can dispense with God. 
 But if it does, it must also dispense with ethics. Mr. Harrison 
 pertinently says : " What can evolution do to give a basis for the 
 entire man ? How can it act on the moral nature and appeal to 
 feeling, to veneration, devotion, love ? The heart of man cannot 
 love protoplasm or feel devotion to the idea of the survival of the 
 fittest. Our moral being is not purified and transformed by con- 
 
 1 L'AvenirReligieux des Societe's Modernes. See Kenan's Studies of Relig- 
 ious History and Criticism, Frothingham's Trans., pp. 392, 393. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 409 
 
 templating dynamic potency that lies hid in matter. Was any 
 one ever made purer, braver, tenderer by the law of perpetual 
 differentiation ? The scorn which true brains and hearts, that 
 have the root of the matter in religion, launch against this as- 
 sumption has been far from unjust or excessive. The dream 
 that on the ruins of the Bible, creed and commandments, in the 
 place once filled by Bossuet, Bernard and Aquinas, or by Para- 
 dise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress and the English Prayer Book, there 
 might be erected a faith in the Indefinite Persistence of Force 
 and the Potential Mutability of Matter, indeed deserves the ridi- 
 cule it meets. Evolution will never eliminate the heart out of 
 man so long as mankind exists ; nor will the spirit of worship, 
 devotion and self-sacrifice cease to be the deepest and most abid- 
 ing forces of human society." * Of the same purport is the con- 
 clusion of Mr. Sidgwick in the closing paragraphs of his Methods 
 of Ethics : " It is, one may say, a matter of life and death to the 
 Practical Reason that this premiss " (the existence of God and 
 divine sanctions of the moral law) " should be somehow obtained. 
 . . . Nor can I fall back on the Kantian resource of thinking my- 
 self under a moral necessity to regard all my duties as if they 
 were commandments of God, although not entitled to hold specu- 
 latively that any such Supreme Being exists 'as Real.' . . . Still 
 it seems plain that in proportion as man has lived in the exercise 
 of the Practical Reason, as he believed, and feels as an actual 
 force the desire to do what is right and reasonable as such, his 
 demand for this premiss will be intense and imperious. Thus we 
 are not surprised to find Socrates, the type for all ages of the man 
 in whom this desire is predominant, declaring the conviction that 
 'if the Rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the 
 unjust, it is better to die than to live.' . . . The whole system of 
 our beliefs as to the intrinsic reasonableness of conduct must fall, 
 without a hypothesis unverifiable by experience reconciling the 
 Individual with the Universal Reason, without a belief in some 
 form or other that the moral order which we see imperfectly real- 
 ized in this actual world is yet really perfect. If we reject this 
 belief, we may perhaps still find in the non-moral universe an ad- 
 equate object for the Speculative Reason, capable of being in 
 some sense ultimately understood. But the Cosmos of Duty is 
 thus reduced to Chaos ; and the prolonged effort of 'the human 
 intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct is seen to 
 have been fore-doomed to inevitable failure." 
 
 1 Creeds, Nineteenth Cent., Nov. 1880. 
 
410 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The knowledge of God is necessary, also, to the progress of 
 man toward realizing the highest possibilities of his being. It 
 is necessary to his culture and growth toward perfection. 
 
 If we look at man in society, it is evident that it is essential to 
 the existence of society and still more to its wellbeing, that there 
 must be some common standard of appeal in thought and also in 
 character and action. There must be a universal reason and its 
 common truths in order that men may be intelligible to one 
 another in the intercommunication of knowledge and thought ; 
 in order that they may be able to discuss any subject, to present 
 arguments and come to a common conclusion. Equally necessary 
 is some common standard of moral judgment. Materialism or 
 any other non-theistic theory of the universe, which offers itself 
 as adequate for the guidance and improvement of human society, 
 is bound to present some common and universal truths to which 
 all can appeal in the determination of questions of belief, some 
 universal law of character and conduct ; it must provide common 
 sentiments by which men may be moved and inspired to the no- 
 blest life; it must present these principles, laws and sentiments 
 as authoritative upon all in some overarching light which shines 
 for all, " the true light which lighteth every man." So Lange 
 says : " Certain it is that the new epoch will not conquer unless 
 it be under the banner of a great idea, which sweeps away ego- 
 ism and sets human perfection in human fellowship as a new aim, 
 in the place of restless toil which looks only to the personal 
 gain." i 
 
 This great idea, this inspiring sentiment is found in the law of 
 love. But the law of love has not power to hold society in coher- 
 ence and to inspire and direct its progress unless it is the law of 
 the universal Reason of whose unchanging truths and laws the 
 universe is the expression and revelation, unless this law is itself 
 the constitution of society and of the universe, unless it can in- 
 spire men with the faith that the universe is upheld and directed 
 in all its ongoing by an all-pervading energy of wisdom and love. 
 All non-theistic systems fail of verification when tested by the 
 demand that they provide the principles and constitutive power 
 adequate for the coherence, the happy existence and the healthful 
 progress of society. Theism is verified by the test. It presents 
 the principle adequate for the unity of thought in the absolute 
 and universal Reason in the light of which all men participate ; it 
 presents the principle adequate to the unity of moral sentiment 
 1 History of Materialism, vol. iii. p. 361, Thomas's Trans. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 411 
 
 in the law of love ; and it imparts the inspiration to noble life in 
 the revelation that God is love, and that all are called to the life 
 of love in faith in him. 
 
 Here also is a practical test and verification of the belief in 
 God. When God reveals himself to man he reveals man to him- 
 self. The approach of God to the spirit of man awakens him 
 from the life of the flesh to the life of the spirit, makes him 
 aware of his spiritual powers and relations and quickens him to 
 spiritual life. This is just the power which meets Lange's demand 
 in behalf of " the new epoch," and which under the banner of a 
 great idea is to sweep away egoism and set men to concentrating 
 their energies, in universal fellowship, on realizing the highest 
 perfection of man. Lange adds : " It would indeed mitigate the 
 impending conflict if insight into the nature of human develop- 
 ment and historical processes were more generally to take posses- 
 sion of the leading minds." The great ideas and motive influ- 
 ences, which this insight would discover and which are necessary 
 to secure the bloodless and peaceable progress of man, are just 
 those which come from the revelation of man to himself by the 
 revelation of God to man; just those which are brought into 
 action when the Spirit of God comes near to the spirit of man, 
 awakens him to the consciousness of his own spiritual powers 
 and relations, and quickens him to spiritual activity to realize the 
 highest spiritual ends for himself and for mankind. And as the 
 revelation of God in Christ is the most complete revelation of 
 God, so it, more than all else, has revealed the real significance 
 and greatness of man's being and aroused him to use his highest 
 powers for his highest ends. Before Christ came and in heathen 
 civilization, the individual was lost in the race, he was submerged 
 in the state, and in reference to it he had no rights but only 
 owed duties ; the idea was widely dominant that a whole family 
 should be put to death for the crime of one of its members. But 
 when God in Christ revealed his love, not merely to mankind as 
 an organic unity, but to men individually and even to sinners, 
 redeeming them from sin, when he proclaimed in Christ that a 
 person is justified by God on his own personal faith turning away 
 from sin, without the intervention of any priesthood or hierarchy, 
 when he called every one by himself to enter into his closet and 
 alone with God, " solus cum solo," to commune with him, as a 
 child with his father, then the greatness of a man in his person- 
 ality, his likeness to God, his immeasurable worth, and the sacred- 
 ness of his rights were revealed. When a person stands face to 
 
412 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 face with God, then and then only he knows his own greatness 
 and dignity, the sacredness of his duties and rights, the signifi- 
 cance and possibilities of his being. He who believes in God be- 
 lieves himself to be a spirit and not mere flesh ; he who believes 
 himself a spirit believes also in God. Here is the philosophical 
 basis of the scriptural doctrine that man is justified by faith. It 
 is only as he comes to the knowledge of God that he discovers 
 the true significance of his own being. As a finite creature it is 
 only as he sees his dependence on God and trusts him as the 
 source and support of all being and all life, that he discovers the 
 real and most fundamental relations of his being and conforms 
 his life and action to the realities which encompass him, or, as we 
 may say, to his real environment. It is only as he sees and trusts 
 God as the absolute Reason or Spirit perfect in wisdom and love, 
 that his own spiritual potencies are quickened into action and di- 
 rected to realizing the highest possibilities of his being. This 
 fact is established alike by Scripture, philosophy and history. 
 
 " From God is all that soothes the life of man, 
 His high endeavor and his glad success, 
 His strength to suffer and his will to serve." 
 
 To this practical test the belief in God lies open continuously 
 through the whole course of human history and by this it chal- 
 lenges verification. 
 
 If we deny God, then the ideal of the perfect man is funda- 
 mentally changed. Comte says that Positivism requires man to 
 give up his claim to be the lowest of the angels and to content 
 himself with being the highest of the brutes. But if man may 
 no longer think of himself as a personal being existing in a sys- 
 tem of personal and spiritual beings all united by common rela- 
 tions to God, the eternal Spirit, if all interests and hopes, all 
 activities, possibilities and plans of a spiritual system vanish in 
 nothingness and man is shut up in the sphere of brute life, then 
 certainly there must be a radical change in his idea of the range 
 of his action and aspiration, of the possibilities of his being, of 
 his perfection and the goal of his progress. 
 
 It will be objected that, though man denies God, he does not 
 in fact sink to the level of mere brute life ; he still has pleasure 
 in science and art ; he has moral ideas and acts in conformity 
 with duty. This may be true. But it is because his denial of 
 God does not change his constitution as a personal being, that he 
 still feels these aspirations to higher ends than the animal system 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 413 
 
 presents, and directs his energies to higher spheres. In this his 
 constitution as personal protests against his disbelief and denial. 
 He uses his reason as if it participated in the light of the uni- 
 versal Reason, he obeys moral law as if it were absolute and 
 universal law, he seeks perfection as if he were still the lowest 
 of the angels, he feels enthusiasm for truth and right, for ideals 
 of the reason and sentiments of the soul which have no signifi- 
 cance in the life of sense, as if he were in the image of God 
 and capable of spiritual perfection. He might give up his life 
 for a sentiment as if conscious of worth transcending his earthly 
 life, though every principle left him in his disbelief must tell him 
 that the sacrifice would be foolish. And in every such " as if " 
 the action reveals a spiritual reality. 
 
 It is needless to attempt to picture what the ideal and goal 
 of life would be if there is no God ; for we have a picture of 
 it already drawn by the competent hand of Mr. Huxley in his 
 Physical Basis of Life. He quotes one of Goethe's Venetian 
 Epigrams, and says that into it " Goethe has condensed a survey 
 of all the powers of mankind." It is this : " Why so bustle the 
 people and cry ? To get food, to rear children and nourish them 
 as well as they can. . . . Farther than this attaineth no man, put 
 himself however he will." l He then explains that all the multi- 
 plied activities of men are comprehended in these three classes, 
 and adds : " Even those manifestations of intellect, of feeling and 
 of will, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are not ex- 
 cluded from this classification, inasmuch as to every one but the 
 subject of them they are known only as transitory changes in 
 the relative positions of the human body." This, then, is the 
 highest possibility of humanity, the ideal of human perfection, 
 the goal of all human progress. " Lord Brougham, expressing 
 perhaps extravagantly his expectation of intellectual progress, 
 said he hoped the time would come when every man in Eng- 
 land would read Bacon. Cobbett wittily replied that lie would 
 be contented if the time should come when every man in Eng- 
 land would eat bacon an answer not less pertinent than witty, 
 if it meant merely that the removal of pauperism was a more 
 immediate need than the diffusion of intellectual culture, but an 
 answer well fitted to express the ultimate and highest promise of 
 Professor Huxley. The Hebrew prophets foretell a happy future 
 
 1 " Warum treibt sich das Volk so und pchreit? Es will sich ernahren, 
 Kinder zeugen, und sie nahren so gut es vermag . . . 
 Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stell' er sich wie er auch will." 
 
414 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 for man when the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God ; 
 this new gospel foretells a happy future when the earth shall be 
 full of bacon." 1 Mr. Huxley with good reason cautions his read- 
 ers : "In accepting these conclusions you are placing your feet 
 on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, 
 is the reverse of Jacob's and leads to the antipodes of heaven." 
 
 Here we come in sight of two types of civilization struggling 
 for precedence contrasted long ago by Jesus: the one that man 
 lives by bread alone; the other that he lives by the word of God; 
 the one which sees utility only in the multiplication of products, 
 and sinking the man in the artisan, appoints him to moil and 
 fatten " where wealth accumulates and men decay ; " the other 
 which, not neglecting physical attainments and comfort, subor- 
 dinates these to intellectual, sesthetic, social and spiritual cul- 
 ture; the one which recognizes man in his highest attainments 
 as no more than the student of nature ; the other which, with 
 Kepler, recognizes the student and interpreter of nature as also 
 the student and interpreter of the divine mind, "reading God's 
 thoughts after him ; " the one which explains man and all his 
 progress as the result only of physical forces ; the other which 
 regards them as the result of spiritual energies originating in 
 God's love, expressing the action of his grace, establishing on 
 earth a kingdom of righteousness and peace, renovating the earth 
 by and for man and installing him in that lordship over nature 
 for which he was created. It is the former of these types which 
 arises from disbelief in God, a realistic and materialistic civil- 
 ization, creeping over society like a glacier, freezing and burying 
 all spiritual life and beauty. 
 
 In such a civilization, as it gradually works out its legitimate 
 results, art will lose its ideals and sink to a realistic copying, 
 the work of a draughtsman rather than of an artist ; poetry will 
 lose its inspiration, and the noble sentiments for which men and 
 women have died as heroes will be sneered at as sentimentality ; 
 the chief end of man will be to be an artisan, and in the mul- 
 titude of specialists Diogenes will again have need to light his 
 lamp in the daytime to find a man ; the artisan becomes of less 
 value than his products, and, if it is needful, is to be sacrificed 
 to multiply them. Under such influences the civilization which 
 Comte has described as the result of the reign of Positivism may 
 
 1 The Christian Doctrine of Human Progress Contrasted with the Natural- 
 istic, by Samuel Harris, in Boston Lectures on Christianity and Skepticism, 
 1870, pp. 56, 57, 59. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. ' 415 
 
 be realized, if ever. The man is the tool of the state, having 
 no rights as related to the state, but only duties ; a hierarchy of 
 savans determines despotically every person's business, regulates 
 hour by hour all the minutiae of labor, food and rest, and, like 
 the Inquisition of old, carries its dictation and espionage into the 
 sphere of opinion and conscience, and, as no other tyranny polit- 
 ical or ecclesiastical ever did, into all the privacy of life. Love 
 is regulated by the state ; the glow of passion and the freedom 
 of impulse are suppressed ; nobleness of character and heroism of 
 action are made impossible. Individuality is lost in the monot- 
 ony of a universal and regulated productiveness ; everything is 
 graded down to a dead level of mediocrity ; all stimulus to enter- 
 prise and the development of genius and special endowments is 
 taken away, and society is reduced to mechanism. This is the 
 vision of the good time coming according to the gospel of the 
 Positive Philosophy. And all communism and socialism, resting 
 on the passionate denial of God, propose to realize a civilization 
 of a similar type. 
 
 Indications of this materializing tendency are not wanting. In 
 a notice of Charles Sumner, published soon after his death, we 
 read : "All are agreed that his work was accomplished and that 
 there was little left for him to do. He belonged to a past era in 
 politics, in which what may be called sentimentalism played an im- 
 portant part.' 1 Since that time there has appeared an increasing 
 tendency to stigmatize as sentimentalists and doctrinaires all who, 
 looking beyond mere partisanship, would lift "practical politics" 
 to a higher plane and purify and invigorate political action with 
 strong moral principle, would stop the encroachment of the gam- 
 bling spirit upon the domain of legitimate business, and would 
 forestall the revolutionary violence of communists and socialists 
 by finding the true way of applying the Christian law of love to 
 the relations of labor and capital, and of constructing a Political 
 Economy not founded exclusively on selfishness. 
 
 Dr. Dawson mentions an address recently delivered in a Scotch 
 university by a man of some scientific standing, who illustrated 
 clergymen's ignorance of science from the hymn, 
 " What though in solemn silence all 
 Roll round this dark terrestria' ball; " 
 
 and suggested that if Addison had substituted " splendid solar 
 ball," " the hymn would have sung just as well, and would have 
 had the advantage of being right instead of wrong, and would 
 not have shocked our convictions of truth and tended to destroy 
 
416 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the respect which really educated men ought to have for religious 
 instruction." l What is most strikingly illustrated here is the 
 thick incapacity to appreciate poetry in Gradgrinds professing to 
 be scientific, but whose materialism is more manifest than their 
 science. But what is most amusing is that if the suggestion of 
 this solemn critic were adopted and the change made which 
 would save " really educated men " from being shocked by 
 clergymen's ignorance of science, we should sing, not as devo- 
 tional poetry, but as poetry rectified into exact science, the as- 
 tounding assertion that all the fixed stars revolve around the 
 sun once in every twenty-four hours. Kahnis says that some of 
 the German illuminati in the last century, in the interests of 
 geographical accuracy, actually changed a line of a hymn from 
 'The world is all asleep" to "Half the world is asleep." 2 I 
 close the discussion of this point in the words of Lange ; " We 
 here leave entirely out of view what advantages the other sys- 
 tems (the theistic systems) may perhaps possess in their pro- 
 foundness, in their relations with art, religion and poetry, in 
 brilliant divination and stimulating play of mind. In such 
 treasures materialism is poor." 3 
 
 It remains to consider the practical need of the knowledge of 
 God in its bearing on man's acquisition of the Good. 
 
 It must determine what his Good is. If he knows God, then 
 he is capable of blessedness in communing with him and being 
 like him, and in working with God in universal love to advance 
 his kingdom of righteousness and peace on earth. But if there 
 is no God, all the great possibilities of good for man in hie rela- 
 tion to God and the spiritual system vanish. Then man's highest 
 and only good must be found in his short earthly life and in the 
 narrow physical sphere of action and enjoyment. 
 
 Brutes are shut up within these limits and are content. There 
 is nothing in their constitution that gives them any consciousness 
 of their limitation as brutes, or any capacity of looking over the 
 bounds of their nature into any higher sphere, or that awakens 
 desire for aught beyond. But man cannot be groomed and fod- 
 dered into blessedness. His constitution as personal awakens 
 higher desires and inspires him with larger hopes. Therefore 
 his desires outreach his earthly condition ; they grow by what 
 
 1 Nature and the Bible, pp. 16, 17. 
 
 2 Internal History of German Protestantism since the Middle of the Last 
 Century, p. 184, Meyer's Trans. 
 
 8 Hist, of Materialism, vol. ii. p. 157, Thomas's Trans. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAX. 417 
 
 they feed on ; and whatever the amount of his worldly goods, he 
 remains unsatisfied and restless, always driven by a consuming 
 desire for more. Hence men find that they have fed their hopes 
 on illusions; they begin to ask "Is life worth living?" They 
 sink into pessimism ; they seek suicide. The growing frequency 
 of this crime and the revival of attempts to justify it are gloomy, 
 symptoms of a decay of faith. 
 
 To help men to peace and save them from this disappoint- 
 ment and discontent some moralists warn us against dispelling 
 the illusions of life ; let the rugged realities of life remain cov- 
 ered with pleasing illusions. But this is sadder than the unrest 
 it would remedy that one must be blinded to the realities of 
 the life through which he hurries ; that he chase shadows with a 
 zest whetted by their eluding his grasp ; that he shake the hoary 
 locks of age with childish glee at gains whose transitoriness he 
 does not see, and rush with growing eagerness across the narrow- 
 ing handbreadth of life, till all unawares he steps off the brink 
 into nothingness a moment's bustle, a few inquiries, and all is 
 ended. 
 
 And this unbelief dries up the springs of hope for mankind. 
 It paralyzes the great motives to self-sacrifice in working for the 
 progress of man ; it annuls the very principles of the equality 
 and brotherhood of men and the sacredness of human rights, and 
 justifies the sneers at them as glittering generalities. Ex- 
 pressed as only one writing from his own experience could ex- 
 press it : 
 
 " Which to the wilderness drove out 
 
 Our life, to Alpine snow, 
 And palsied all our world with doubt, 
 
 And all our work with woe." 
 
 From all these considerations it is evident that the knowledge 
 of God is not only practically necessary to religion and all its 
 influences for the elevation and blessing of man, but also in per- 
 sonal action not distinctively religious it is necessary to the real- 
 izing of man's highest possibilities in the spheres of the True, 
 the Right, the Perfect and the Good. Therefore the practical 
 necessity of religion is not too strongly stated by Daniel Web- 
 ster : " Religion is a necessary and indispensable element in any 
 great human character. There is no living without it. Religion 
 is the tie that connects man with his Creator and holds him to 
 his throne. If that be all sundered, all broken, he floats away, a 
 worthless atom in the universe ; its proper attractions all gone, 
 
 27 
 
418 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 its destiny thwarted and its whole future nothing but darkness, 
 desolation and death. A man with no sense of religious duty is 
 he whom the Scriptures describe in such terse but terrific words 
 as being without God in the world. Such a man is out of his 
 proper being, out of the circle of all his duties, out of the circle 
 of all his happiness, and away, far away from the purposes of his 
 creation." 1 We cannot be surprised at the heart-breaking sor- 
 row over this crushing of man's highest hopes and this desolation 
 of human life. Professor Helmholtz, in his Popular Lectures on 
 the Theory of Vision, expressing the desolation and sorrow of a 
 far reaching skepticism which seemed to be impending from his 
 own scientific speculations, uses these lines of Goethe : 
 
 " Woe, woe, 
 Thou hast destroyed 
 The beautiful world 
 With powerful fist; 
 In ruin 't is hurled, 
 By the blow of a demigod shattered. 
 The scattered 
 
 Fragments into the void we carry, 
 Deploring 
 The beauty perished beyond all restoring." 
 
 3. The objection is made that we may have religion and all 
 its practical benefits without a divinity, but with some other 
 object of religious worship and service. John Stuart Mill says : 
 " Though conscious of being in a very small minority, we ven- 
 ture to think that a religion may exist without beiief in a God, 
 and that a religion without a God may be even to Christians an 
 instructive and profitable object of contemplation. ... If a per- 
 son has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty toward 
 which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments 
 and propensities and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person 
 has a religion. ... If the object of this attachment and of this 
 feeling of duty is the aggregate of our fellow-creatures, this re- 
 ligion of the infidel cannot in honesty and conscience be called 
 an intrinsically bad one." 
 
 In the first chapter I showed that the object of religious wor- 
 ship and service must be a divinity, and that Mr. Mill's substi- 
 tute, and various others suggested of late, are entirely inadequate 
 as objects of religion in its distinctive meaning. This is ex- 
 emplified in Mr. Mill's own definition of religion. Any passion, 
 desire or appetite may flame up and envelop the whole being, 
 1 Eulogy on Jeremiah Mason ; Works, vol. ii. p. 490. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 419 
 
 may control the other propensities and prescribe a rule of life,, 
 and so would be a religion. But Mr. Mill says the controlling; 
 passion must have an ideal object. But even so, Charlotte Cor- 
 day was religious ; and at the present time, Louise Michel, and 
 all the self-consecrating and self-sacrificing but passionately athe- 
 istic communists, nihilists and anarchists are religious, for "the 
 object of their attachment and duty" is an "ideal" one. The 
 proposal of such a substitute annuls the essential and distinctive 
 meaning of religion. 
 
 In the light of our discussions of what religion distinctively 
 is, of man's practical need of it and the great ends which it 
 subserves, it is obvious that the objection as it recurs in its 
 present form is entirely without force. No one of the proposed 
 substitutes for a divinity can develop a religion in its distinctive 
 significance, or meet man's religious needs, or subserve the great 
 ends of religion in man's progress and wellbeing. 
 
 The proposers of these several substitutes for a divinity agree 
 in testifying thereby that religion is constitutional in man and 
 indispensable to his true development. They agree also in re- 
 futing each other. Mr. Spencer refutes Mr. Harrison, and shows 
 conclusively that the worship of humanity is not a religion and 
 cannot satisfy man's religious needs nor exert the beneficent in- 
 fluence of religion in society. Mr. Harrison conclusively proves 
 the same of Mr. Spencer's religion of the Unknowable. 1 Each 
 of them, in setting forth his own substitute for a divinity, de- 
 clares and conclusively exposes the insufficiency of all the others. 
 Thus we are returning to a sort of polytheism, and again as of 
 old the gods of Greece fight against the gods of Troy, the gods 
 of the hills fight against the gods of the valleys. 
 
 Mr. Spencer recognizes the absolute Being in the Unknowable 
 as the object of religion, and says: "That the object-matter can 
 be replaced by another object-matter, as supposed by those who 
 think the 4 Religion of Humanity ' will be the religion of the 
 future, is a belief countenanced neither by induction nor by de- 
 duction. However dominant may become the moral sentiment 
 enlisted on behalf of Humanity, it can never exclude the senti- 
 ment, alone properly called religious, awakened by that which 
 is behind Humanity and behind all other things." 2 Here he 
 recognizes the absolute Being. But because it is unknowable 
 he resolves religion into the sense of the mysterious only. This 
 
 1 Nineteenth Cent,, Jan., March, July, Sept., Nov., 1884. 
 
 2 The Study of Sociology, p. 311. 
 
420 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 certainly can never die away. But it is equally certain that 
 it is only one manifestation of the religious consciousness and 
 of itself alone can never constitute a religion. Such a religion 
 would be immoral. We are not justified in trusting and serving 
 at a venture the Unknowable, since, for aught wo can know, it 
 may be the contradictory of all which to us is true, right, per- 
 fect and good, of all which to us is wisdom and love. If the 
 agnostic says that the human reason is not to be distrusted, that 
 the Unknowable cannot be contradictory to reason, then it is no 
 longer the Unknowable, but is the absolute Reason, and that 
 is God. Mr. Spencer recognizes the absolute Being, and this is 
 essential in the idea of a divinity. But in declaring it unknow- 
 able he admits that the universe may be ultimately grounded in 
 unreason and not in reason. More than this is necessary to the 
 idea of a divinity and the possibility of religion; the absolute 
 Being must be recognized as the absolute Reason energizing in 
 the universe, and its ultimate ground. 
 
 On the other hand, Mr. Harrison, the great expounder and de- 
 fender of Cornte's worship of Humanity, recognizes the rationality 
 of the divinity, but denies that it is absolute Being. In fact it is 
 not a being at all, but only an abstract idea of the wisdom and 
 love, the beauty and nobleness of humanity, excluding all its im- 
 perfection and weakness, its ignorance and vice. But we cannot 
 worship an abstract idea constructed by our own minds. We can- 
 not be conscious of dependence on it, cannot commune with it, 
 cannot trust it and serve it. The worshiper of it, as Browning 
 says, is like a boy riding astride a stick, who himself carries the 
 horse on which he rides. The ancient Romans personified and 
 deified the virtues. They worshiped, as goddesses, Fides, Pudi- 
 citia and other virtues. Christianity swept away this worship and 
 revealed to us all wisdom and love, all beauty and perfection, all 
 truth and law, all ideals of good, archetypal, concrete, eternal in 
 God, the absolute and universal Reason, and, as such, being the 
 fundamental constitution of the universe. But now that skep- 
 ticism denies the God of wisdom and love, the virtues, dispossessed 
 of their habitation in the divine being, are again worshiped, but 
 only as elements of an abstract idea. Professor Clifford, however, 
 seems to have been able to carry this out into a sort of realism 
 in which he parodies the Christian's " Our Father who art in 
 Heaven " with " Our Father Man." " The dim and shadowy out- 
 lines of the superhuman deity fade slowly away from before us; 
 and as the mist of his presence floats aside, we perceive with 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 421 
 
 greater and greater clearness a yet grander and nobler figure of 
 him who made all gods and shall unmake them. From the dim 
 dawn of history and from the inmost depth of every soul the face 
 of our Father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth 
 in his eyes, and says, Before Jehovah was I am." 1 
 
 And if humanity, embodied as our Father Man, is to be wor- 
 shiped, we may pertinently ask on what principle the worshiper 
 selects certain qualities to be combined as the object of wor- 
 ship, while leaving out many others which in the actual history 
 of humanity have been its more common characteristics. 
 
 Feuerbach teaches that God is simply man himself contem- 
 plated as objective. His doctrine issues in these definitions of 
 God : " God is the aspiration of the human heart transformed 
 into a fixedly blessed Is, the omnipotence of the feeling, the 
 prayer which hears itself, the soul perceiving itself, the echo of 
 our own cries of distress, . . . the free atmosphere of the heart, 
 the unuttered pain of the soul. God is a tear of love shed in the 
 deepest concealment over human misery." Certainly such a God 
 cannot be the object of religious trust and service, nor meet any 
 of the practical needs of religion. 
 
 Ruge presents still another conception of a humanitarian relig- 
 ion: " Religion in the sense of humanity-worship (Humanismusy 
 is conscientiousness, the conviction of truth which binds us to 
 live and act in obedience to the highest and holiest law. It is 
 ardor, inspiration for the Right and the Good and their realiza- 
 tion on earth ; consequently the noble passion for freedom and 
 right. For the self-conscious man is as such free, he acknowl- 
 edges no lord over himself; he. should therefore make himself 
 free from every outward authority, not only of positive religion 
 and of the church, but also of the existing state, so far as it is 
 grounded on an antithesis of the lord and the servant, of the gov- 
 ernment and the subject." 2 This leaves out the essential idea 
 of religion. It begins by identifying religion with morality and 
 resolves itself into the loud-mouthed fervor for human freedom 
 which issues in red republicanism and anarchy. 
 
 In like manner if religion is identified with morality or with 
 enthusiasm for science, if the universe itself is proposed as the 
 object of religious reverence, the proposed worship misses what is 
 essential in religion and fails entirely to satisfy man's need of re- 
 
 1 Lectures and Essays, vol. ii. p. 243, London ed. 1879. 
 
 2 Das Wesen und die innere Wahrheit des Christenthums, von Dr. Wilhelm 
 Meyer, pp. 124, 125, 108, 109. 
 
422 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 iigion and to subserve its ends. In fact they all assume an im- 
 passable gulf between man and the absolute Being. If they do 
 not go with Strauss to bald materialism, their substitute for a di- 
 vinity is either the unknowable or a non-entity; and they must 
 join in the confession of Feuerbach : " We adore the great nega- 
 tion." 
 
 It is not to be expected that any considerable number of per- 
 sons will accept these weak substitutes for a divinity or rest in 
 these artificial religions. They are at best temporary expedients 
 to break the force of the fall into atheism. They must issue 
 either in a return to theism or in the abandonment of religion 
 altogether and the substitution of culture in its stead. But such 
 a culture would be meagre and superficial. 
 
 Already there is a tendency to set up a Hellenistic culture, 
 which substitutes beauty for duty, the love of truth defecated 
 from all interest in its practical bearings for love to man, and 
 intellectual activity for religious faith ; a breezy, open-air life, a 
 life of enjoyment in following the impulses of nature for a life of 
 concentrated energy, of discipline and self-devotion, of warfare 
 against evil. Schiller in his Gods of Greece laments the depart- 
 ure of the old mythology : 
 
 " Cold from the North has gone 
 Over the flowers the blast that killed the May ; 
 And to enrich the worship of the One, 
 A universe of gods must pass away." 
 
 But theism is not antagonistic to culture. On the contrary it 
 deepens and enriches it. If the gods have vanished from the trees 
 and streams, from the hills, the seas and the stars, yet no solitude 
 is made ; for the universe is filled with God. A man is a centre 
 to the universe. From every side it acts on him through the eye, 
 the ear and every sense ; the moon and planets, the sun and stars, 
 the immensely distant nebulae pour their light on him ; electric- 
 ity, gravitation, all the powers of nature act on him ; he is cen- 
 tral to the universe and all its energies converge on him. Herein 
 he also sees encompassing and converging on him the universal 
 Reason pervading and regulating the universe by the same prin- 
 ciples which he knows in his own reason. Thus he sees the uni- 
 verse full of God and pervaded with a divine wisdom and love. 
 Anywhere the man entering into his closet and shutting the door 
 finds himself shut in with God and communing with him. The 
 gods of Greece can never return, and the culture which grew up 
 around them in that ancient age can never be renewed. But the 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 423 
 
 universe to us has a grandeur and glory which the ancient Greeks 
 never knew. And in the knowledge of the one God the culture 
 of man has a depth and breadth and richness which polytheism, 
 could never produce. And any culture developed in the absence 
 of all religion and under the withering breath of atheism must 
 not only be incapable of being a substitute for religion, but as 
 culture must be arid and barren. 
 
 V. GOD REVEALED IN THE COURSE OP HUMAN HISTORY. 
 
 The full development of the evidence that God reveals himself in 
 history would require study of the entire history of man. I shall 
 attempt only to indicate some of the lines in which the evidence 
 may be found. 
 
 1. The existence of God is revealed in the history of man's re- 
 ligion ; and is necessary to account for its origin, its universality, 
 spontaneity, power and persistence, and for its progressive devel- 
 opment. 
 
 As already shown, the universality, spontaneity, power and 
 persistence of belief in a divinity prove that it and the religious- 
 ness accompanying it are rooted in the constitution of man, and 
 that, if no God exists and religion is a delusion, then falsehood is 
 incorporated into the constitution of man and all knowledge is 
 impossible through the untrustworthiness of man's mental pow- 
 ers. The objection was formerly urged, and is still urged by ig- 
 norant and fanatical unbelievers, that religion was an invention 
 of priests to keep the people in subjection. We might ask how 
 there came to be priests in the first place, and how men came by 
 the belief in a God and the capacities for religion and morality 
 which made them susceptible of being controlled by these influ- 
 ences. But leaving this, it is evident that such universal, contin- 
 uous and powerful forces in humanity as religion and morality 
 are not inventions and contrivances. They are rooted in the 
 whole personality of man and are the spontaneous outgrowth of 
 the fundamental principles of his reason and of the noblest senti- 
 ments and deepest needs of his rational constitution. They can 
 be accounted for only on the supposition that God exists and re- 
 veals himself to man. 
 
 The evidence, however, does not lie merely in the origin, uni- 
 versality and continuity of the belief in a divinity, but also in the 
 progressive development of the knowledge of him, keeping pace 
 with man's advancing knowledge of the universe. 
 
 It is often objected that the savage at first refers everything 
 to a spirit like his own ; but as fast as he finds out the causes and 
 
424 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 order of nature, he ceases to wonder and to see a spirit in it ; 
 hence that it is only in extraordinary and startling events that 
 the man sees a divinity. But this does not accord with the facts. 
 The gods of the heathen are gods of the sun, of the dawn, of the 
 powers of nature in their fixed courses, and not divinities known 
 only in the extraordinary and violent energies of nature. So 
 Mr. Spencer truly says : "As fast as the explanation of anoma- 
 lies dissipates the wonder they excited there grows up a wonder 
 at the uniformities; there arises the question, how came they to 
 be uniformities? As fast as science transfers more and more- 
 things from the category of irregularities to the category of regu- 
 larities, the mystery which once attached to the superstitious 
 explanation of them becomes a mystery that attaches to the sci- 
 entific explanation of them ; there is a merging of many special 
 mysteries in one general mystery." 1 And the wonder of igno- 
 rance is exceeded by the wonder of knowledge. 
 
 If the progress of man in knowledge, civilization and mental 
 development left the idea of God behind as a figment of the child- 
 hood of the race, the objection might have some force. But in 
 all his progress man never leaves it behind, but retains and de- 
 velops it. He finds that it harmonizes with his increasing knowl- 
 edge, underlies it as the ground of its reality and unity, and is 
 enriched by all which science discovers of the universe in and 
 through which God is revealed. When in the progress of knowl- 
 edge man has attained the idea of a cosmos, then arises the ne- 
 cessity of referring the cosmos itself with all its order, law and 
 beauty to one originating and perfect mind expressing its thought 
 in it ; and polytheism gives place to monotheism. 
 
 A recent writer argues that " if all religions have arisen from 
 the needs and constitution of mankind in society, there can be no 
 objective truth in any of them." And, he says, it is idle to attempt 
 by any test to determine among them the true religion, for " ob- 
 viously all religions are true, inasmuch as they meet the needs of 
 their followers." That is, there is no objective reality to the di- 
 vinity of any of them. To this it is sufficient to reply that this 
 reasoning leads to the denial of the objective reality of all knowl- 
 edge, because it impugns the trustworthiness of man's rational 
 constitution. It must be added that this reasoning rests on the 
 assumption that the different forms of religious belief are essen- 
 tially antagonistic and contradictory ; that they have no elements 
 in common. On the contrary the fact is that in all religions 
 1 Study of Sociology, chap. xii. p. 310. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 425 
 
 there are common elements which are retained and more clearly 
 and fully developed in all the progress of man. Theism in its 
 highest forms takes up into itself all the elements of truth which 
 the human mind has apprehended in its ruder forms of worship 
 and its more imperfect conceptions of the divinity. 
 
 The same writer declares that Christianity is only a "veneer- 
 ing " of paganism ; l and other writers affirm that it is only a 
 survival of sun-worship, and another that the " wise men of the 
 East" were traveling Buddhist priests, who imported elements of 
 the Buddhist belief into Christianity. Here the very fact that 
 Christianity retains all the truths of other and less perfect reli- 
 gions is urged to prove that it is not a true religion and that its 
 God has no objective reality. Just the contrary should be the 
 inference ; that man having some true idea of God from the be- 
 ginning, has retained it through all his progress and developed it 
 to a more complete idea of him. It would be just as pertinent to 
 argue that the human mind has outgrown physical science, because 
 it has rejected alchemy ancl astrology for chemistry and astron- 
 omy, because it no longer believes in the theory of Thales that 
 water is the original of all things, nor in phlogiston, as to argue 
 that the human mind has outgrown theism because it no longer 
 believes in fetichism and the myths of polytheism. The concep- 
 tions which uncultivated minds form of supernatural beings may 
 be wrong. They may believe in hobgoblins which have no ex- 
 istence and in myths which are not true. They may misinter- 
 pret the manifestations of God and of the unseen world. But 
 this does not disprove the belief in the supernatural and the di- 
 vine. If impressions on man's spiritual susceptibilities have led 
 men to believe in hobgoblins, impressions on the senses have led 
 men to believe that the moon is no bigger than a cheese and that 
 the stars are merely glittering spangles. As such errors of sense 
 do not destroy the credibility of physical science, so errors in in- 
 terpreting spiritual impressions do not destroy the credibility of 
 theism. 
 
 The necessary inference is that nothing but the real existence 
 of God can account for the origin, universality, spontaneity, per- 
 sistence and power of religion and the belief in a divinity, and 
 for the progressive development of the idea of God keeping pace 
 with the advancing knowledge and culture of man. God must 
 have revealed himself to man or the belief in him could not have 
 arisen and persisted, spontaneous, universal and powerful, any 
 1 A. R. Grote, The New Infidelity, pp. 45, 46, 25. 
 
426 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 more than a belief in the sun could have been universal, if the 
 sun had never revealed itself to man. 
 
 Opposed to this view of the progressive development of religion 
 and the idea of God is Comte's law of the progress of thought. 
 This is the law that knowledge must exist in three theoretical 
 conditions ; the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical, and 
 the positive, which is its last and highest form. Alike in every 
 individual and in the race, knowledge must pass through the 
 theological and metaphysical stages in order to attain its maturity 
 in positivism. In the theological stage of thought the mind must 
 pass through three subordinate stages. Man begins with feti- 
 chism. He thinks every physical phenomenon is a manifestation 
 of a mind or spirit like his own ; and therefore takes any object 
 as the abode or shrine of a divinity. The next stage is polythe- 
 ism. The supernatural agencies are reduced in number and only 
 the more important natural powers are presided over by a divin- 
 ity. The next stage is monotheism. In the metaphysical condi- 
 tion phenomena are referred to entities, substances, causes. In 
 the latest stages of metaphysics men substitute, for the multitude 
 of entities at first proposed, the one great entity, Nature. The 
 theological is the infantile state of human intelligence, its neces- 
 sary point of departure ; the positive is its fixed and final condi- 
 tion ; and the metaphysical is the state of transition. Comte, 
 as the representative of positivism, rejects as unscientific all rec- 
 ognition of supernatural beings, of substance, cause and force, of 
 atoms, molecules and ethers. He laments the use of " the unfor- 
 tunate word attraction " by Newton. He claims for positivism 
 exclusive control over human thought and belief ; he regards it 
 as profoundly incompatible with metaphysics and theology, and 
 stakes its triumph on their overthrow. 
 
 The decisive refutation of this law of progress is that it is ev- 
 erywhere contradicted by the facts of history. Comte himself 
 acknowledges this to be the one serious objection. 1 
 
 In the present state of anthropological knowledge there is no 
 sufficient reason to believe that the primitive religion of man was 
 fetichism. On the contrary, " it is a fact proved by historical 
 evidence that fetichism represents a secondary stage in the growth 
 of religion and that it presupposes an earlier stage in which the 
 name and concept of something divine, the predicate of every 
 fetich, was formed." " Wherever there has been an opportunity 
 
 1 Cours de Phil. Positive, tome ii. p. 234; tome iv. p. 709 and legon 51; tome 
 V. lemons 52-55. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 427 
 
 of ascertaining by long and patient intercourse the religious sen- 
 timents even of the lowest savage tribes, no tribe has ever been 
 found without something beyond mere worship of so-called fe- 
 tiches." " There is ample evidence that the same tribes who are 
 represented as fetich-worshipers believe either in gods or in a su- 
 preme good God, the creator of the world, and that they possess 
 in their dialects particular names for him." " In Africa many 
 tribes who believe in fetiches cherish at the same time very pure, 
 very exalted, very true sentiments of the Deity. . . . The very 
 tribes who were represented to us as living instances of fetich- 
 worship, possessed religious ideas of a simplicity and sometimes 
 of a sublimity which we look for in vain even in Homer and He- 
 siod." l 
 
 Waitz says: "A more profound investigation, such as has 
 lately been carried out by several eminent scholars, leads to the 
 surprising result that several negro tribes, who cannot be shown 
 to have experienced the influence of any more civilized nations, 
 have progressed much farther in the elaboration of their religious 
 ideas than almost all other uncivilized races ; if we do not like to 
 call them monotheists, they have come very near to the bounda- 
 ries of monotheism, although their religion is mixed with a large 
 quantity of coarse superstition." 2 Of the religions of the African 
 negroes Tiele says : " The prominent characteristic is their un- 
 limited fetichism. ... A theistic tendency cannot be denied to 
 them. Almost all tribes believe in some supreme god, without 
 always worshiping him." 3 Mr. Rae says that Schultze, in his 
 Fetichismus, u is almost the only surviving representative of the 
 theory which makes fetichisrn the initial form of religion." 4 
 
 And the three principal stages recognized in Comte's law are 
 found not to be successive as the law requires, but coexistent; 
 and that, not merely as Janet suggests, because different persons 
 and peoples pass through the three stages with different rapidity, 
 but in the same persons and peoples. 5 In Lord Bacon all three 
 are conspicuous. Theological thought, a profound religious spirit 
 and eminence in physical science coexisted in Kepler, Newton 
 and many others. The brilliant metaphysics of Greece flourished 
 
 1 Max Miiller, The Savage, Nineteenth Cent., Jan. 1885, p. 125 ; Origin and 
 Growth of Religion, pp. 101, 106, 102, 116. 
 
 2 Anthropologie, vol. ii. pp. 167-171. 
 
 8 Ency. Brit., Religions, vol. xx. p. 362. 
 
 4 Recent Speculations on Primitive Religions, Contemporary Review, Oct. 
 1880. 
 
 6 Theory of Morals, p. 475, Trans. 
 
428 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 in the midst of polytheism. The brilliant era of Arabic science 
 coexisted with the most intense monotheism. The renaissance 
 issued in a great revival of theological thought. Modern phys- 
 ical science has not issued in positivism, as Comte predicted, but 
 has left it behind ; and has itself become intensely metaphysical, 
 busying itself preeminently with forces, molecules, ethers and 
 other metaphysical ideas, against which, as unscientific, Comte so 
 vigorously protested. And aside from this, with all the brilliant 
 achievements of physical science, philosophical thought is in- 
 tensely and widely active ; and never has there been more think- 
 ing and more earnestness of thinking on religious themes. 
 
 Comte also acknowledges that his law is not found to be true 
 in Asia; and he entirely overlooks Russia and America. And 
 the law is not verified in the development of children any more 
 than in the history of the race. Multitudes have been thought- 
 less of God in childhood and youth who have been awakened to 
 deep religiousness in mature life. 
 
 In anticipation of Comte, a theory of the progress of thought 
 essentially the same with his had been propounded by Turgot. 1 
 It is one of many attempts to express the significance of great 
 periods of history in a single generalization. The German ideal- 
 ists have proceeded on the principle that a theory of history is to 
 be first formed in their own minds and then simply to be exem- 
 plified and illustrated from the facts of history. " According to 
 Fichte, history is but the biography of the absolute Ego from 
 the infancy to the maturity of reason, through the five great 
 epochs of instinct, authority, reflection, science and philosophy. 
 According to Schelling, it is the self-evolution of the absolute 
 Mind, as revealed in humanity through the three periods of fate, 
 of natural law and of providence. According to Hegel, who re- 
 duced history as well as nature to sheer logic, it is the human 
 development of the absolute Reason, the dialectic of nations, the 
 great argument of successive civilizations, beginning in China, 
 continuing in India, Egypt and Greece, and issuing in Germany 
 as a complete triumph of art, religion and philosophy. Cousin 
 found in all history, as the only possible phases of civilization, 
 the three ideas and epochs of the infinite, the finite and the rela- 
 tion between them, with their predetermining climates, the Asi- 
 atic, the Mediterranean and the European." 2 When history is 
 studied for the purpose of verifying such theories, the results can- 
 
 1 Flint's Phil, of History in France and Germany, p. 113. 
 
 2 Prof. Shields, The Final Philosophy, p. 213. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 429 
 
 not be trustworthy. The history will be shaped to the theory, 
 not the theory to the history. Such theories perhaps attract at- 
 tention as ingenious speculations for a time and then sink into 
 oblivion. Comte's theory excited not a little discussion for a few 
 years ; but it is already sinking into the oblivion of its many 
 -analogous predecessors. 
 
 We have already seen that knowledge on any subject attains 
 completeness only by passing through the three grades of em- 
 pirical, noetic or rationalistic, and theological thought. 1 The true 
 course of thought is the reverse of that set forth in Comte's law; 
 for it culminates with the theological and begins with the empir- 
 ical. It also differs from Comte's law in this, that the human mind 
 is not occupied with the three stages successively, and with each 
 for a long period of time ; but always, whatever it investigates, 
 the mind passes through the three stages of thought in order to 
 complete its knowledge of it. Hence we do not distinguish them 
 as respectively transitional and permanent, but man's knowledge 
 is permanent in the continuous use of -the three in connection and 
 unity. And it is equally true that he has been always and simul- 
 taneously occupied with the three spheres of knowledge, nature, 
 man and God. And the facts of history show that, from age to 
 age, the progress of knowledge has been going on at the same 
 time in each grade, empirical, rationalistic and theological, and 
 in each sphere, nature, man and God. Comte confounds the- 
 ology with superstition and charges on it errors which were due 
 only to the prevailing ignorance of an early age. He identifies 
 theology with ignorance, and relegates all the ignorance of an 
 age to its theology. He represents the progress from ignorance 
 to knowledge as the progress from theology to science. The 
 truth is that in the earlier ages man was ignorant on all subjects. 
 If his theology was childish, so also were his philosophy and his 
 empirical science. Ignorance and immaturity characterized his 
 thinking on God ; they equally characterized his thinking respect- 
 ing man and nature. His progress from ignorance to knowledge 
 on all subjects has been simultaneous. The progress of science, 
 therefore, does not expel the belief in a divinity nor remove the 
 necessity of ultimately explaining all phenomena by it. It makes 
 the idea of God and his relations to the universe more intelligent, 
 but not less true or less urgent. 
 
 2. History shows that atheism, wherever it has prevailed, has 
 -been disastrous to the interests of society. 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 293-344. 
 
430 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The prevalence of avowed atheism in any nation or community 
 has been of rare occurrence and of short duration. The reign of 
 atheism in France in the first revolution, for example, was short, 
 and probably controlled the belief of but a small minority of the 
 population. 
 
 Where atheism has prevailed it has proved disastrous. The 
 reign of atheism in France is known in history as the Reign of 
 Terror. The decay of the ancient religion in the Roman empire 
 and the attendant gradual coming in of skepticism and atheism 
 were accompanied with general corruption of morals and an en- 
 feebling and disintegrating of society. 
 
 Conversely, the theories and revolutionary schemes of anarch- 
 ists demand the rejection of all belief in God. The nihilists 
 and revolutionists of all types, who are now seeking to destroy 
 government and to resolve society into anarchy, agree in declar- 
 ing that the first necessity is to root out all belief in God. 
 
 The argument is of equal force, whether atheism is in these 
 cases a cause or a consequent of the corruption, and of the an- 
 archical violence and terrorism. If it is a cause, then it is re- 
 sponsible for these evils. If it is a consequent, then theism is a 
 barrier against corruption, terrorism and anarchy, which must 
 be broken down before they can prevail. 
 
 3. A third line of argument from history would consist in 
 pointing out the influence of religious belief in the progress of 
 civilization. The presentation of this evidence would require a 
 study of the whole history of man ; its scope is too wide for pres- 
 entation here. But by all my study of the subject I am con- 
 vinced that religious belief has been an essential factor in the 
 progress of man and of civilization ; that this progress could never 
 have been realized in atheism ; that religious belief is essential 
 not only to progress but also to the supremacy of law, to the sta- 
 bility, order, intelligence and virtue of the community ; that it 
 is thus essential to preserve the results already attained and to 
 prevent degeneracy into corruption, disorder and violence, and a 
 return to a barbarism, which, in the use of the agencies of civili- 
 zation with the spirit and recklessness of barbarism, would be the 
 most terrific the world has ever seen. 
 
 One of the marked characteristics of modern civilization is the 
 great industrial movement which is exalting industrial enterprise 
 into a public function, is determining the welfare of nations, and 
 giving scope for the genius and ambition which aforetime found 
 no sphere but in politics and war. It would be easy to show 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 431 
 
 that Christianity has been one of the most powerful agencies in 
 effecting this change. 
 
 For four hundred years the great struggle in political life has 
 been to break down despotism and elevate the people to self- 
 government. Underlying this are the great principles of the 
 worth of a man and the sacred ness of his rights inherent in his 
 personality as a man ; the equality of men before the law ; the 
 existence of government for the good of the governed, and the 
 like. It was Christ who made these principles powers in civili- 
 zation. He taught that a man is worth more than a world ; he 
 revealed God's estimate of the worth of a man in all which he 
 does in Christ to turn him from sin and bring him back to God. 
 He declares the equality of all men before God ; each man is jus- 
 tified by his own faith and admitted to free communion with God 
 without the intervention of any priest or any human mediation. 
 And in the Fatherhood of God he gives a real and immovable 
 basis for the brotherhood of man. Nothing short of the God 
 over all can be the basis for the political equality and freedom of 
 men. 
 
 The Lutheran revival in religion preceded the Baconian revival 
 in science. And the Lutheran revival was a breaking away from 
 authority in the sphere of thought to original investigation, from 
 the authority of the Aristotelian logic not less than of the church. 
 It was an assertion of the right of private judgment, a return to 
 dealing with concrete realities instead of abstractions and words, 
 a subordination of speculative inquiry to the practical needs and 
 uses of men. These were the very principles of the Baconian 
 movement ; and they were applied by Luther in theology before 
 they were applied by Bacon in science. And in the Reformation 
 it was religion and theology which waked the human mind, and 
 aroused the activity of thought which has since achieved so great 
 results in physical science. 
 
 And so in all human progress it is the spiritual which pre- 
 cedes and quickens the progress of discovery and invention in 
 the physical. 1 
 
 In fact we are indebted to religion for that fixed belief in prog- 
 ress which is now accepted as a sort of axiom in the face of all 
 discouragements. It is the prophecy and promise of the Hebrew 
 and Christian religion through the ages which have incorporated 
 into human thinking the expectation that the future is to be 
 better than the past. 
 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, 330-333. 
 
432 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 And the more elevated and true the idea of God, the more 
 rapid and genuine has been the progress of man. Accordingly 
 for many centuries history has shown that the only progressive 
 nations have been the Christian nations. And now progress is 
 beginning among the oriental peoples only as it has been stimu- 
 lated and guided from Christendom. 
 
 4. There can be no satisfactory philosophy of human history 
 without the recognition of God and of man's relation to him in a 
 moral and spiritual system. 
 
 An examination of human history discovers a progress of man 
 toward the realization of a higher and better condition and the 
 appearance more and more clearly of the advancing reign of 
 righteousness, peace and universal good-will. It discovers a plan 
 pervading history and progressively realized by the action of man 
 Under the influence of his surroundings ; but it is plainly not a 
 plan which men have devised or by any concert agreed on, any 
 more than the coral polyps ever agreed on the plan according to 
 which by the labors of many generations they build a Neptune's 
 cup. Writers on the philosophy of history refer to the various 
 agencies which have cooperated in bringing mankind to the high- 
 est advancement which it has yet attained. They tell us what 
 was contributed by the Greek civilization and culture, what by 
 the Roman, what by the Hebrew. They tell us of the far-reach- 
 ing influence, in promoting civilization and progress, of great 
 wars, of scientific discoveries, of industrial inventions ; of the ser- 
 vice rendered by Charlemagne, by Napoleon ; of the preparation 
 for the coming of Christ and the spread of Christianity made by 
 the Roman conquests and the Greek philosophy. Nothing can 
 be more certain than that these various agents acted without con- 
 cert and without conscious design of realizing a preconceived plan 
 for the progress which humanity has made and to which in fact 
 they were important contributors. We are driven to the infer- 
 ence that there is in the history of man a progressive realization 
 of an ideal plan which cannot be referred to man himself, but 
 must be referred to some superior and all-embracing wisdom su- 
 perintending and directing his progress. 1 
 
 In fact the very conception of a philosophy of human history 
 presupposes that it has the unity and significance of a plan carried 
 forward through the ages. The fact that the courses of human 
 history can be thus comprehended in a philosophy implies that 
 
 1 " Deus ordinem seculorum tanquam pulcherrimum carmen honestaret." - 
 De Civitate Dei, lib. xi. cap. 18. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 433 
 
 the history is philosophical ; that there is a philosophy in it ; that 
 therefore there must be above it some superintending and direct- 
 ing mind, progressively realizing a grand ideal in the development 
 of man. 
 
 If, on the other hand, an attempt is made to find a philosophy 
 of history without God, no such philosophy will be found ; it will 
 be impracticable to bring the facts into the unity of a philosoph- 
 ical system. And in addition to this, the whole history of man 
 will be found to be without worthy significance or end. 
 
 The Bible declares that God is establishing on earth a king- 
 dom or reign of God, which is to be a kingdom of righteous- 
 ness, peace and good-will. With this conception of God and of 
 man under God's law in a moral and spiritual system, of man's 
 sin and God's redeeming energy working in and with man for 
 his renovation, development and blessedness, and of the gradual 
 transformation of human society into the kingdom of God, we 
 find a worthy significance and design of human history. 
 
 If all men eventually become worshipers of the one only living 
 and true God, if as the children of God, their common Father, 
 they dwell together in righteousness, peace and good-will, then 
 the history of man will have demonstrated the existence and 
 reign of God. And already the progress of man and the course 
 of his development admit no satisfactory explanation without 
 the recognition of God and of man's relation to him in a moral 
 system. 
 
 But this line of thought reaches too far to be even entered 
 on here. I can merely call attention to it as a line of evidence 
 which will richly repay investigation. 
 
 VI. ANTHROPOMOBPHISM. The objection is urged that, after 
 all, the idea of God is anthropomorphic ; it is a fiction which man 
 creates from the attributes of his own mind. Feuerbaeh, for ex- 
 ample, says : " Man this is the mystery of religion projects 
 his being into objectivity ; and then again he converts this pro- 
 jected image of himself into a subject to which he himself becomes 
 an object. Man is an object to God. It is not indifferent to God 
 that man is good or evil." l The man creates his own God by 
 unconsciously projecting his own attributes outside of himself and 
 illuding himself with the belief that it is a real being other than 
 himself, and then worships it as God. Thus a man's God, like 
 the spectre on the Brocken, is only a magnified shadow of him- 
 self. Herbert Spencer puts the objection thus : " If for a moment 
 1 Wesen des Christentbums, chap. i. 2. 
 
434 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 we made the grotesque supposition that the ticking and other 
 movements of a watch constituted a kind of consciousness, and 
 that a watch possessed of such a consciousness insisted on re- 
 garding the watchmaker's action as determined, like its own, by 
 springs and escapements, we should simply complete a parallel of 
 which religious teachers think much. And were we to suppose 
 that a watch not only formulated the cause of its existence in 
 these mechanical terms, but held that watches were bound out of 
 reverence so to formulate this cause, and even vituperated, as 
 atheistic watches, any that did not venture so to formulate it, we 
 should merely illustrate the presumption of theologians by carry- 
 ing their own argument a step further." 1 The same objection 
 has been often urged in various forms. Mr. Huxley uses a death- 
 watch ticking in a clock, and a piano listening to its own music. 
 Hume tells us of a world of spiders imagining the creator to be 
 .an infinite spider which spun the world out of its own bowels. In 
 the earlier Greek philosophy, Xenophanes presents the objection 
 of anthropomorphism in essentially the same form. He says that 
 men of different races picture their gods like themselves. The 
 Thracians picture them as fair and red-haired, the Ethiopians as 
 black and flat-nosed. And so, he says, if lions, oxen and horses 
 .knew the art of drawing, they would depict their gods severally 
 in their own forms. And so, it is objected, men deceive them- 
 selves, "describing the Immortals in the language of mortals." 2 
 It is only an example of " our inclination to find our own figures 
 in the clouds, our faces in the moon, our passions and sentiments 
 even in inanimate matter." 
 
 The first answer is that the objection makes no distinction be- 
 tween the attributes and character peculiar to personality in its 
 perfection and the non-essential forms in which personality is 
 manifested. The theologian always distinguishes between a rhe- 
 torical or poetical ascription to God of hands or eyes, of anger or 
 repentance, of human organs and passions which are not essen- 
 tial to personality and its perfection, and a philosophical recog- 
 nition of God as the absolute Reason energizing freely in wisdom 
 .and love, which are of the essence of personality in its perfec- 
 tion. This distinction the objection entirely overlooks. The ob- 
 jection rests on the absurdity that if a watch should become 
 endowed with reason it would still remain a mere machine just 
 
 1 First Principles, pp. 110, HI. 
 
 2 " Immortalia mortali sermone notantes." Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 
 lib. v. 121. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 435 
 
 as it wns before, and therefore would see nothing in itself but 
 mechanism and could ascribe nothing but mechanism to its maker. 
 But if a watch were endowed with reason it would no longer be 
 a mere machine, but a rational person. Then contemplating its 
 own mechanism, it would infer, precisely as a rational man does 
 in contemplating it, that it had a maker like itself in intelligence, 
 but not necessarily like itself in its mechanism. And should this 
 intelligent watcli ridicule all intelligent watches that believe they 
 were made by an intelligent maker, it would be like Mr. Spen- 
 cer ridiculing intelligent men for believing their creator to be an 
 intelligent being ; and thus I " merely illustrate the presumption 
 of" Mr. Spencer "by carrying" his " argument one step further." 
 And this is evident not merely from the whimsical analogies 
 in which the objection has so often been expressed, but also in its 
 more scientific statement. Mr. John Fiske says : " The defini- 
 tion of intelligence being ' the continuous adjustment of special- 
 ized inner relations to specialized outer relations,' it follows that 
 to represent the Deity as intelligent is to surround him with an 
 environment, and thus to destroy his infinity and his self-exist- 
 ence." l Mr. Spencer says : " So too must die out the belief that 
 a Power present in innumerable worlds throughout infinite space, 
 and who during millions of years needed no honoring by the in- 
 habitants of earth, should be seized with a craving for praise; 
 and having created mankind, should be angry with them if they 
 do not perpetually tell him how great he is. ... Passing 
 over the familiar difficulties that a god who repents of what he 
 has done must be lacking either in power or in foresight ; that 
 his anger presupposes an occurrence which has been contraiy to 
 intention, and so indicates a defect of means ; we come to the 
 deeper difficulty that such emotions, in common with all emotions, 
 can exist only in a consciousness which is limited." This is the 
 reasoning of which Mr. Harrison says : " As a summary of phi- 
 losophical conclusions on the theological problem it seems to me 
 frankly unanswerable. It is the last word of the agnostic phi- 
 losophy in its long controversy with theology." 2 Mr. Fiske 
 makes no distinction between what is essential in rationality and 
 personality and what is merely a particular and contingent form 
 in which it is manifested ; and infers that because man is sur- 
 rounded with an environment God must be so. Mr. Spencer, 
 with his indorser, falls into the same error ; he also criticises 
 
 1 Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii. pp. 394, 395. 
 
 2 Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1884, pp. 6, 7 ; and March, 1884, p. 494. 
 
436 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 rhetorical and poetical anthropomorphisms as philosophical prop- 
 ositions ; and besides this, founds his reasoning on an astounding 
 caricature of theism of his own invention. And Mr. Harrison de- 
 clares his inference from this monstrous misrepresentation to be 
 " an unanswerable summary of philosophical conclusions." 
 
 The objector insists on ascribing to God the limitations and im- 
 perfections of man. But reason and freedom, righteousness and 
 benevolence, wisdom and love, truth, right, perfection and worth, 
 are not limitations and imperfections ; they are eternal and uni- 
 versal. Man participates in them ; and they are rightly ascribed 
 to God. But no theologian ascribes to God the finiteness, the 
 imperfection of man, nor any human characteristic which is not 
 essential to rational personality in its perfection. The objection 
 proves no more than that it is absurd and ridiculous to hold it as 
 philosophical truth that God has the eyes or ears or passions of a 
 man. But the objection is of no force whatever against attributing 
 to him reason and freedom, righteousness and benevolence, wis- 
 dom and love, intelligence and power. When Mr. Spencer attrib- 
 utes Power and Being to the Unknowable Absolute, he is just as 
 anthropomorphic as is the theist when he attributes reason to the 
 Absolute. For man has no knowledge of power and being ex- 
 cept through his own consciousness. So also he is as anthropo- 
 morphic as the theist in saying, in the article quoted, " that the 
 power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently 
 conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond con- 
 sciousness." 
 
 A second answer to the objection is that all scientific knowl- 
 edge of nature is anthropomorphic in the same sense in which 
 theism is so. The postulation of the universality of reason and 
 of man's participation in its light is at the basis of all science. If 
 this is anthropomorphism in theology it is equally anthropo- 
 morphism in all scientific thinking. 
 
 Physical science accepts our observation of outward things, 
 though made through impressions on our own senses, as true 
 knowledge of objective reality. The knowledge of the beings 
 and forces of which physical science treats is given in our own 
 consciousness. Our knowledge of being is primarily given in our 
 knowledge of ourselves and of the objects which impinge on our 
 sensorium. Our knowledge of force is given in our own con- 
 sciousness in exerting or resisting it. Du Bois Reymond says -. 
 " Force is nothing but a hidden out-birth from the resistless ten- 
 dency to personification which is impressed on us, like the rhetor- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 437 
 
 ical knack of our brain in using figurative terms when the repre- 
 sentation of anything lacks clearness. In the ideas of force and 
 matter we see the same dualism which thrusts itself forward in 
 the representation of God and the world, soul and body. It 
 is a more refined form of the necessity which once impelled men 
 to people the woods and the fountains, rocks, sea and air with 
 creations of their own imagination." 1 The hypothesis of atoms 
 and molecules arises from a necessity of our own minds to refer 
 qualities to a being, action to an agent, and ultimately to a de- 
 terminate, indivisible being. The scientific conception of poten- 
 tial force as distinguished from active energy, is derived from 
 our own consciousness of power unexerted in free will ; and the 
 same is the source of the materialistic conception of mind as a 
 property of matter, contained " potentially " in the original homo- 
 geneous and nebulous matter. The attraction and repulsion of 
 physical science are nothing but our own pull and push trans- 
 ferred to external bodies. The mechanical theory of the universe 
 is derived from the conception of a machine made by man. Mr. 
 Darwin describing the fertilization of plants by insects continu- 
 ally speaks of arrangements made " in order that " certain re- 
 sults may be secured. He uses the anthropomorphic language 
 of final causes because no other can so exactly express the ob- 
 served facts. Nature, when we come to investigate it, is found 
 to be essentially anthropomorphic. Scientists sometimes try to 
 avoid this by using more abstract and general terms. But in 
 proportion as they do this, they make their language colorless 
 and rob it of distinctive meaning. For example, when Mr. 
 Spencer defines life as " the continuous adjustment of internal 
 relations to external relations," the relations being indefinite, the 
 definition is equally applicable to a multitude of adjustments ; and 
 " adjustments," the only word which has a distinctive meaning, 
 has itself no meaning except as the act of a mind. 
 
 In addition to this, the ideas and laws in which science appre- 
 hends, differentiates and comprehends material things are ideas 
 of the human mind. Kant says : " An idea must lie as the 
 ground of the possibility of a product of nature." 2 Plato had 
 taught before him, that in every observation made by the senses 
 the reason disengages an element exclusively its own, which, 
 until this disengagement, had been mingled and hidden in the 
 complex result. He aimed to trace all that is presented to the 
 
 1 Quoted by Ulrici, Gott und die Natur, p. 25. 
 
 2 Kritik der Urtheilskraft, sect. 65. 
 
438 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 senses in the visible world, down to its root in a deeper and in- 
 visible world ; and he held that the notion of a perfect science is 
 a delusion when it does not penetrate to this profounder reality. 
 And modern science is practically in accord with these teachings 
 of both ancient and modern philosophy. Observed facts and 
 rational ideas are both indispensable to science. Facts may be 
 observed through the senses ; but science is attained only when 
 the observed facts are known in their significance to intelligence, 
 in their order and harmony under law, in their progressive reali- 
 zation of rational ideals and ends, and thus in their unity in a 
 rational system. Hence the physical world and its movements 
 and changes lay open to the observation of the senses of man 
 for ages while scientific knowledge of them was slowly and labo- 
 riously attained. But the scientific significance, order, progres- 
 siveness and unity of the facts are found only in their accordance 
 with the ideas, principles, laws, ideals and ends of human reason 
 and intelligence. Physical science consists in taking up the 
 realities of the outward world into the intellectual equivalents 
 of human intelligence ; thus it is as essentially anthropomorphic 
 as theism. This however is no evidence that it is not true, but 
 just the contrary, that it is true science. It finds that nature in 
 its essential constitution is anthropomorphic; it is constituted 
 rationally ; it is expressive of the ideas and principles of human 
 reason, accordant with its truths and laws, and developing pro- 
 gressively toward the realization of its ideals and ends. 
 
 Science also assumes that the principles of reason regulative of 
 human thought and action are regulative of thought and action 
 throughout the universe ; and that the conclusions resting on 
 them respecting observed facts are valid conclusions throughout 
 the universe. Astronomy applies these principles and conclusions 
 to masses and systems in remotest space ; microscopy, to bodies 
 and motions too minute to be perceived by the naked eye ; chem- 
 istry, to the action and reaction of molecules in the inmost com- 
 position of matter; geology and paleontology, to the formation of 
 this planet into a habitable world and to the life on it from the 
 most ancient times ; and evolution, beyond the universe as now 
 constituted to the primitive nebulous matter from which it has 
 been evolved. All this rests on the assumption that the prin- 
 ciples regulative of human thought and action are equally regu- 
 lative of all thought and action throughout the universe ; that 
 what is absurd to the human reason is absurd and impossible to 
 be realized everywhere; that therefore the universe is pervaded 
 
GOD REVEALED IN MAN. 439 
 
 and directed by one and the same universal Reason, the same, in 
 its essential constituent principles, with the reason of man ; and 
 that all rational intelligence is everywhere and always essentially 
 the same in kind. Accordingly Mr. Fiske says : u From first to 
 last all our speculative successes and failures have agreed in teach- 
 ing us that the more general principles of action which prevail 
 to-day and in our own corner of the universe have always pre- 
 vailed throughout as much of the universe as is accessible to our 
 research. They have taught us that for the deciphering of the 
 past and the predicting of the future no hypotheses are admis- 
 sible which are not based on the actual behavior of things at 
 present." j 
 
 Theism simply accepts this and declares that the universal 
 Reason thus found pervading and directing the universe is God, 
 and that man as rational is in the likeness of God. 
 
 A third answer to the objection is that it rests on the assump- 
 tion of the relativity and consequent un trust worthiness of all hu- 
 man knowledge, and, if valid, makes all human knowledge im- 
 possible. It is merely a rhetorical and pictorial way of reassert- 
 ing this familiar doctrine of complete agnosticism. The objection 
 implies that if any man assumes that the mind of another is like 
 his own, that the mathematical axioms and demonstrations which 
 are true to him are true anywhere beyond his own subjective 
 consciousness, or that any principle on which he reasons or any 
 conclusion which he reaches is true beyond his subjective con- 
 sciousness, his assumption is anthropomorphic, fictitious and false. 
 
 Finally, I recall attention to the fact that the belief in God has 
 its grounds in reason. We have seen that it arises spontaneously 
 in experience as a primitive belief ; that God is revealed both in 
 nature and in man ; that the belief in his existence is grounded 
 in every part of the rational constitution of man ; that it is a 
 practical need, and is confirmed by the whole history of man; 
 that it is a necessary idea of reason, without which it cannot solve 
 its necessary problems. A belief thus grounded is not to be rooted 
 up by the mere assertion that it is anthropomorphic, especially 
 since the assertion, if true, is equally fatal to all knowledge. No 
 doctrine or belief can be invalidated merely by the objection that 
 it is anthropomorphic ; that is, that man's knowledge implies 
 truths and laws, ideals and worthy ends, which are universal ; 
 which, therefore, are principles and laws, ideals and worthy ends, 
 of the Reason that pervades and regulates the universe. Wher- 
 1 John Fiske, Unseen World, p. 4, 
 
440 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ever and whatever in his immortal existence man may be, these 
 principles and laws, these ideals and ends of reason, will illumi- 
 nate him. They are the light which lighteth every man. 
 
 " On a far shore my land swam from my sight ; 
 
 But I could see familiar native stars; 
 
 My home was shut from me by ocean bars, 
 Yet home hung there above me in the night. 
 Unchanged fell down on me Orion's light; 
 
 As always Venus rose and fiery Mars; 
 
 My own the Pleiads yet : and without jars 
 In wonted tones sang all the heavenly height. 
 So when in death from underneath my feet 
 
 Rolls the round world, I then shall see the sky 
 
 Of God's truths burning yet familiarly; 
 My native constellations I shall greet. 
 
 I lose the outer, not the inner, eye, 
 
 The landscape, not the soul's stars, when I die." 
 
PART IV. 
 
 GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST AS THE REDEEMER OF 
 MAN FROM SIN. 
 
 "When I come to consider his life, his works, his teaching, the marvelous mingling in 
 him of grandeur and simplicity, of sweetness and force, that incomprehensible perfection 
 which never for a moment fails, . . . when I contemplate this grand marvel, which the 
 world has seen only once and which has renewed the world, I do not ask myself if Christ 
 was Divine; I should be rather tempted to ask myself if he were human." Lamennais, 
 Essai sur I' Indifference, torn. iv. p. 449. 
 
 "The mightiest heart that ever beat, stirred by the Spirit of God, how it wrought in his 
 bosom. What words of rebuke, of comfort, counsel, promise, hope, did he pour out ; words 
 that stir the soul as summer dews call up the faint and sickly grass. What profound in- 
 struction in his proverbs and discourses ; what wisdom in his homely sayings, so rich with 
 Jewish life; what deep divinity of soul in his prayers, his action, sympathy, resignation. 
 . . . Rarely, almost never, do we see the vast divinity within that soul, which, new though 
 it was in the flesh, at one step goes before the world whole thousands of years; judges the 
 race ; decides for us questions we dare not agitate as yet, and breathes the very breath of 
 heavenly love." Theodore Parker, Discourse of Religion, p. 294 f. 
 
 "It is of no use to say that Christ as exhibited in the gospels is not historical . . . Who 
 among his followers or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed 
 to Jesus or of imagining the life and character revealed in the gospels?" J. S. Mill, 
 Essays on Religion, pp. 253, 254. 
 
 " The more strongly negative criticism asserts its position as to the person of Jesus, the 
 more unaccountable are his teachings and the results of his work." Edersheim, Life of 
 Jesus, vol. i. p. 639. 
 
 "To deny that Christianity in its various forms has been and still is one of the greatest 
 powers in the world, or to deny that its leading doctrines have in fact been associated in 
 many ways with all that we commonly recognize as virtue, is like denying the agency of 
 the sun in the physical world." Mr. Justice Stephen, Nineteenth Cent., June, 1884, p. 914. 
 
 "God's word is an anvil which has worn out many a hammer." Beza. 
 
 The Christian religion " is an ultimate whereto humanity can and must attain. . . . And 
 when it is once attained mankind cannot go back. And it ought, to be said, that the Chris- 
 tian religion, having appeared, cannot disappear again* since it has embodied itself in its 
 divine form, it cannot come to dissolution." Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, Wanderjahre, bk. 
 ii. chap. i. 
 
 " Then souls of men were shaken with emotions new and strange, 
 And creeds and thoughts were tossing in an agony of change. 
 The world, that had grown weary of its pleasures and its gains, 
 Felt a tide of youth and rapture rush through its wasted veins; 
 And life it never knew before was stirring to its core 
 The proud and puissant empire that was ' Pagan Rome ' no more. 
 
442 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The seed that was so small had grown a tree that flourished grand, 
 The leaven in the woman's cake had leavened all the land. 
 Where silver Jordan runneth from the Lake of Galilee, 
 A narrow kingdom lies between the mountains and the sea; 
 From its hill-sides red with vineyards, the gentle Syrian wind 
 Bore the only voice that answered to the sobbing of mankind. 
 To the cottage of the fisher, to the poor man's mean abode, 
 The ' Desire of Nations ' came, the Incarnate Son of God. 
 The sign that was a sign of shame to pagan and to Jew, 
 Had become an image glorious, that all men flocked unto; 
 The martyr at the stake for this esteemed the world but loss, 
 The emperor victorious won his battles in the Cross." 
 
 Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD'S REVELATION OF 
 HIMSELF IN REDEMPTION THROUGH CHRIST. 
 
 THE presentation of the " Evidences of Christianity " is not 
 included in the plan of this book. I propose to consider only 
 what is distinctive and essential in the revelation of God in 
 Christ ; the essential character and the possibility of the miracu- 
 lous in the redemptive action ; and the unity and continuity of 
 God's revelation of himself culminating in Christ. The coming 
 of Christ is the epoch in the continuous revelation in which re- 
 deemed humanity is lifted to the highest plane of its earthly 
 development in the kingdom of Christ, and is to continue thereon 
 under the dispensation of the Spirit till the epoch, still in the 
 future, when the natural life of mankind on earth will end, re- 
 deemed humanity will be lifted to a higher plane and the king- 
 dom of Christ will be perpetuated in the heavenly glory. 1 
 
 1 There are three principal lines of the Christian Evidence. 
 
 I. The evidence of historical documents and tradition. 
 
 II. From the biblical history in itself and in its vital connection with the his- 
 tory of mankind. It admits of no reasonable explanation, except as recording 
 God's revelation of himself in historical action among men, redeeming them 
 from sin and establishing his reign of righteousness on earth. This evidence 
 is found in three distinct lines: In the history of Israel before Christ and since ; 
 in the life of Jesus; in the rise of the kingdom of Christ on earth and its prog- 
 ress through the ages. 
 
 III. The philosophical argument : Christianity, as history, doctrine and life, 
 is in harmony with the fundamental principles and ideals of reason. It is ac- 
 cordant with its fundamental truths and laws, and fitted to realize the perfec- 
 tion and wellbeing of man; thus it satisfies the demands of reason. It takes 
 up into itself the spiritual truth and motives in other religions, harmonizes them 
 with the higher revelation in Christ, thus meets all the spiritual needs of man 
 and proves itself to be the absolute and universal religion. It reveals the true 
 significance and highest possibilities of human life, the true law and goal of 
 human progress, and the motives and influences for its realization in God's 
 love in Christ redeeming man from sin by the power of the divine Spirit, and 
 establishing on earth his kingdom of righteousness and peace. Thus it is the 
 only basis for a true philosophy of human history ; for that philosophy must 
 recognize as fundamental the fact of human sin and the necessity of redemp- 
 tion from it in order to the progressive development of man to his true perfec- 
 tion and wellbeing. 
 
444 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 God's revelation of himself in Christ as the Redeemer of men 
 from sin and condemnation as recorded in the Bible is the dis- 
 tinctive and essential fact of Christianity and the centre of all 
 distinctively Christian doctrine. I propose to consider in this 
 chapter what this revelation of God in redemption is, and thus to 
 define Christianity by its distinctive and essential characteristics. 
 
 By Redemption I mean all which God does to deliver man 
 from sin and condemnation and to bring him back to harmony 
 with himself in the life of faith and love. It includes the whole 
 action of God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. It 
 includes also God's action in human history preparing man for 
 Christ's coming ; it includes the descent of the Holy Spirit after 
 his ascension, and the subsequent development of the kingdom of 
 Christ under the dispensation of the Spirit till the close of the 
 history of the human race in its natural life on earth ; and it in- 
 cludes the final consummation of the kingdom beyond man's 
 earthly life in the blessedness of heaven. 
 
 I. God's action in redemption is historical. 
 
 That it is historical is involved in the idea of redemption, which 
 is God's action on and within men, and therefore must be in the 
 courses of human history. It is God's action issuing in historical 
 results ; it influences men to turn from sin to God, renovates 
 them to new spiritual life, establishes and perpetuates among 
 them a kingdom of righteousness and good-will, transforms soci- 
 ety into the kingdom of God. It reveals its progress in history 
 by its effects, like a hidden brook, which by the livelier green 
 betrays the secret of its winding course. 
 
 Christ is an historical personage. His life, teaching and work, 
 his death and resurrection are accepted by Christians as histor- 
 ical facts. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. 
 It is also the conception of Christianity that the descent of the 
 Spirit on the day of Pentecost was an historical fact ; that ever 
 since then the Spirit of God has been acting on men and in the 
 courses of human history building up the kingdom of Christ on 
 earth, and will continue so to act until the final consummation of 
 man's earthly history. Nor does the historical action of God in 
 redemption begin with Christ's earthly life. The biblical repre- 
 sentation is that when man first sinned he made no movement to 
 return, and had no disposition to do so. Separated from God by 
 his iniquity he loved the distance well. But God in his love 
 would have him return to his favor. On the very day of his first 
 sin God sought the sinner fleeing and hiding from his maker, 
 
GOD KEVEALED IN CHRIST. 445 
 
 called him to himself, and while condemning his sin, received him 
 again as a worshiper. This was the beginning of redemption. 
 And the Old Testament goes on to relate that God continued to 
 reveal himself among men as gracious to all who returned to him ; 
 he accepted their worship, declared to them his law, taught them 
 by his prophets ; he revealed himself to Israel as their covenant 
 God ; he perpetuated his kingdom and educated the people in 
 the hope of the Messiah. Thus the whole history recorded in the 
 Old Testament looked forward to Christ. 
 
 Therefore " Christianity, being essentially redemption, is nec- 
 essarily historical. It is the promised Christ of the Old Testa- 
 ment, the living, suffering, dying, risen Christ of the New Testa- 
 ment, the Christ reigning and life-giving in the dispensation of 
 the Spirit. Christianity therefore is not primarily doctrine but 
 history ; not philosophy or ethics but the historical manifestation 
 of God in his love redeeming man from sin. It is history in the 
 past, life-giving energy in the present, promise for the future." 
 
 II. God's action in redemption involves the miraculous. Rothe 
 says : u Miracles and prophecy are not adjuncts appended from 
 without to a revelation in itself independent of them, but are con- 
 stitutive elements of the revelation itself." 2 
 
 The possibility of miracles is involved in the idea of redemp- 
 tion. Redemption implies such presence and action of God in 
 the universe, such access of God to man, such intimacy of man's 
 communion with him, such close relations of the spiritual system 
 to the natural, as make miracles possible and reasonable ; as in 
 fact make them, when rightly apprehended, to cease to be mira- 
 cles in the sense often attached to them, and bring them into 
 strict accord with the constitution and law of the universe. 
 
 Miracles, in their relation to redemption, may be distinguished 
 as essential and incidental. 
 
 The acts which are essential and fundamental in redemption 
 are miraculous. Such are the person and life of Christ, his res- 
 urrection and ascension, the whole history of God in Christ rec- 
 onciling the world unto himself. And the redemptive action of 
 God in its preparatory stage recorded in the Old Testament in- 
 volves the miraculous. In all that period God was related to his 
 people by covenant, in which he promised his favor and blessing 
 on condition of their trust in him and their fidelity to him in obe- 
 
 1 The Kingdom of Christ on Earth, by Samuel Harris, p. 66. See Lectures 
 iii. and iv. 
 
 2 Studien und Kritiken, 1858, p. 23. 
 
446 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 dience to the law. We have the record of the making of this 
 covenant with Abraham, and of its renewal at successive epochs 
 in their history. They were instructed by his prophets, who com- 
 municated to them his commands, his warnings and his prom- 
 ises. It was by this covenant of God with them that Israel was 
 distinguished from other peoples. Thus the history of redemp- 
 tion through this period of preparation for Christ's coming was 
 marked by both miracle and prophecy. 
 
 The miraculous, therefore, belongs to the essence of redemp- 
 tion, and consequently to the essence of Christianity. The at- 
 tempt to retain Christianity after eliminating the miraculous is 
 futile. Such an elimination changes the conception of Christian- 
 ity from historical redemption through Christ to speculative phi- 
 losophy and ethics. The residuum of speculative and ethical doc- 
 trine, if it can be called a system of religious thought, is not 
 Christianity ; and those who hold it, however wise and good, at 
 least are not Christians in any true significance of the name. 
 
 Besides those miracles which were constitutive and essential in 
 redemption are others which were incidental ; as the miracles of 
 healing. 
 
 Thomas Aquinas distinguishes the first class as miracles that 
 are objects of our faith ; the second as miracles which are for the 
 confirmation of our faith. All the miracles of Christ and the 
 apostles were wrought in carrying on the work of redemption and 
 founding and extending Christ's kingdom on the earth. 
 
 Miracles have a threefold significance. They are acts of re- 
 demption, either constitutive and essential, or incidental. They 
 are signs or evidences ; signs of the spiritual and supernatural 
 penetrating the natural ; of the presence of the kingdom of God 
 on earth and of its agencies and influences energizing among 
 men ; of the riches of that kingdom opened in works of benefi- 
 cence ; of the presence and power of God's redeeming grace em- 
 powering and authorizing the worker of the miracle ; and of the 
 glory and coming exaltation of Christ and the prevalence of his 
 kingdom. And, lastly, as wonders, they arrest attention, awaken 
 the spiritual capacities, arouse the conscience, enforce instruction, 
 and thus are auxiliary to the introduction of the gospel into the 
 unbelieving world. 
 
 III. God's redemptive action centring in Christ constitutes a 
 revelation. In Christ and in God's redemptive action centring 
 in him as recorded in the Bible, God reveals himself as the Re- 
 deemer of men from sin. The redemptive action is the revela- 
 tion. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 447 
 
 It is a revelation of God himself by what he does, as distin- 
 guished from a revelation of ready-made doctrines and precepts 
 communicated in words. 
 
 It was shown in a former chapter that a man cannot know any 
 object merely by his own subjective activity. The object must 
 first act in some way on him and so reveal itself, and then the 
 mind reacts on the object, perceiving and apprehending it. The 
 same is true of God. Man cannot know God by dint of mere 
 subjective thinking. There must be some action of God in which 
 he comes out from the secrecy of his being and reveals himself. 
 It is essential in the idea of revelation that it must be made 
 primarily in what God does. Accordingly God's action in re- 
 demption constitutes his revelation of himself as redeemer. It 
 is a revelation of himself made in actually redeeming men from 
 condemnation and sin, not a revelation of truth communicated 
 in words. 
 
 Here is a double contrast. The object revealed is not prima- 
 rily formulated truth or doctrine or precept ; it is not even reli- 
 gion ; it is God himself, the Redeemer of men. And the revelation 
 is made not primarily by the medium of words and sentences but 
 by deeds. It is not an absent father writing to his children to 
 instruct them as to the nature of the family and the grounds of 
 filial duty and informing them what he would have them do. It 
 is rather a father living among his children revealing himself in 
 all which he does for and with them. God reveals himself in 
 redemption as the sun reveals itself by shining to all that see its 
 light and feel its heat. Very different would the revelation of 
 the sun be by a message to men in total darkness, teaching them 
 by words the scientific theory of light. 
 
 Accordingly the word in which God communicates his fullest 
 revelation is the living word made flesh in Christ ; God in Christ 
 reconciling the world unto himself. " No man hath seen God at 
 any time ; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the 
 Father, he hath declared him." The prophet Malachi, in mes- 
 sianic vision, sees this revelation as the rising of the sun : " Unto 
 you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with 
 healing in his wings." And in the Epistle to the Hebrews it is 
 said of him, under the same likeness to the sun, that he is the 
 effulgence or outshining of God's glory and the very image of his 
 substance. But God reveals himself in Christ by what he is and 
 does rather than by what he says. The author of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews begins by declaring that God bas revealed himself 
 
448 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 in his Son, and is occupied throughout the epistle expressly in 
 explaining what the revelation is. But in the whole letter he 
 does not quote a single saying of Christ, but unfolds the signifi- 
 cance of the revelation made in what he is and does. The other 
 epistles in the New Testament are full of Christ ; they profess 
 to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified. Yet in 
 them all there is scarcely a quotation of any sentence which he 
 uttered. Christ when on earth made himself the principal ob- 
 ject of his own teaching. He proclaimed himself as the pre- 
 dicted Messiah ; he explained the true nature of his kingdom and 
 the character of those who should be admitted to it. But he said 
 comparatively little of his death. How could he ? His death 
 was itself the revelation ; it was itself the sacrifice of atonement. 
 Necessarily he must let the fact reveal its significance. He did 
 not come to preach redemption but to redeem. He did not come 
 to preach the gospel, but to give us a gospel to be preached ; to 
 do the great work of redemption which reveals God's grace to 
 sinners, the glad tidings of which are the gospel. The signifi- 
 cance of his revelation of God does not consist primarily in " the 
 words of the Master," as rationalists like to express it, but in 
 what he is and does, the Immanuel, the God with us. 
 
 God's action centring in Christ and redeeming man from sin 
 is, both as to that which is revealed and the method of the rev- 
 elation, peculiar to itself, distinct from all other revelations, and 
 transcends them all. 
 
 The old distinction of natural and revealed religion and na- 
 tural and revealed theology is no longer available. All religion 
 and all knowledge of God imply some action of God revealing 
 himself to men. In this sense God reveals himself to all men. 
 This Paul affirms in the first and second chapters of the Epistle 
 to the Romans, and in his speeches at Athens and at Lystra. 
 This universal revelation has been already set forth. God re- 
 veals himself as the absolute Being in the necessary principles 
 and laws of thought which underlie all scientific knowledge and 
 make such knowledge possible. In the universe he reveals him- 
 self as its first Cause and as the Power that maintains it and acts 
 in it. In the constitution and course of nature and in the con- 
 stitution and history of man he reveals himself as the absolute 
 Reason, the personal God. And in man's rational and moral con- 
 stitution and freedom God reveals himself as the righteous moral 
 lawgiver and judge ; and reveals man to himself not only as a 
 rational free agent but also as a sinner against God in the trans- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 449 
 
 gression of his righteous law. Christianity then is not distin- 
 guished from the so called natural religion and theology by the 
 fact of revelation, but by the fact of an additional revelation pe- 
 culiar to itself. 
 
 In the first place, it is distinguished by a peculiar line of his- 
 torical action in which God reveals himself as the redeemer of 
 men from sin. It is God in Christ reconciling the world unto 
 himself. From the beginning of history we trace a line of action 
 in which God reveals himself as gracious to sinners. This action 
 looks forward to Christ and culminates in him. From the God 
 in Christ proceeds the divine Spirit. He illuminates the minds 
 of men, darkened with sin, with the knowledge of God revealed 
 in Christ as the Redeemer ; he bears the influences and energies 
 of God's redeeming grace through all the world and perpetuates 
 them through the earthly history of mankind ; thus he from age 
 to age is gathering out of the world a community of the re- 
 deemed, a kingdom of Christ, a kingdom of righteousness and 
 peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, comprising all who under the 
 influence of God's grace are willing to turn from sin and to trust 
 and serve God in a new and spiritual life. 
 
 In the second place, God's revelation of himself in Christ is 
 distinguished by the peculiar matter of the revelation. He re- 
 veals himself as the Redeemer of men from sin. When man by 
 sin has sundered the bonds of his union with God in filial trust 
 and service, the questions arise, can he be received again to the 
 favor of God and restored to his normal union with him ; and if 
 God can receive him, can the sinner be influenced of his own free 
 will to return. To these questions no answer is given in the rev- 
 elation of God in the constitution and course of nature, or in the 
 constitution of man, or in his history aside from the history of 
 redemption in Christ. The answer from these sources, if any, 
 would rather seem to be that sin, as man's wilful rupturing of 
 his normal union with God, as his setting up for himself in self- 
 sufficiency and repudiation of his condition as a creature, as a 
 contradicting of the universal reason and of the fundamental con- 
 stitution of the universe, must make it forever impossible for man 
 to regain his normal union with God and so to realize his true 
 perfection and wellbeing. Plainly it is impossible unless God 
 first by his own action in some way reveals himself gracious and 
 accessible even to sinners. It is in Christ and only in him that 
 he makes this revelation. In him he makes atonement for sin, 
 and opens the way for the free return of every sinful man who 
 
450 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 will. In him he reveals himself gracious to sinners with open 
 heart ready to receive them to his favor, when they return to 
 him. And this is the Gospel of Christ, the glad tidings of great 
 joy to all people. But this is not all. God not merely waits to 
 be gracious to sinners when they return to him, but he puts forth 
 positive influence to arouse and guide and draw to himself sin- 
 ners having of themselves no disposition to come. While the 
 minds of men are darkened with sin so that the light of the 
 eternal wisdom and love are hidden, God in Christ, the eternal 
 Reason which is the true light of every man, breaks ttirough the 
 darkening clouds and shines into their hearts to give the light of 
 the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 
 And while men are yet sinners, with their wills fixed in the re- 
 nunciation of God, in their self-sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking 
 and self -glory ing, while their desires and affections are perverted, 
 their spiritual susceptibilities benumbed, and their fleshly nature 
 exalted above the spiritual, God in Christ comes to them by the 
 Spirit with heavenly influences and energies to quicken them to 
 spiritual life, and to supply divine guidance and grace to help in 
 time of need to every one willing to return to the life of filial 
 trust and loving service and so to regain the privilege and bless- 
 edness of the sons of God. And here again is the gospel of Christ, 
 the glad tidings to all. 
 
 This historical action of God in Christ redeeming the world 
 from sin is the revelation of God peculiar to Christianity and dis- 
 tinctive of it. It is distinctive and peculiar both as to what it 
 reveals and as to the historical action in which the revelation has 
 been made. It is therefore also distinguished from all other rev- 
 elations by its superior fulness and completeness, by its adapted- 
 ness to all the spiritual needs of man and by its power of spir- 
 itual renovation. It is God's revelation of himself in its highest 
 and consummate form. As Dr. Dorner expresses it, ' The per- 
 fecting of the self -revelation of God is nothing other than the in- 
 carnation of God." 1 This is the new revelation which brea-ks 
 through the old circle of the natural -life, to make us by a birth 
 of the Spirit into new creatures in Christ and children of God. 
 And if so, then God's coming into humanity in Christ to redeem 
 man from condemnation and sin and to set up his reign of right- 
 eousness and grace, is the central and fundamental fact in human 
 history, to which all other revelations and religions are subor- 
 dinated, on which all true theology must centre, and on which 
 1 System of Christian Doctrine, vol. iii. p. 141, Trans. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 451 
 
 the true significance and philosophy of all other history must 
 depend. 
 
 IV. The Christian revelation includes both the historical or 
 public and the prophetic or private. Both are facts, and there- 
 fore both, in the broadest meaning of the word, are historical. 
 But the distinction may be designated by these words in the 
 lack of any which are more exact. The historical or public rev- 
 elations are redemptive acts open to. common observation, as trm 
 life, works 2 death and resurrection of Christ ; and in the Old 
 Testament the deliverance from Egypt and other divine inter- 
 positions in the history of Israel. The prophetic or private rev- 
 elations are divine influences revealing God in the consciousness 
 of an individual, so that he knows God in experience and is able 
 to testify to others of what he has thus known of God. This 
 is the essence of all prophecy. In this sense all Christians, as 
 recipients of the witness of the Spirit and as thus themselves wit- 
 nesses for God, are prophets. The prophets of the Bible were 
 subjects of a special divine influence and inspired to testify of 
 what God had revealed to them. So Ewald represents it : " We 
 must recognize in the prophets one of the most wonderful pri- 
 mal faculties of the soul, potentially existing through the whole 
 human race, but revealed in especial strength, truth and persist- 
 ence in the history of Israel only." " The spirit of every true 
 prophet begins with beholding the divine light, and being ab- 
 sorbed into the mind and will of God." 
 
 Prophecy is a knowledge and declaration, not of future events 
 only, but of God in any revelation of himself within the con- 
 sciousness of an individual. In Israel the prophets not only fore- 
 told future events, but were revealers of the truth, character and 
 will of God, and preachers of righteousness. They u negotiated 
 between God and man." They stood for God, his law and cov- 
 enant against all wickedness, warned the people of impending 
 judgments on their sins, declared God's promises, and strove to 
 keep them faithful to their covenant with him. 
 
 Prophecy sustains important relations to redemption. Pro- 
 phetic revelation is a part of the divine action in redemption, 
 either essential or incidental. The revelation of God in the con- 
 sciousness of an individual through the influence of the Spirit 
 convincing of sin, renewing, illuminating and sanctifying, giving 
 peace with God and inspiring with courage and hope, invigorating 
 with divine energy in every good work, is essential in redeeming 
 the person from sin and restoring him to his normal union and. 
 
452 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 communion with God, so that he is filled with all the fulness of 
 God. Promise of blessing, both to the individual and to the com- 
 m unity of the redeemed, is inseparable from the revelation of 
 God's grace in redemption. The preaching of the gospel, the tes- 
 tifying of those in whom Christ is revealed, is essential in the idea 
 of redemption as carried forward among men through the agency 
 of Christians working together with God and rinding therein their 
 own education and development, in fellowship with God, into the 
 likeness of Jesus Christ. In this sense prophecy is perpetual in 
 the kingdom of Christ. 
 
 Prediction, also, by men specially inspired, is essential in the 
 carrying forward of redemption. Such is the messianic prophecy 
 which pervades the prophecies of the Old Testament. It was the 
 declaration by inspired men of the revelation, which they had 
 received in divers portions and divers manners, of the central 
 idea and central fact of redemption. Other predictions of par- 
 ticular events, though they belong to the general course of re- 
 demptive action, are not essential but incidental. Thus the rev- 
 elation of God in his redemptive action is both historical and 
 prophetic, and the latter is always subordinate to the former. 
 So a great general reveals the plan of his campaign in actually 
 carrying it through, and therein also reveals himself as a great 
 military genius. But in the execution of his plan he must take 
 subordinate commanders into his confidence, disclose to them some 
 general idea of his plan, and from step to step its details in vari- 
 ous parts and in various wnys. And these private revelations are 
 acts essential or incidental to the action of the campaign. 
 
 Prediction in its fulfilment has also evidential value. The ful- 
 filment in Jesus Christ of the messianic prophecy is evidence 
 that in him God is redeeming the world. The history unfolds 
 in agreement with the prophetic plan. The Old Testament con- 
 tains the New as the bud contains the flower. In Christ the bud 
 of prophecy opens into the flower of history. Redemption moves 
 on in an atmosphere of promise, and prediction of greater things 
 to come is but the vocalization of its vital breath. The fact that 
 the spirit of promise and of prophecy pervades the Hebrew re- 
 ligion, unfolding into realization in Christianity and thence into 
 larger promise, is evidence that this religion is from God. In the 
 religions of Egypt, India, Persia, China, there is no prophecy and 
 no promise. It is a characteristic of an ethnic religion that it 
 assumes its own completeness, and is bound within its own lim- 
 its. It admits no outlook to a future when it will burst its cere- 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 453 
 
 ments, rise to a new life and transcend itself. And it has no 
 consciousness of a destiny and vital power to renovate society 
 and to quicken and guide its progress to a future always better 
 than the past. Such development and progress are precluded by 
 the essence of these religions. Pantheism, in making God every- 
 thing, makes him nothing. It recognizes only an unconscious 
 indeterminate forever evolving into the universe and resolving 
 back into the infinite. The movement is not forward and pro- 
 gressive, but ever in a circle. There is no consciousness, no intel- 
 ligence, no freedom, no love, no wisdom. The generations of men 
 are but the indeterminate, the unconscious evolved, all on the 
 same level, all abreast rather than in movement forward. God is 
 chained by fate, man by caste. In such a system what messianic 
 hope can bud and blossom ? What expectation and prophecy of 
 a kingdom of God growing like the mustard-seed can spring up ? 
 But the very genius of the Hebrew religion was its outlook to 
 the future. Its very life was in the expectation of a development 
 into something transcending itself. It carried ever in its bosom 
 the primal promise, " In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth 
 be blessed." This the prophets unfolded with ever increasing 
 clearness and fulness, until the expectation of its fulfilment satu- 
 rated the life of the people and became what has been called The 
 Hebrew Utopia. But this messianic expectation was realized in 
 Christ, and from him the religion of promise and hope, of en- 
 thusiasm for humanity, of ever widening and deepening progress, 
 has been prevailing in the world. And this progress is accordant 
 with the essence of the religion. Here is the personal God acting 
 in consciousness and freedom. He is the eternal Reason ; he is 
 the almighty Power acting freely in eternal harmony with the 
 Reason. Here are wisdom and love, here is God with men, gra- 
 cious even to the sinful when they return to him ; here is God 
 redeeming men from sin. Here that which has been ceases to 
 be the measure of that which shall be ; the miracle of free will 
 bursts forth in the world and men are in the image of God, know 
 him and can trust and serve him. Then a kingdom of God, a 
 reign of righteousness and peace, appears on the earth ; the old 
 gives place to the better and more vigorous new ; old institutions 
 become effete and pass away ; and in the face of all hindrances 
 and delays, the believer in Christ believes that the ancient proph- 
 ecy will surely be fulfilled, that "the earth shall be full of the 
 knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." 
 
 Prediction is also related to redemption as giving instruction 
 
454 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 and motive, as inspiring courage and enthusiasm and directing 
 endeavor. The Christian works for the welfare of men in ad- 
 vancing the kingdom of Christ, in the inspiration of expected 
 victory ; he knows that it is " a kingdom which cannot be 
 moved." 
 
 V. It follows that God's revelation of himself is through a hu- 
 man medium. 
 
 The reception of it must be through the medium of the suscep- 
 tibilities and powers of a human soul. As a revelation of God it 
 must be not only apprehended by the intellect but accepted in 
 the trustfulness of the heart. There must be a human medium 
 and the mediation must be both intellectual and moral. All con- 
 ception of revelation poured into a man in a- mechanical way 
 without his personal and free participation in it as its intelligent 
 and trustful recipient, is destructive of its essential significance 
 as a revelation. Even if the revelation were after the manner 
 of the Arabian Nights, and the future, the distant, the unknown 
 were seen in a magic mirror, the seer must apprehend for him- 
 self what the mirror reveals, must interpret its significance in its 
 practical relations to himself and to persons and interests within 
 the circle of his previous knowledge. And this must be true of 
 revelation however made. If it is historical and public the ob- 
 server must apprehend and interpret the event with his own 
 mental powers, just as an astronomer must observe the heavenly 
 bodies and their movements, and by the intelligent faculties of 
 his own mind find out their scientific significance. And if it is a 
 prophetic revelation within the man's own consciousness, he must 
 in like manner apprehend and interpret its significance. And he 
 must do this, under the continued influence of the Spirit, but 
 with his own faculties, in the light of his previous knowledge, 
 and in view of the bearing of the revelation on existing condi- 
 tions and circumstances. And as God's revelation pertains to 
 the moral and spiritual in man, its reception and interpretation 
 will depend on the moral and spiritual state of the man. Hence 
 Christ compares his word to seed, the growth of which depends 
 on the receptivity and condition of the soil on which it falls. 
 Revelation must find in man some soil in which it can inhere and 
 take root. Otherwise it is abortive. This distinguishes Chris- 
 tianity from heathen religions. In these the alleged revelations 
 ^re not given through an intelligent, moral and personal medium. 
 The Pythia uttered her oracles only when possessed by the god 
 and beside herself in mantic fury. Christianity, on the contrary^ 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 455 
 
 insists that " the spirits of the prophets are subject to the 
 prophets." 
 
 It must also be through a human medium that the revela- 
 tion is communicated. Prophecy is communicated first by the 
 prophet who has received it. And both historical revelation and 
 prophetic are communicated, by those who have received them, 
 to all people. The human spirit enlightened and fired by the 
 Spirit of God is the only adequate agency for communicating 
 God's revelation of himself in Christ to all mankind. Hence our 
 Saviour's command is, ** Go ye." 
 
 The action of God in redemption and the revelation of himself 
 made thereby as redeemer is necessarily progressive. This is not 
 on account of any imperfection in God, but on account of the 
 limitation and imperfection of man to whom the revelation is 
 made and by whom it is received, communicated and perpetuated. 
 God's action in redemption and the revelation made by it go on 
 in the courses of human history. For this reason a large part of 
 the Bible is history of the ordinary actions of men and the or- 
 dinary providence of God in human affairs. The revelation is 
 the heavenly jewel ; the human history is its necessary setting. 
 Hence along with the distinctively redemptive action go always 
 the human agency and action through which it is connected with 
 humanity. Hence the revelation is everywhere related to the 
 historical exigencies of the time ; it bears the marks of the age 
 and country in which it was given, and even of the individual 
 prophet or apostle who received it. Paul's epistles were written 
 to meet existing conditions in the churches to which they were 
 addressed. The inspired writings are, in various forms, biog- 
 raphy, history, doctrines and precepts, poetry, letters, proverbs 
 and parables. The revelation must therefore be progressive. 
 Facts and ideas familiar to all in modern civilization could not 
 have been communicated in the languages of ancient time. No 
 prophet could have predicted intelligibly at the court of David, 
 king of Israel, that on April 4, in the year of our Lord, 1885, in 
 a battle fought that day with cannon and rifles in Egypt, a posi- 
 tion was shelled by the English at two o'clock in the afternoon, 
 and the news of this event was sent by electric cable and an- 
 nounced in New York in America on the same day before the 
 clock struck two in that city : that it was printed the same after- 
 noon in the newspapers, and that one of these sent by rail was 
 read in a town seventy miles from New York at seven o'clock 
 the same evening. Here is the necessity that God's revelation of 
 
456 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 himself must be progressive. God can reveal himself no faster 
 than is commensurate with the knowledge, the condition, the re- 
 ceptivity of the men on whom he acts and to whom and through 
 whom he reveals himself. There must be a preparatory dispen- 
 sation before Christ comes. The race must be educated to 
 receive the larger revelation. The redemptive action must be 
 adjusted to the existing capacity and condition of men ; the light 
 must be admitted gradually to the eye enfeebled in long dark- 
 ness ; a sudden excess of light would only dazzle and blind. 
 Archbishop Whately illustrates this necessary progressiveness of 
 revelation by a father writing letters to a son from early child- 
 hood to full manhood. A better illustration would be from a 
 father living with his son, revealing himself as father both by 
 what he does and by counsel and instruction ; the son meanwhile 
 from early childhood up keeping a diary or record both of his 
 father's acts and of his counsel and teaching as received and un- 
 derstood by him at the time. The revelation of the father to 
 the son as thus recorded would necessarily be progressive. The 
 father would adapt his conduct, counsel and instruction to the 
 unfolding capacity of the child. The child would record them 
 with such capacity of apprehension and expression as he had at 
 the time and in their application to the current events and the 
 existing circumstances. And yet by the very process the father 
 is progressively educating the son to capacity for larger and 
 higher instruction, and to a more mature and complete under- 
 standing of the father's plan in educating him, and of his fatherly 
 character and love. 
 
 All religions claim to rest on revelation. But not one of these 
 alleged revelations, so far as it is the tradition of the action of a 
 god, declares any unity of plan and continuity of beneficent ac- 
 tion on the part of the god, aiming at the spiritual renovation of 
 human character and the reconciliation of man with God. The 
 Christian revelation, on the contrary, is the manifestation of God 
 bringing a divine life into the world, the coining of a divine 
 energy into human history progressively revealing God as the re- 
 deemer of men from sin, and issuing in the coming of Christ, in 
 whom God is reconciling the world to himself, and the kingdom 
 of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit is securely 
 founded and begins to pervade the world. 
 
 Revelation is not an end in itself. God makes the revelation 
 by his gracious action redeeming men from sin ; the revelation is 
 not an end in itself but is subordinate to the redemption of men 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 457 
 
 from sin, and to the advancement of the kingdom of God, which 
 in its progressive realization is the consummation of all good for 
 mankind. What is revealed is God himself. God must be what 
 he is before he can reveal himself as he is. His action in re- 
 demption is his revelation to man of what he is. His eternal 
 ethical character is Love including both righteousness and good- 
 will. He redeems men from sin because redemption is the spon- 
 taneous and free acting out among and upon sinful men of his 
 eternal ethical character. In this redemptive action he reveals 
 himself as eternal Love. The revelation is incidental to his re- 
 demptive action ; for if he acts towards men at all he will act 
 out his eternal ethical character ; and in acting it out he reveals 
 himself as eternal Love. And the revelation is subordinate to 
 the design of redemption ; for the revelation of his love is made 
 in his redemptive action in order to draw men away from their 
 sin and misery to reconciliation with himself. 
 
 VI. The Bible is the inspired record of God's action centring 
 in Christ, redeeming man from sin and establishing his kingdom 
 of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. It is not 
 itself the revelation, but it is the inspired record of the revelation 
 and preserves its contents. 
 
 The Bible is necessary for the preservation of the revelation. 
 This is well expressed by Rothe : u Revelation should not be like 
 a meteor flashing for a moment on the world, but should fix itself 
 like the sun in the firmament to bring the full clear day over the 
 whole circuit of the earth. It must then incorporate itself organ- 
 ically into the existence and life of the race, and become an his- 
 torical power and thus a factor in the development of the world's, 
 history. To this end it must be written." 1 As the kingdom 
 grows the knowledge of God's past action in establishing it and 
 especially of his coming in Christ, must be perpetuated and ex- 
 tended. And this is the design of the record in the Christian 
 Scriptures. The Bible is not the revelation itself but the record 
 of it ; it is essential to its preservation. John Wallis, one of the 
 clerks of the Westminster Assembly, said : " The Scriptures in 
 themselves are a lantern rather than a light." 2 But they who* 
 would destroy the lantern in order that the light may shine more 
 clearly would only find the light blown out. 
 
 The Bible is the record of God's action in Christ redeeming 
 men from sin, as distinguished from a collection of doctrines and 
 precepts revealed in propositions to inspired men, and from a reo 
 
 1 Zur Dogmatik, pp. 121, 122. 2 Sermons, London, 1791, p. 127. 
 
458 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ord of the religious sentiments and experiences of pious persons. 
 It is the record both of the historical or public, and of the pro- 
 phetic or private revelations. But the latter are presented as 
 they were given, in their historical setting, in their place in the 
 history and their relation to the then existing conditions and ex- 
 igencies of the divine kingdom ; and they are seldom elaborated 
 into formulas of doctrine or vindicated by any argument. 
 
 The Bible is not a collection of truths formulated in proposi- 
 tions, which God from time to time whispered in the ear to be 
 communicated to the world as the unchanging formulas of thought 
 and life for all time. It records indeed the teachings of prophets 
 and apostles ; it records the teachings of Christ Logia, as Mat- 
 thew Arnold calls them, " words of the master," in which they, 
 who regard him as a teacher only, find the whole significance of 
 his mission. But, while these are of inestimable worth, they are 
 not the essence of the biblical revelation. God reveals himself 
 by his action on and before men. The revelation recorded in the 
 Bible is that which God made by his historic action redeeming 
 man from sin, culminating in Christ and in the presence and 
 power of the Holy Spirit, issuing in the continued agencies and 
 influences of God's redeeming grace working in humanity and 
 transforming society into the kingdom of God. This historic re- 
 demption and the life arising from it are the essence of Christian- 
 ity. The Bible therefore is not a system of philosophy, ethics 
 or theology ; it is not an " arsenal of proof-texts." " The gospel 
 is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth ; 
 to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." (Rom. i. 16.) If we 
 get out of it a system of truth as to God and his relations to man, 
 we must do it as an astronomer gets a system of astronomy from 
 the heavenly bodies, as a botanist gets a system of botany from 
 the plants, as a statesman gets a system of political administra- 
 tion from the history of man. The facts are in the heavens, in 
 the plants, in the history of man ; the science is found by human 
 observation and thought. It is only in an analogous way that 
 we get our theology, by studying the facts of God's historical ac- 
 tion in redemption recorded in the Bible. 
 
 The conception of the Bible as a collection of doctrines and 
 precepts was common in the Middle Ages and has been scarcely 
 less so in Protestant theology. Theologians have used it as an 
 arsenal of proof-texts. Luther said : " Therefore are St. Paul's 
 epistles more a gospel than Matthew, Mark and Luke. For the 
 latter record not much more than the history of Christ's works 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 459 
 
 and miracles. But the grace which we have through Christ no 
 one presents so bravely as St. Paul. Because now much more 
 lies in the word than in the works and deeds of Christ, if we 
 must dispense with one of these, it were better to be without the 
 works and the history than the word and doctrine ; so are those 
 books to be valued most highly which treat most fully of the doc- 
 trine and word of Christ." l And coming down to the most re- 
 cent times, I find the following in two different numbers of one 
 of our most widely circulated religious newspapers : " Christ was 
 an instructor, a lecturer, a reformer, an agitator, and not a mag- 
 istrate or king, or in any sense a lawgiver." " Many Christians 
 regard the Bible as a clear and comprehensive revelation concern- 
 ing God and divine government, which contains the whole truth 
 concerning him and his purposes, so that humbly studied and 
 heartily received it will furnish a complete science of God and 
 divine things. I do not so understand the Bible. It appears to 
 ine to be simply a book of practical directions for godly living in 
 this present life." 
 
 Professor Robertson Smith rejects the mediaeval conception of 
 the Bible as a book of ready-made doctrines and precepts ; but he 
 falls into an error of a similar kind when he says: "The Bible is 
 a book of experimental religion. ... In the Bible God and man 
 meet together and hold such converse as is the abiding pattern 
 and rule of all religious experience." He recognizes its historical 
 character, not as the history of the redemptive action in which 
 God reveals himself, but " its peculiar worth " is in the record of 
 the personal experience of individuals in communion with God. 
 This is as erroneous and misleading a conception as that which 
 regards it primarily as a revelation of doctrines, or " a book of 
 practical directions for godly living." It remains an arsenal of 
 texts as really as it was to the dogmatist ; texts which the be- 
 liever appropriates as fitting his own experience, and as given 
 primarily for this very purpose. It is " a personal message to 
 me." And the conception is of God primarily making a private 
 revelation to individuals, instead of primarily working the re- 
 demption of man and setting up his kingdom of righteousness. 
 It remains as much as ever a whispering in the ear of an individ- 
 ual instead of God's majestic march through history, redeeming 
 man from sin. 2 
 
 And this historic character of the Bible, instead of implying 
 
 1 Preface to Exposition of the Epistles of Peter and Jude. 
 
 2 The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, pp. 11, 12, 13, 15, 18. 
 
460 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 any detraction from its divine authority, greatly enhances its sig- 
 nificance as a revelation of God. 
 
 It confirms its truth, as rooted in history. The Bible purports 
 to be the record of a progress of God through human history rec- 
 onciling man to himself and thus establishing in the hearts of 
 men the reign of God, the divine kingdom of righteousness and 
 good-will, of peace and joy in God ; a progress involving the com- 
 ing of God in Christ, the Redeemer, from whom the redeeming 
 energy goes out through all the world and continues through all 
 following ages, extending and perpetuating the kingdom of Christ 
 by the agency of men and women quickened to the life of faith 
 and Christ-like love, under the influence of the ever present Spirit 
 of God. The making of this biblical record went on through the 
 ages, connected with the redemptive action and inseparable from 
 the various exigencies of its progress and the divine manifesta- 
 tions made in them. The biblical record is rooted in the history 
 which it records. The truth of the Bible is the truth of a course 
 of history. It can be rooted out from the life and history of 
 man only when this whole history is rooted out. 
 
 The Bible itself also must be accounted for. It is a collection 
 of small books written at different periods in the course of many 
 centuries. The writers were of various conditions and acquire- 
 ments, from kings and priests to shepherds and fishermen, some 
 learned, some unlearned, living in widely separated ages and 
 widely different conditions of society. The books were written 
 in almost every variety of literary form. Their all -pervading 
 idea of God's redemptive action and kingdom is unique, found 
 nowhere in human literature outside of the Bible and the range 
 of its influence. This great idea sets forth as the end to be 
 attained, the highest life of man, the realization of the highest 
 possibilities of his being in righteousness and good-will and rec- 
 onciliation with God, and the universal extension of a spiritual 
 kingdom of renewed men. Yet these many authors, writing each 
 about the events and with the culture and under the influence of 
 their nation and age, grasp and unfold this unique idea as they 
 saw it, in the forms arid coloring respectively of their own times. 
 Such a result was possible only if God was really moving through 
 the ages in his redemptive action and thus actually making the 
 revelation which these books record. 
 
 Not only is the Bible rooted in the history of the past, but it 
 challenges verification from the history of the future. It finds 
 the true significance of history in the relation of man to the God 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 461 
 
 t> righteousness and grace and in the perpetuation and advance- 
 ment of his spiritual kingdom among men. And as these ends 
 shall be more and more realized in the progressive history of man, 
 the verification of the Bible will be continually going on. 
 
 Contrast the Bible, thus the outgrowth of the ages, with the 
 Koran, which records no redemptive action of God in humanity 
 through the ages, which had no roots in the past, but was the cre- 
 ation of a single man in a small part of a single life-time, and 
 professes to be only the record of private communications made 
 secretly to him. 
 
 Thus the conception of the Bible which I have presented shows 
 the irresistible evidence of its truth as the product of God's his- 
 torical action through the ages. 
 
 And this sets aside the objection of F. W. Newman, Rousseau 
 and others, that a revelation made in a book is impossible. As 
 Rousseau puts it, " revelation is not possible even though God 
 should wish it ; for as the first truths are cognizable to all intui- 
 tively, no other truths, as truths of religion, can rise to the same 
 rank." Certainly reason must always be supreme in the sphere 
 of truth. No miracles can prove that it is right to hate one's 
 neighbor. But the objection rests wholly on the supposition that 
 the Bible is a collection of ready-made propositions divinely re- 
 vealed. It is of no force against the Bible rightly conceived. 
 For the revelation is not " made in a book ;" but made in the 
 historical action of God in his redeeming grace, and is only re- 
 corded in the book. And this ought to have been perceived by 
 Rousseau himself when he put into the mouth of the Savoyard 
 vicar his much admired confession of the revelation of the divine 
 in the life of Christ. 1 
 
 And this conception of the Bible gives it a certain indepen- 
 dence of the results of criticism. If the Bible is a collection of 
 propositions given directly by God, then one error throws sus- 
 picion on all. But if the revelation is made in God's historical 
 action in Israel preparatory to Christ's coming and then in Christ 
 himself, then a single error of fact does not invalidate the his- 
 tory as a whole ; as the recent discovery that Pocahontas did not 
 interpose between Captain Smith and the club of the savage does 
 not disprove the history of Virginia nor of these persons them- 
 selves. Critical discussions of the date and authorship of Deuter- 
 onomy do not destroy the credibility of the history of Israel, nor 
 the fact that messianic prophecy pervaded its literature, nor the 
 1 Emile, livre iv. pp. 369, 370. F. W Newman, The Soul. 
 
462 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 fact that the distinctive service of Israel to humanity was to com- 
 municate the knowledge of the one true God and to bring Christ 
 and his benign religion into the world. So Ewald rebukes "many 
 inquirers of modern times, who give themselves the air of being 
 very wise and circumspect, and not only scorn to pursue the mod- 
 est traces on the ground, preferring the mazes of their own 
 invention, but will surrender even such a lofty and conspicuous 
 person as Moses, the Man of God." And if one is convinced on 
 scientific grounds that Joshua did not cause the sun to stand still, 
 or on critical grounds that an angel did not trouble the water in 
 the pool of Bethesda, these conclusions do not make it necessary 
 to disbelieve that God was in Christ reconciling the world to him- 
 self or to abandon all our religious faith and hope in him. If our 
 faith rests on the letter of the Bible, it stands unstable, like an 
 inverted pyramid on its apex, and the disturbance of a letter by 
 criticism overturns our faith. But if our faith rests on God as 
 the redeemer of men revealed in his gracious action in the his- 
 tory recorded in the Bible, nothing can unsettle our faith which 
 does not unsettle the whole course of the history. 
 
 It must be added that nothing can take away this faith which 
 does not equally take its deepest significance from the life of every 
 individual and from the history of mankind. Man bound to the 
 world of sense and shut lip within the life of selfish appetite and 
 desire cannot realize the nobleness of life, the ideal of his being 
 nor his true good. His desires grow by gratification, and his get- 
 ting, with his most eager diligence, can' never overtake his dis- 
 content. He is the Prometheus bound whose ever living heart 
 is gnawed by ever consuming greed and insatiable desires. It is 
 the life of insatiable longing and fruitless pursuit which Goethe 
 has pictured over and over ; in Werther, in Wilhelm Meister, in 
 Faust, and in a peculiar form in his Tasso, the type of one living 
 in the visions of the poet, in the sensitiveness of the artist, in 
 the refinement of high culture, and bewildered and hurt by con- 
 tact with the realities of life. In these characters Goethe pictures 
 himself and the life of unsatisfied yearning and endless unrest in 
 which, as he said in his later years, he himself had lived. Life 
 can be redeemed from this fruitless activity and ever goading 
 restlessness only as man knows himself in his relations to God 
 and his likeness to him, and in the life of faith in God and uni- 
 versal love becomes a worker with God to extend his kingdom of 
 righteousness and good- will, and thus realizes his own perfection 
 and wellbeing and sees his earthly life and work unfolding into 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 46& 
 
 the life eternal. Then life is found to be no longer a failure, a 
 series of illusions and disappointments, vanity of vanities and 
 vexation of spirit, but a sphere for the noblest work and the 
 achievement of the noblest ends, rich and satisfying .alike in the 
 pursuit and the attainment, in which success is assured in the pro- 
 gressive realization of the highest possibilities of the being and in 
 promoting the highest welfare of man. In a Christian life there 
 is no place for the despairing question, Is life worth living ? A 
 great philosopher said : " I have spent my life in laboriously doing 
 nothing." A great emperor said : " I have tried everything, and 
 nothing is of any profit." Goethe said his life had been a con- 
 tinual rolling of a stone up hill, which as continually rolled back. 
 But Paul said: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished 
 the course, I have kept the faith ; henceforth there is laid up 
 for me the crown of righteousness ; " in the retrospect, fidelity, 
 earnestness and achievement; in the future, beyond the bloody 
 death, a continued career from glory to glory. 
 
 The same line of thought is true of the history of mankind. 
 The highest destiny of the individual determines the highest des- 
 tiny of mankind. Human history has no worthy object except 
 as there is in the process of realization among men a kingdom 
 of God in which all possible perfection, blessedness and worth 
 are progressively attained on earth, and which, as the successive 
 generations of men pass away, is unfolding into the kingdom of 
 heaven. Pessimism is the necessary conception of the life and 
 destiny of the individual and of the history and destiny of man- 
 kind, if we must leave out the high possibilities of man's being 
 which are involved in his participation in the light of the divine 
 Reason, in his likeness to God in his rational and free person- 
 ality, in the fact of God's redeeming action revealing himself in 
 human history, and in man's capacity and privilege to commune 
 with God and to be a worker with him in the advancement of his 
 kingdom of righteousness and good-will. So Victor Hugo says : 
 " God is found at the end of all. Let us not forget it, but let 
 us teach it to all ; there would be no dignity in living and life 
 would not be worth its pain, if we are to die totally. That which 
 alleviates toil, which sanctifies work, which renders man strong, 
 good, wise, patient, beneficent, just, at once humble and great, 
 worthy of intelligence, worthy of liberty, is the having before 
 him the perpetual vision of a better world shining through the 
 darkness of this life." l 
 
 1 Speech on the Falloux Law, 1850. 
 
464 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The Bible is also the medium of fellowship with the people of 
 God in all the ages. It reveals God in his redeeming grace, and 
 the faith in him which has vitalized the Christian experience of 
 his people in all the ages. Thus, while the Christian under the 
 influence of the Spirit finds God revealed in the Bible directly to 
 his own soul, he therein also finds himself in fellowship with all 
 who have trusted the God of grace as he has revealed himself 
 in ages past. Our God is the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of 
 Jacob. As Paul declares, " We, brethren, as Isaac was, are the 
 children of promise." We utter our devotion in the words of pen- 
 itence, trust and praise in the Hebrew Psalms. In the New Testa- 
 ment we are brought into communion with Christ and his apos- 
 tles. In the first words of the prayer w 7 hich our Lord taught us 
 we must recognize this fellowship with all men, and say, " Our 
 father." Whatever destroys our belief of God's revelation of him- 
 self recorded in the Bible, also dissolves into illusion all which is 
 deepest, purest and most ennobling in the fellowship of men. 
 
 With the historical conception of the Bible we shall interpret 
 it more correctly, shall apprehend its significance in greater rich- 
 ness and fulness, and shall apply it practically with more wisdom 
 and efficiency. 
 
 We shall interpret it more correctly. The Bible is the record 
 of God's historical action redeeming men from sin and in it re- 
 vealing himself as the God of righteousness and grace. As in a 
 grand panorama it discloses to us God moving in the courses of 
 human history, revealing both the depths and heights of his own 
 love, and the greatness and worth, the sin and the needs, the 
 possibilities and opportunities of man. The study of it as a mere 
 collection of doctrines and precepts, of religious sentiments and 
 experience, must miss much of its true meaning and lead into 
 positive error. 
 
 Its significance also will be seen with greater richness and ful- 
 ness. Dean Stanley used to speak of the Bible as u having far 
 more in it than has ever been taken out of it." J The study of 
 the Bible as the history of God's revelation of himself in redeem- 
 ing the world from sin, is the study of a theme which is inex- 
 haustible ; it is " to comprehend with all the saints what is the 
 breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love 
 of Christ, which passeth knowledge." The study of the prophetic 
 revelations in their place in the history and their relation to the 
 exigencies of the kingdom opens in them new reality and mean- 
 1 Bradley 's Recollections of Stanley, p. 118. 
 
.GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 465 
 
 ing. The study of any event or period of the history in its rela- 
 tion to the progressive development of the redemptive action, 
 opens new and rich mines of instruction. And the life and death 
 and resurrection of Christ, in their moral and spiritual signifi- 
 cance, will always be in advance of the progress of man. 
 
 And the beneficent moral influence of the Bible is the greater 
 because it records God's revelation of himself by his action in 
 human history. God reveals himself not to scholars only but to 
 mankind. The historical is the most effective method of reach- 
 ing all minds. " History is philosophy teaching by examples." 
 A Unitarian writer, trying to explain the superior power of the 
 evangelical preaching, gave as the reason the fact that the evan- 
 gelical conception of revelation is more dramatic. It opens with 
 Edeu and the Fall ; it discloses God visiting judgments on men 
 for sin, the flood, the storm of fire on Sodom ; giving his law and 
 entering into covenant with the people at Sinai ; going before 
 them and encamping among them, the light of his tabernacle, 
 seen every evening from the surrounding tents. Then it shows 
 him revealed among men in Christ going about doing good, bear- 
 ing men's sorrows and sins, opening the inmost heart of God in 
 love to men even to the cross, then rising triumphant over death 
 in man's behalf, reigning in heaven bearing them always on his 
 heart, and yet dwelling among men everywhere and always in his 
 Spirit, unseen, yet closer to them and more intimate with them 
 than when his tabernacle was among them or even when in Christ 
 he was with them on the earth. It is dramatic indeed ; but it 
 is the drama of God's real history among men seeking the lost 
 and reconciling sinners to himself. The revelation of God in this 
 great drama of redemption is the power of the Bible. The Bible 
 is the glass through which we look back through the vista of the 
 ages and see God moving among men in his righteousness and 
 grace, educating them to capacity to know him, and to know 
 themselves in their true dignity and capacity in their relation to 
 him, developing them to receptivity of larger communications of 
 his grace and to greater spiritual power in achieving great re- 
 sults in the service of God and man, and thereby to the develop- 
 ment of themselves toward perfection and the realization of the 
 highest possibilities of spiritual love, wisdom, beauty and power; 
 and thus bringing in everlasting righteousness and so revealing 
 himself with ever increasing glory as the Saviour of man. Here 
 is the fullest revelation of man, opening to us in long vistas the 
 significance of his history in the past and of his destiny in the 
 
466 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 future. Here also God makes the fullest revelation of himself. 
 His archetypal plan comes into view traced in the long line of 
 his righteous and gracious action through the past and brighten- 
 ing onward into the glories of the future ; in redemption he comes 
 into multiplied and intimate connections with man and therein 
 reveals himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit ; his inmost be- 
 ing seems to unfold to sight in the fulness of his communication 
 of himself to sinful men in saving them from sin ; the depths of 
 his love and wisdom are opened to view, as when the doors of a 
 great palace are thrown open and we look in on its rich rooms 
 and lengthening halls. 
 
 But notwithstanding this wide range through history, this 
 world-wide grandeur and magnificence of God's revelation of 
 himself and of his kingdom recorded in the Bible, or rather for 
 these very reasons, it is the book which brings God nearest to the 
 individual believer and closest to his own personal experience and 
 spiritual needs. It is to every Christian a word in season, a word 
 to the heart. And like no other book it comes to the spiritual 
 mind with a self -revealing and self-evidencing power and con- 
 vinces him of the divine authority of the revelation which it de- 
 clares. As Rothe says : " What most impresses the right reader 
 of the Bible is just this, that in it and nowhere else the Christian 
 religious truths which he has longest confessed come to him as 
 with supernatural light, with such original truth to nature, such 
 fresh breathing life, such transparent purity, such majestic and 
 commanding authority, that he finds himself immediately con- 
 vinced of their reality and obliged to give himself up to them." l 
 
 VII. After Christ's ascension the divine action in redemption 
 is continued by the Holy Spirit. 
 
 The belief in a divine influence on men is not peculiar to Chris- 
 tianity. It is commonly recognized in some form in the ethnic 
 religions. The peculiarity of Christianity in this respect is that 
 the Spirit of God in his universal presence continues the work of 
 redemption. The redeeming energy of God which centred in 
 Christ, proceeds from him in the Holy Spirit, perpetuating and 
 diffusing the offers, the influences and agencies of God's redeem- 
 ing grace. Thus the Spirit is distinctively the divine witness to 
 Christ through all the ages. God does not complete redemption 
 in the earthly history of Christ. In him he makes atonement for 
 sin and opens the way for the outpouring of the influences of his 
 grace in all their fulness on all mankind in the Holy Spirit. Nor 
 1 Zur Dogmatik, p. 165. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 467 
 
 does he leave the communication of the glad tidings of his grace 
 in Christ to the record of it in the Bible and to the faithfulness 
 and diligence of his people. But in the Spirit he continues to 
 dwell and act among men, testifying of God's grace in Christ and 
 with divine influences drawing them to return to him in faith 
 and love. Hence the testimony of God himself in the Spirit to 
 Christ and the divine grace in him is given in the soul of men 
 who open their hearts and minds to receive it, and this goes with 
 the Bible and the efforts of the church to perpetuate Christian 
 faith among men. 
 
 But here again the witness is not by communicating a truth to 
 the intellect, but by actually continuing the work of redeeming 
 men from sin by quickening them to the new and spiritual life, 
 inspiring them to Christ-like love and work in drawing men away 
 from sin and advancing Christ's kingdom on earth, and so de- 
 veloping them in spiritual purity, completeness and power. 
 
 The knowledge of Christ by his disciples and their communion 
 with him were necessarily incomplete while he was with them in 
 the flesh ; for his presence was limited to one place, and the great 
 revelation, by his death, resurrection and ascension, and by the 
 coming of the Spirit, was not yet made. After he was gone their 
 knowledge of him and communion with him were more complete. 
 Then they began, under the quickening of the Spirit, to tread 
 with intelligence the Way of Christ and to preach him with 
 power. So Christ himself had said, " It is expedient for you 
 that I go away." 
 
 Therefore the influence of Jesus after his death is not merely 
 like the posthumous influence of a great man, surviving in the re- 
 membrance of his life, in the consequences of his deeds, the record 
 of his instructions, or even in the institutions which he founded. 
 He is present and acting among men in the Spirit whom he sends 
 and in whom he is administering his kingdom of grace on the 
 earth. Thus is his own word fulfilled : " Lo, I am with you alway, 
 even unto the end of the world." We must not suppose that God's 
 work of redemption was finished in the earthly life of Christ 
 a transitory wonder, like the sheet let down from heaven before 
 the astonished eyes of Peter and then drawn up again and seen 
 no more. It continues through the history of man. And this 
 even the symbolization of the Scriptures represents. In the the- 
 6phanies the common symbol of God's manifestation was light; 
 the flaming sword which guarded Eden, the burning bush, the 
 fire and cloud which guided Israel in the wilderness, which envel- 
 
468 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 oped Sinai and filled the tabernacle and the temple, the over- 
 powering glory before which prophets fell and became as dead 
 men. This peculiar manifestation of God the Jews called the Sbe- 
 chinah. The same symbol repeatedly manifested the glory of the 
 Christ, in the bright cloud which overshadowed him in his trans- 
 figuration, and which received him at his ascension, in the glory 
 brighter than the sun in which he appeared to Paul, in the re- 
 splendence in which he was seen by John in Patmos, his face 
 like the sun shining in his strength and his very feet like brass 
 heated to whiteness in a furnace. The same symbol manifested 
 the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, cloven tongues of fire on 
 each disciple. It is a fit symbol ; for light with its accompanying 
 heat is the guide of all action and the nourisher of all life ; it is 
 essentially pure, incapable of taking on itself any defilement even 
 by contact with pollution, and purifying even to burning. The 
 Sliechinah is, indeed, no longer seen ; the voice of God speaking 
 from heaven is no longer heard ; " no angel's pinion gleams along 
 the empyrean now." But the Spirit of God, silent and all-per- 
 vading, is perpetually carrying forward redemption to its consum- 
 mation. And in this we have an advantage. While the ancient 
 revelations were made to favored prophets and apostles and were 
 by them communicated, the Spirit comes with the gospel to each 
 and all. His divine influence is at once universal and individ- 
 ualizing ; it pervades the whole, it concentres on every one. It 
 knocks at every door; it enters every opened heart and dwells 
 within it. This universality and individualization were perhaps 
 symbolized by the manner of his manifestation on the day of 
 Pentecost : the Shechinah broken up into lambent flames resting 
 severally on every one. 
 
 In his parting words to his disciples the Lord had said : "I as- 
 cend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your 
 God ; " ' all authority hath been given unto me in heaven and 
 on earth;" and he had promised, after his exaltation to send to 
 them his Spirit who should abide with them forever. The descent 
 of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost was the present token and 
 pledge that the Lord had triumphantly accomplished all which 
 he had said, and that in his exaltation he remembered his disci- 
 ples left on earth and had fulfilled his promise. And the influ- 
 ence of God's Spirit on any human heart through all time is a 
 present token and pledge of the same. Nor is this all. By the 
 influence of the Spirit we are brought into immediate connection 
 with the Lord, as the rays of the sun falling on us bring us into 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 469 
 
 immediate connection with the sun. In that influence the en- 
 ergy of redeeming grace strikes on our souls ; we are brought into 
 contact with the heart of God and feel the throbbing of his love 
 knocking evermore for a responsive love. Then, rejoicing in 
 God, we rise up new witnesses from our own experience of the 
 power of God to redeem from condemnation and sin. And 
 through all the Christian ages every one who has had the like 
 experience has become a witness to Christ revealed in his own 
 consciousness by the Spirit of God. Their united testimony 
 comes to us from all the ages, like that which John heard from 
 the hosts of the blessed in heaven, " as the voice of many waters 
 and as the voice of a great thunder ; and as the voice of harpers 
 harping with their harps ; and they sing as it were a new song." 
 This is the witness of the Spirit to Christ in the consciousness and 
 the deepest experience of every Christian. 
 
 VIII. Christianity is ideal as well as historical. But the ideal 
 Christ necessarily implies the historical Christ. 
 
 Rationalistic writers have attempted to retain an ideal Christ 
 while neglecting or rejecting the historical. So Strauss : " The 
 attempt to retain in combination the ideal in Christ with the his- 
 torical having failed, these two elements separate themselves , 
 the latter falls as a natural residuum to the ground, and the for- 
 mer rises as a pure sublimate to the ethereal world of ideas." l 
 The ideal has been presented in various forms ; the subjective 
 idea of moral perfection ; the objective idea of God's presence in 
 the human race as a whole. With some, Christianity becomes 
 nothing more than a collection of moral precepts and prohibitions. 
 Matthew Arnold presents two virtues, kindness and pureness, 
 charity and chastity, and says : " If any virtues could stand for 
 the whole of Christianity, these might." Of the deeper concep- 
 tion of Christ and Christianity which has prevailed through the 
 ages he says : " The immense pathos, so perpetually enlarged 
 upon, of his (Christ's) life and death, does really culminate here : 
 that Christians have so profoundly misunderstood him." 2 
 
 The reply is that the ideal of Christianity can be found only 
 in the historical Christ. This is exemplified in the authors just 
 now quoted, who miss the distinctive idea of Christianity. The 
 same must be the failure of every attempt to find the ideal Christ 
 without the historical. Christianity assumes as already existing 
 a knowledge of God and his law, of sin and the need of reconcili- 
 
 1 Strauss, Life of Jesus, vol. ii. p. 887, Miss Evans's Trans. 
 
 2 Last Essays on the Church and Religion, pp. xx. 53. 
 
470 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ation with God. These are not distinctive of Christianity. All 
 that is peculiar and distinctive in Christianity is known only in 
 the revelation which God makes of himself in his action in hu- 
 man history redeeming men from sin and centring in Christ. 
 
 So Biedermann says : " The Christian religion will be the re- 
 demption of the natural man out of his disunion from God into 
 freedom in God through the full revelation of God's grace in 
 Jesus Christ, the object of its faith." 1 God reveals himself in 
 redemptive action centring in Christ. But we must interpret 
 that action and read the idea of God and of man set forth in it. 
 We stand before the redemptive action in Christ as the scientist 
 stands before the physical world, reads the thought expressed in 
 its masses and molecules and their interaction, and thus appre- 
 hends them in science. So we observe God's action in Christ re- 
 deeming men from sin, read in it the thought or idea which it ex- 
 presses, and thus apprehend it in theology. It is said there is no 
 theology in the history of Christ and no theology in the biblical 
 history ; and in the same sense it is true that there is no science 
 in nature. The science in the one case and the theology in the 
 other is simply the apprehension and enunciation of the idea or 
 thought disclosed in the facts. In each it is the facts translated 
 
 o 
 
 into thought and so apprehended, distinguished and comprehended 
 in the mind. There can be no astronomical knowledge of the sun 
 except what is obtained from the sun itself ; and the ideal sun of 
 science implies the existence of the real sun. So the distinctive 
 truths of Christianity can be found only in Christ and the his- 
 torical redemption in him. And necessarily if the ideal Christ is 
 accepted as true, the historical Christ must be accepted as real. 
 
 At whatever point we find a spiritual truth or motive distinc- 
 tive of Christianity, we find it inherent in the historical Christ 
 and the historical action centring in him. 
 
 While in other religions man thinks of himself as seeking God, 
 in Christ God reveals himself as seeking man. While in other 
 religions men think themselves obliged to make God propitious, 
 God reveals himself in Christ as graciously disposed towards sin- 
 ners ; not only willing to forgive any who return to him, but seek- 
 ing men in their sins to draw them back to filial trust in him and 
 so to reinstate them in their normal condition of union with God. 
 His attitude toward the sinner is not merely that of the father 
 willing to receive the prodigal son when he returns in penitence 
 and rags, but also that of the shepherd going out on the moun- 
 1 Christliche Dogmatik, 113, p. 131. 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 471 
 
 tains to seek and recover the sheep that had strayed from the 
 fold, exposing himself to the perils of the mountain's storms and 
 cold, its slippery precipices and savage beasts, from which he seeks 
 to save the sheep. u God so loved the world." God's good-will, 
 his gracious disposition to save, precedes the sinner's return ; if 
 not, the sinner would return in vain. And when man by sin- 
 ning has disrupted his union with God, has rushed away in his iso- 
 lation and individuation, and his will is set in his self-sufficiency 
 on himself as his supreme object of trust and service, then if left 
 unsought and untouched by God, he would have no disposition to 
 return. But God, "not wishing that any should perish but that 
 all should come to repentance," follows the sinner with his love 
 on his darkening way, as the sun follows with its attraction a 
 comet in its remotest flight to draw it back to itself. 
 
 This is God's attitude always toward all for whom Christ died. 
 But this doctrine is not independent of God's historical action 
 redeeming men from sin in Christ ; it merely declares one item 
 of its significance. 
 
 In Christ God unites himself, not with a particular man al- 
 ready existing, but with humanity itself in all its essential attri- 
 butes. In him God enters humanity with redeeming grace, and 
 from him pours into humanity the divine Light and Life and 
 Love to renovate man to spiritual life and draw him back into 
 union with himself. In Christ God is revealed in his grace to 
 man, and man is revealed in his normal condition, in union with 
 God and in the realization of his archetypal perfection. Christ is 
 the new Head of the human race in whom man is to be born of 
 the Spirit and quickened to a new spiritual life, and is to realize 
 the perfection and good which he has missed by separating him- 
 self from God in sin. Thus Christ is " the manifestation of a 
 person in whom the eternally ideal had become the historically 
 real." 
 
 The same dependence of the idea of Christianity on the histor- 
 ical Christ appears in the progress of Christianity, both in the 
 renovation of individuals and the progress of the kingdom of 
 Christ. A distinctive doctrine of Christianity appears in its 
 unique idea of the kingdom of Christ on earth ; the community 
 of those who have been reunited to God through his redeeming 
 grace, and by their common union with God in Christ are united 
 with one another in fellowship in the Christian community. 
 This kingdom is in the world like the leaven and the mustard- 
 seed ; and as it spreads and grows, is gradually transforming hu- 
 
472 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 man society into the kingdom of God. We note its coming in 
 the spiritual renovation of individuals, in the training of children 
 for Christ, in the moral purification of society, in every overthrow 
 of wicked institutions, usages and laws, in every reformation 
 which is a real and permanent uplift of society. And while it is 
 thus renovating individuals and society in this life, it is from gen- 
 eration to generation continuously flowing over, like a great river 
 into the ocean, into the life eternal in heaven. And so it is to 
 continue till the consummation of human history on earth. And 
 this will be in the coming of the historical Christ and the award- 
 ing to all men of their destiny by him in the final judgment. 
 But the progress of Christ's kingdom through the ages is not by 
 the power of truth alone. But in his kingdom on earth Christ is 
 present in his Spirit, in whom the light and energy of his redeem- 
 ing grace are brought to bear on men. As Paul says, " The Lord 
 is the Spirit." It is in and through the Spirit that Christ is in 
 us and we in Christ, and our normal condition of union with God 
 is attained anew. Hence " the ideal Christ " is not a subjective 
 idea of our own minds, nor truth and precept intellectually ap- 
 prehended. Rather, if we must speak of the ideal Christ, it is 
 the living Spirit of Christ pervading humanity with the offers and 
 influences of redeeming grace brought into the world through 
 him, and revealing him in our own consciousness. 
 
 Therefore the spiritual doctrine, precept and motive of Chris- 
 tianity centre on the historical Christ and the historical action of 
 God in redemption wrought through him. If the ideal Christ is 
 true the historical Christ is real. For the essence of Christianity 
 is not speculative nor ethical philosophy, but the redemption of 
 man from sin in the person of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Christianity has its doctrine, its speculative and ethical philos- 
 ophy ; but they rest on the historical facts of redemption through 
 Christ, and take up and express their significance. They grasp 
 the true idea and greatness of man, the significance of his his- 
 tory, the ideal of his perfection and wellbeing, and the possibili- 
 ties of his destiny, with a depth, clearness and comprehensiveness 
 wanting in all philosophy which takes no note of the real facts of 
 man's relation to God. It is only as man is known in his rela- 
 tions to God in redemption that we get the true philosophy of his 
 history, the true conception of man himself and of the possibilities 
 of his being, and of human society in its true progress and des- 
 tiny. Man's history and destiny remain inexplicable to the rea- 
 son until we know him in his relation to God in Christ redeeming 
 
GOD REVEALED IN CHRIST. 473 
 
 him from sin. It is evident therefore that the ideal Christ can- 
 not be separated from the historical. The fact that we have the 
 ideal, can be accounted for only by the historical existence of the 
 real Christ. As Professor Hedge says : " If the Christ of the 
 church is an ideal being, it was Jesus who made the ideal. The 
 ideal in him is simply the result of that disengagement from the 
 earthly vestiture which death and distance work in all who live 
 in history." 1 And Theodore Parker says: " Shall we be told, 
 Such a man never lived ; the whole story is a lie? Suppose that 
 Plato and Newton never lived ; that their story is a lie. But who 
 did their works and thought their thought ? It takes a New- 
 ton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated Jesus ? 
 None but Jesus." 2 
 
 Therefore in seeking the central idea of Christianity we must 
 begin with the revelation of God in Christ reconciling the world 
 unto himself. If Christ is the God in man redeeming man from 
 condemnation and sin, if the story of that wondrous life and death 
 and triumph over death is true, then in its full scope and ultimate 
 intent it cannot have been designed for any nation or section of 
 men exclusively, but is broad and deep as humanity. It cannot 
 be limited in its influence to any partial sphere of human thought 
 and action, but must throw its light and influence on all. Chris- 
 tian theology must centre on it. Philosophy cannot be complete 
 if it takes no note of this great revelation of God in his relation 
 to man, and of man in his relation to God. Even in relation to 
 physical science it answers questions which the science inevitably 
 raises but which it makes no attempt to answer because they 
 reach beyond its province ; and it declares the worthy ends for 
 which the world exists and the glorious issues of its evolution in 
 the future. It must be the central fact in human history ; es- 
 sential to disclose the true significance of historical events and 
 periods, and the true principles and aims of human politics, civil- 
 ization and progress, and to reveal in the progressive kingdom of 
 God the highest destiny of man. It is also central in the life of 
 the individual man, the very turning-point of his destiny, as it 
 comes to him in the invitation and energy of God's redeeming 
 grace, awakening him to the consciousness of spiritual relations, 
 obligations and privileges, calling him to enter the kingdom of 
 God which has come to him, drawing him to return to union and 
 communion with God. 
 
 1 Ways of the Spirit, p. 338. 
 
 2 Discourse of Religion, Boston ed. 1842, p. 363. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 MIRACLES. 
 
 I. DEFINITION. A miracle is an effect in nature which nei- 
 ther physical forces acting in the uniform sequences of cause and 
 effect nor man in the exercise of his constitutional powers are 
 adequate to effect, and which therefore reveals the agency of some 
 supernatural being other than man. 
 
 A 'miracle presupposes the system or course of nature. " Na- 
 ture " as here used means the physical system. It includes the 
 whole of impersonal being, conditioned in time and space and 
 the subject of continuous transition through the energy of effi- 
 cient causes acting as they are acted on in the uniform sequences 
 of cause and effect. These uniform sequences are called laws 
 of nature. A miracle is an effect in the physical system which 
 these causes acting in these uniform sequences would never have 
 effected. 
 
 A miracle also presupposes a supernatural system. By this I 
 mean the moral, rational or spiritual system. Man is a supernat- 
 ural being. As endowed with reason and free will and susceptible 
 of rational motives he is a personal being and as such above na- 
 ture or supernatural. 1 He thus knows what the supernatural is. 
 By his own rational free action on nature he has knowledge of 
 the supernatural acting on nature. A miracle therefore is not 
 the revelation of a kind of agency foreign to his experience and 
 so unknowable, but of a rational free agency like his own ; and 
 supernatural because it is rational, free and personal. By this 
 knowledge in his own experience he can recognize a supernatural 
 agency in the effects in which it manifests itself. A miracle is 
 an effect in nature manifesting the agency of some supernatural 
 being other than man. 
 
 1 Professor Thomas H. Green of Oxford, says, that the self-conscious will 
 of man " does not consist in a series of natural events ... is not natural in 
 the ordinary sense of that term; not natural at any rate in any sense in which 
 naturalness would imply its determination by antecedent events or by condi- 
 tions of which it is not itself the source." 
 
MIRACLES. 475 
 
 Man belongs both to the physical system and to the moral ; 
 both to nature and the supernatural. As to his physical organi- 
 zation he is implicated in nature. The physical forces in their 
 unvarying sequences sweep through his being as resistlessly as 
 through a rose or crystal. But in knowing himself and his fel- 
 low-men he knows the spiritual system and his own participation 
 in it. As participating and acting in both spheres, and as acting 
 by his own free will on nature, he knows that the two systems 
 are not sundered by any impassable gulf, but are in the closest 
 communication and interaction. Thus he knows that the action 
 on nature of personal beings other than man, if such exist, is pos- 
 sible without any interruption of its uniformity and continuity. 
 
 A miracle as such does not reveal the moral character of the 
 agent. That is revealed in the character and design of the mira- 
 cle, as the moral character and intent of a man are revealed by 
 his action. 
 
 In this definition of a miracle we must notice two different 
 meanings of law. Laws are primarily principles of reason ; as, 
 that every beginning or change has a cause, that the same com- 
 plex of causes always produces the same effect, and others. 
 These laws regulate both thought and things, and they persist 
 unchanged through all changes and convulsions, through all pro- 
 duction and all dissolution ; and all changes must accord with 
 them. No action of power, even though almighty, ever inter- 
 rupts their operation. Every miracle is wrought in accordance 
 with them. 
 
 In accordance with these laws there are uniform factual se- 
 quences which are also called laws of nature, but only in a sec- 
 ondary sense. These do not persist forever. A new force may 
 begin to act in the complex of causes which has produced this 
 factual sequence, and the sequence is interrupted. But this very 
 interruption of the sequence is effected only in accordance with 
 the unchanging principles of reason which are the laws of nature 
 in the true and deeper sense. The rotation of the earth is a uni- 
 form factual sequence of this sort, which has been uninterrupted 
 throughout the entire experience of mankind. But it had a be- 
 ginning and science teaches that it will come to an end. But 
 its beginning and its ending must be accordant with the true and 
 deeper laws of nature, the principles of reason. 
 
 A miracle supposes a rational free will, which is above nature, 
 acting as a new cause in a physical complex of causes and pro- 
 ducing an effect which the physical causes left to themselves 
 
476 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 would not have produced. This is the essence of a miracle. But 
 the free will itself, though it may interrupt a uniform factual 
 sequence, can do it only in exact accord with the principles of 
 reason which are the true and never changing laws of nature, and 
 regulate all thought and all energy. The action of the human 
 free will is of the essence of a miracle. It is open to every ob- 
 jection which can be urged against a miracle. On the other hand 
 the reality of human free will removes all objections from the 
 uniformity and continuity of nature to the possibility of mira- 
 cles. But since we are familiar with the action of the human 
 will, we do not call it a miracle. We give the name, miracle, 
 only to effects in nature transcending the power of man and re- 
 vealing a supernatural agent transcending man. But the proof 
 of the existence of free will in man is equally proof of the possi- 
 bility of miracles, provided free will exists in God or in any per- 
 sonal free agent other than man. 
 
 It follows that the question as to the reality and possibility of 
 miracles resolves itself into the question as to the reality and 
 possibility of rational free will. It is the question whether any 
 rational free will can exist either in God or man. The denial of 
 miracles, on the ground of their impossibility in consistence with 
 the continuity and uniformity of nature, involves the denial of 
 free will and the assertion that all human action is necessitated 
 by antecedent physical force in the fixed course of nature, as 
 completely as are the running of water and the falling of stones. 
 
 II. POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES. All objections to miracles 
 resolve themselves into this : A miracle is impossible because 
 it interrupts the uniformity, continuity and unity of nature. It 
 would be a foreign agency intruding into nature, incompatible 
 with the unity of nature in an all-comprehending system and 
 with the uniformity and continuity of its course of development. 
 The objection merely unfolds the significance of M. D'Azeglio's 
 witticism : " Ah, I do not believe in them. They are nothing 
 but celestial coups d'etat." 
 
 The general answer is that miracles are possible if God exists. 
 This answer is forcibly presented by J. S. Mill : " In order that 
 any alleged fact should be contradictory to a law of causation, 
 the allegation must be, not simply that the cause existed without 
 being followed by the effect, for that would be no uncommon 
 occurrence ; but that this happened in the absence of any coun- 
 teracting cause. Now in the case of an alleged miracle the asser- 
 tion is the exact opposite of this. It is that the effect was de- 
 
MIRACLES. 477 
 
 feated, not in the absence but in consequence of a counteracting 
 cause, namely, a direct interposition of an act of the will of some 
 being who has power over nature ; and in particular of a being, 
 whose will, having originally endowed all the causes with the 
 powers by which they produce their effects, may well be sup- 
 posed able to counteract them. A miracle is no contradiction to 
 the law of cause and effect ; it is a new effect supposed to be pro- 
 duced by the introduction of a new cause. Of the adequacy of 
 that cause, if it exist, there can be no doubt ; and the only ante- 
 cedent improbability which can be ascribed to a miracle is the 
 improbability that any such being had existed in the case." l All 
 which Hume makes out is, that no evidence can prove a miracle 
 to one who does not already believe in the existence of God and 
 the moral or supernatural system. This belief is presupposed in 
 every investigation of the occurrence of miracles. The idea of a 
 miracle includes the idea of the supernatural. It would be idle to 
 discuss the question of the intervention of a supernatural power 
 in the course of nature with one who has no belief that any 
 supernatural power exists. In the preceding investigations we 
 have found full justification of our belief in the existence of God 
 and the moral or supernatural system. With this attained the 
 possibility of miracles is assured and the force of the objection 
 is broken. The fallacy of the objector lies in his recognition of 
 the physical system alone. As Trench represents it, he is like 
 the earth-born giant, the Titan Antaeus. His whole strength 
 depends on his standing on the earth. The moment you lift him 
 into the sphere of the personal, spiritual and supernatural, to the 
 recognition of a personal God and a moral system, his strength 
 is gone. 2 For all believers in the existence of God and the moral 
 system, this answer establishes beyond all controversy the possi- 
 bility of miracles. The objection derives all its force from the 
 assumption that the physical system is the only and all-compre- 
 hending system of the universe. 
 
 The objection now recurs in a new form. The possibility of 
 miracles being admitted, yet if God should work a miracle or 
 empower any finite person to do it, the act would be an interfer- 
 ence with the course of nature, interrupting its uniformity and 
 continuity in the unity of the physical system. 
 
 To the objection in this form there are four answers. It is 
 founded on erroneous ideas, of what a miracle is ; of what God 
 is ; of what nature is ; and lastly, of what the universe is. 
 
 1 Logic, bk. iii. chap. xxv. 2, p. 376. 
 
 2 Miracles, Preliminary Essay, chap. v. 4, p. 62. 
 
478 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The first answer to the objection as now urged is this : The 
 objection rests on an erroneous idea of what a miracle is. It as- 
 sumes that an interruption of the uniformity and continuity of 
 the course of nature is of the essence of a miracle. On the con- 
 trary the essence of a miracle consists in the immediate action of 
 a rational free will on nature, directing its physical agencies to 
 the effecting of results which, without this supernatural direction, 
 they would not have effected. What the believer in miracles 
 has to establish is that such supernatural direction of the forces 
 of nature is possible without interrupting its uniformity and con- 
 tinuity. A rational free will, if it exists, is supernatural ; it is 
 a power above nature. It belongs to the rational and spiritual 
 system, not to the physical. Its action on nature is from above 
 nature. 
 
 Such action does not imply the introduction of any new phys- 
 ical agent or force into nature, but only the action of a spiritual 
 power guiding in a new direction physical agents and forces al- 
 ready existing, so that they cause an effect different from what 
 they would have caused without the spiritual action. A phys- 
 ical force acting at right angles to another is said neither to in- 
 crease nor lessen the force deflected. This may help us to con- 
 ceive of the possibility of directing physical forces by spiritual 
 action. 
 
 The action of man's free will on nature is the same in essence 
 with what we call miraculous. Hence Jacobi and others have 
 been wont to call man a miracle-worker. If a man by an act 
 of will should cause a physical effect a mile off without inter- 
 mediate physical agency, we should call it a miracle. Such effects 
 of human volition we are not accustomed to observe. What we 
 observe, when man by his action modifies the action of phys- 
 ical forces, is itself the action of an organized body on material 
 things. Muscular force is physical force. Such, for example, is 
 the action of man in building a dam, putting in machinery and 
 making the force of falling water grind his corn, or in calling 
 forth and directing steam-power by an engine, or electricity by 
 a battery and wires. The really miracle-working power of the 
 human will is hidden from us in the brain and the nervous sys- 
 tem. Physical science cannot deny that this power is there, 
 because it declares that the motion of the molecules of the* brain 
 cannot be transformed into thought and volition, and therefore 
 cannot cause them. It is the manifestation of a supernatural 
 power in man, a power which cannot be defined in the formulas 
 
MIRACLES. 479 
 
 of mechanical science, which physical science cannot explain or 
 account for, which physical science leaves as a power beyond 
 and above nature. This action of man's will continually going 
 on is in its essence miraculous. But this action of man's will 
 on nature does not interrupt the uniformity and continuity of 
 nature and its unity in the physical system. It does not inter- 
 rupt the action of the forces of nature in its uniform sequences 
 of cause and effect. It only gives the physical forces a new 
 direction and thus in the course of nature and through its forces 
 produces a new effect. It is not an interruption of the continuity 
 of nature, but rather a using of its powers in accordance with 
 their laws by a higher power for higher and rational ends. The 
 will of man can do this. Much more may the will of God act 
 immediately on nature, and in the course of nature and through 
 its forces accomplish the ends of his eternal love and wisdom, 
 without interrupting its uniformity and continuity, or its unity 
 in the physical system. A miracle, then, involves no interrup- 
 tion of laws of nature other than is equally involved in effects 
 caused by the action of man's free will. 
 
 A second answer is that the objection is founded on an erro- 
 neous idea of what God is. It assumes that God is a capricious 
 will unregulated by reason. It regards him as a mere almighti- 
 ness acting in no accordance with law. Hence it concludes that 
 his action must be without continuity and uniformity, and there- 
 fore incompatible with the unity of all things in a system. It rests 
 on a superficial philosophy, the falsity of which has already been 
 exposed, which accepts as an axiom that order and law prove the 
 absence of will. But in truth the deepest ground of continuity 
 and uniformity in the unity of a system is in the reign of reason. 
 The highest conception of order which the human mind can at- 
 tain is the order of a rational system in which a rational power 
 is expressing the archetypal thoughts of reason, in accordance 
 with rational law and for the progressive realization of rational 
 ends. All action regulated by reason will have unity of plan 
 ;ind end, and continuity and uniformity in carrying out the plan 
 and attaining the end. As Rothe says, the phrase "laws of na- 
 ture " is continually presented as " a Medusa's head." But the 
 so-called laws of nature are merely observed factual sequences. 
 The name " laws " can be applied to them only in a secondary ap- 
 plication. The word law has its primary meaning in the realm of 
 personality as imposing obligation on free personal agents to act 
 uniformly and continuously in accordance with the truths, laws, 
 
480 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ideals and ends of reason. The principles of reason regulating 
 physical force are the laws of nature in their true and deepest 
 meaning. The sequences have come to be called laws, because 
 they are seen to reveal in nature this intelligent and rational 
 regulation by a power above nature. God is not a capricious 
 will. He is the absolute Reason. All his action is uniform and 
 continuous in the unity of a system, progressively realizing his 
 eternal and archetypal thought in harmony with eternal and uni- 
 versal laws of reason. The universe itself in its development is 
 the progressive expression of the thought and the realization of 
 the plan of God in his eternal love and wisdom. The uniform- 
 ity and continuity of nature have their ground in the unchange- 
 ableness of the principles, laws, ideals and ends of reason. God's 
 action therefore cannot be in contravention of the laws of na- 
 ture. And this is no new idea. It is as old as Augustine. He 
 says : " God does nothing against nature. When we say he does 
 so, we mean that he does something against nature as we know 
 it in its familiar and ordinary way. But against the highest 
 laws of nature he no more acts than he acts against himself." 1 
 
 A third answer is that the objection rests on a false idea of 
 what nature or the physical system is. It assumes that nature 
 is a closed circuit ; that God cannot act on it without breaking it 
 up. Nature is conceived to be like a vessel of cast-iron ; a power 
 that modifies it breaks it. It is regarded by the objector as a 
 definite amount of matter and force, conceivable as so many tons 
 and foot-pounds, combined into a mechanism. God cannot act on 
 or through it without interrupting the continuity and uniformity 
 of its action, and perhaps breaking the machinery to pieces. 
 
 At present the favorite theory of physical science is that na- 
 ture is a mechanism. But a machine, when in action, implies 
 the continuous exertion on it of a force from without, causing its 
 motion in accordance with the law or plan of its construction. 
 It implies a mind that directed its construction. It implies also 
 a mind that intelligently applies the external force and directs its 
 action to the accomplishment of previously planned results. But 
 this intelligent application and direction of the force does not in- 
 terrupt the uniformity and continuity of the action of the ma- 
 chine according to the law of its construction. On the contrary, 
 this is an essential presupposition in the idea and plan of a ma- 
 chine ; for if there were no application of external force, the ma- 
 chine would not act, and therefore could not have any continuity 
 1 Contra Faustum, xxvi. 3. 
 
MIRACLES. 481 
 
 or uniformity of action. If nature is a machine, the fact that 
 there is an intelligent being acting on and through it from with- 
 out and directing and regulating its action according to the law 
 and design of the machine, implies no interruption of the con- 
 tinuity and uniformity of the action of the machine according to 
 its law. 
 
 Nature has a closer analogy with an organism than with a ma- 
 chine. But an organic growth is possible only as cosmic agencies 
 act on the organism from without and supply it with nutriment. 
 This also may be directed and regulated by intelligence so as 
 greatly to modify it; as a gardener modifies by culture or by 
 grafting the flower and fruit of a plant. If therefore nature is an 
 organism, there must be another system of agencies environing 
 it, acting on it and making its growth and development possible. 
 And this environment, being beyond nature, must be supernat- 
 ural, and thus supplies the intelligent direction and regulation 
 of its development. And the action of this environment on it in- 
 volves no interruption of the uniformity and continuity of nature. 
 
 Therefore, in any possible conception of nature, it necessarily 
 implies the presence and action on it of a supernatural power 
 continuously supplying and intelligently applying and directing 
 the energy which is working in and through it. Physical science 
 reveals the necessity of such a power, but cannot discern what it 
 is. Theism gives the explanation by declaring that it is the God 
 whom all men grope after and conceive in some form as the ob- 
 ject of worship, and whom theism presents as the absolute Reason 
 freely energizing in nature in the expression of rational truth, 
 in accordance with rational law, for the realization of rational 
 ends. And this immanence of God in nature and his action on 
 and through it no more interrupt its order and law than the 
 action of the engineer interrupts the order and law of the engine 
 or than that of the gardener interrupts the order and law of the 
 growth of the plant. 
 
 The necessity of such a supernatural agency is disclosed by 
 physical science itself. 
 
 Physical science rests on the assumption that nature is orderly 
 and continuous under law. Without this assumption science is 
 impossible. In discussing the physico-theological proof it was 
 shown that science itself demands the existence of a supernatural 
 power as the ground of the universe, and its immanent agency in 
 it, as the only rational explanation of its own postulate of the 
 law of continuity. It was also shown that physical science dis- 
 31 
 
482 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 closes facts which, so far as it can discover, are contradictory to 
 the law of continuity and can be harmonized with it only by the 
 recognition of God immanent and energizing in nature. It was 
 also shown that the appearance of life, sensitivity and rational 
 personality constitute epochs in the evolution, in which new pow- 
 ers appear and begin to act. These new powers can be accounted 
 for only by the recognition of God immanent and energizing in 
 nature ; otherwise they are effects without a cause. Thus phys- 
 ical science discovers, in the process of evolution, changes which 
 have all the essential elements of epochal miracles. 
 
 The necessary conclusion is that nature is not a closed circuit, 
 but open and plastic to the divine action. Since the spiritual or 
 supernatural is immanent in the natural, since its laws underlie 
 the laws of nature and are revealed in them, a miracle is not 
 only possible to almighty power, but also possible to it working 
 in wisdom and love in harmony with reason, without interrupt- 
 ing the continuity, uniformity and unity of the physical system. 
 In fact we have found that there is in the course of nature con- 
 tinuous divine action having the essential characteristic of the 
 miraculous ; that is, the action of a supernatural will, other than 
 man's, causing effects in nature which its physical forces with- 
 out extraneous direction would never have effected. Thus, when 
 nature is seen in its deepest significance, the miraculous is the 
 law of nature rather than the exception to it, the ordinary rather 
 than the extraordinary. " In God we live, and move, and have 
 our being." And the miraculous, instead of being an interruption 
 of the course of nature, is found to be the indispensable ground 
 of the possibility of the continuity, uniformity and unity of the 
 physical system. 
 
 The Bible says that God created by his word. This gives a 
 basis for a legitimate analogy. In the universe God is progres- 
 sively expressing his eternal and archetypal thought. Worlds and 
 systems are the words in which he is expressing it. Hence men 
 properly speak of the Book of Nature. The* continuity and uni- 
 formity of nature and its unity in a system are analogous to the 
 'continuity, uniformity and unity of an author's thought in writing 
 a book. He is progressively expressing it. The letters, words and 
 sentences vary. But through this variation, ordering and control- 
 ling it, runs one uniform and continuous course of thought in the 
 unity of a system or plan. So God is progressively expressing his 
 archetypal thought in the successive words, sentences and chap- 
 ters of the never completed Book of Nature. 
 
MIRACLES. 483 
 
 This conclusion becomes more evident if we revert to the fact 
 that the invariable uniformity and continuity of nature cannot 
 be known by observation and experience ; these can never com- 
 pass the universal. The law of the uniformity and continuity of 
 nature is a principle of reason, regulative of all thinking. It de- 
 clares simply that the same complex of causes must always cause 
 the same effect. It does not declare that any observed complex 
 of causes has always existed or will always exist. A certain com- 
 plex of causes effects the rotation of the earth on its axis and 
 the alternation of day and night. But the rotation of the earth 
 once began and sometime will cease. This principle may be as 
 applicable to molecules as to masses. Materialists maintain that 
 the molecules, or at least the ultimate atoms supposed to com- 
 pose them, are infrangible, unchangeable and eternal. But it 
 may be that instead of having reached in these the ultimate, mat- 
 ter may have existed in some previous condition entirely beyond 
 our observation. Conjectures of such existence are familiar to sci- 
 ence. 1 It is as reasonable that the molecules may have existed 
 under different conditions and in different forms as that the sun 
 and planets have so existed. The search by physical science to 
 ascertain in what previous forms and conditions matter has for- 
 merly existed is legitimate, so long as it is confined to the inves- 
 tigation of facts and inferences from them. The position of the 
 materialist, that matter, in the forms and conditions in which we 
 know it by the senses, is eternal, has no warrant either in phys- 
 ical science or in philosophy. 
 
 The objection to miracles which we are now considering rests 
 on this materialistic assumption. It supposes nature to be a closed 
 circuit, a finished and self-moving mechanism, admitting no inter- 
 vention of a power from without. This implies that nature as we 
 know it, with all its observed factual sequences, is eternal. The 
 objection brings us squarely to this alternative : shall we retain 
 this rigid conception of the physical system, contradictory alike 
 to physical science and to philosophy, and give up the possibility 
 of the miraculous in its essential significance, or shall we modify 
 this rigid conception of matter and of the physical system and 
 believe in the possibility of the miraculous in its essential sig- 
 nificance? If we accept the latter, the rational principle of the 
 unity, continuity and uniformity of nature remains unchanged 
 and universally regulative forever, but with variability of factual 
 sequences in entire consistency with it. Certainly the only rea- 
 1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 413, 416-418, 495-497. 
 
484 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 sonable decision is, that we must modify the rigid and narrow 
 conception of matter and the physical system and acknowledge 
 that the material system, as the progressive expression of the 
 archetypal thought of the absolute Reason, is always plastic to 
 its creator's power, and yet always unchanging in its unity, uni- 
 formity and continuity as regulated in conformity with the prin- 
 ciples and laws of reason and for the realization of rational ends. 
 It is unchanging in unity, uniformity and continuity as the pro- 
 gressive expression of unchanging wisdom and love, with vari- 
 ability of factual sequences, in adaptation to new developments 
 of the archetypal plan and preparing for still higher stages in its 
 progressive realization. 
 
 A fourth answer remains to be considered. The objection rests 
 on a false idea of what the universe is. It assumes that the phys- 
 ical system is the only and all-comprehending system and that no 
 spiritual system exists. It necessarily follows that the only laws 
 in the universe are the mere factual sequences observed in nature. 
 Thus the very idea of law in its true significance to the reason is 
 lost, and the universe is known as going on necessarily and for- 
 ever merely in the factual sequences of physical cause and effect. 
 This shuts out God as really as miracles. It shuts out all ration- 
 ality and freedom as really as it shuts out God. 
 
 Here ag;iin the objection is founded on a falsity. There is also 
 a spiritual system consisting of personal beings capable of know- 
 ing God, subjects of his law and government, objects of his loving 
 care, capable of trusting and serving him and of communing with 
 him, capable of spiritual perfection and blessedness, and so pre- 
 senting an end to be attained in the universe transcending the 
 physical system and worthy of God. That this system exists we 
 know in our knowledge of ourselves, of our fellow-men and of 
 God. 
 
 The spiritual system and the physical are not in antagonism 
 nor existing apart, but are in intimate interaction and close corre- 
 spondence. The physical system is the expression of thought; and 
 physical science consists in reading and formulating the thought 
 which it expresses. But the thought imprinted in it comes from 
 the rational or spiritual sphere. The factual sequences, which 
 we call laws of nature, are revelations of the continuity and uni- 
 formity of the action of power regulated by the divine Reason 
 in executing the plans of perfect wisdom and love. Therefore it 
 is not physical laws which are carried over into the spiritual, but 
 it is the spiritual laws which are carried over into the physical 
 
MIRACLES. 485 
 
 and reveal themselves in the laws of nature. And the phys- 
 ical forces acting in their factual sequences may be held in abey- 
 ance in the presence of a spiritual power acting according to 
 these higher laws. This would be analogous to mechanical force 
 held in abeyance ih the presence of chemical affinity, and chem- 
 ical force held in abeyance in the presence of life. The physical 
 system is also subordinate to the spiritual. It gives the theatre 
 in which spiritual beings live and act, the media through which 
 they reveal themselves, the agencies and instruments through 
 which they act. The ends for which nature exists are not in 
 itself but in the spiritual sphere beyond. Nature always points 
 to something beyond itself, backward to a cause, above to a law, 
 and forward to ends in the spiritual system. God is always 
 developing nature to a capacity to be receptive of higher pow- 
 ers, tinder the tension of the divine energy in it, it always 
 seems to be " striving its bounds to overpass." This discloses iu 
 nature a certain reality underlying Hegel's conception, that na- 
 ture is always aspiring to return to the spiritual whence it came. 
 Nature is also full of final causes; yet these point, beyond the 
 contrivance effecting a mechanical result, to ultimate ends in the 
 spiritual sphere. No end for the existence of nature can even 
 be imagined in nature itself. There can be no end in the violin 
 for the music drawn from its strings. There can be no end in a 
 house for the architectural skill with which it is constructed, nor 
 in the marble for the beauty into which it is chiseled. Even 
 what in its relation to nature alone seems faulty may be occasion 
 of good in the spiritual sphere. We ask for what purpose the 
 enormous store of energy in the physical universe was created. If 
 we seek the answer in the physical sphere exclusively, one inevi- 
 table answer is : " In order that something less than a billionth 
 part of the sun's energy might be utilized by ourselves, while the 
 remainder is carried off into space and appears again no more." 
 But looking at this waste in view of the spiritual system, Balfour 
 Stewart asks : " Is it not rather meant to teach us that the things 
 which are seen are temporal, by means of a celestial handwriting 
 in the largest possible characters ? " So intimate is the connec- 
 tion of the two systems, so close the correspondence, that poets 
 find in nature the imagery in which they best reveal the creations 
 of their genius, and Christ found in nature the parables which 
 best disclose the realities of the spiritual world. The physical is 
 from, by and for the spiritual. 
 
 We infer, then, not merely that miracles are possible because 
 
486 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 there is a God, but that they are probable as meeting exigencies 
 and accomplishing ends beyond the physical in the spiritual sys- 
 tem. And on account of the intiuiacy and interaction of the two 
 systems, miracles are possible without breaking the continuity, 
 uniformity and unity of nature, any more than Franklin broke 
 them when by his kite he drew the lightning from the heavens, 
 or any electrician when he sets up his battery and evokes the 
 electricity from the continuity of its silent and unseen course. 
 In a miracle a spiritual power reveals itself in the physical sys- 
 tem while in the act of effecting a higher result in the spiritual 
 system. 
 
 We see then that nature is not the only and all-comprehending 
 system. The vaster spiritual system encompasses and permeates 
 the natural as the ocean encompasses and permeates its own cur- 
 rents. The current has its own limits, course and laws; but it 
 is also subject to the law of the ocean in which it moves and a 
 part of which it is. It heaves with the ocean's billows ; the swell 
 of distant storms sweeps across it; the ocean tides, raised by 
 heavenly attraction, rise and fall in it. These effects are inex- 
 plicable and incredible to one whose knowledge is limited to the 
 current, but simple and intelligible when considered as manifest- 
 ing the power of the ocean in which the current moves. So the 
 course of nature is a current in the ocean of God's universal ac- 
 tion. If miracles sweep across it and tides of heavenly influence 
 swell within it, though transcending its laws and inexplicable to 
 one who sees only its narrow and uniform flow, yet are they re- 
 sults of agencies from an encompassing and permeating system 
 acting according to broader laws, and sweeping across the nar- 
 rower stream of the physical and the temporal. To higher intel- 
 ligences they do not interrupt the law of nature but reveal the 
 universal law which is " the harmony of the universe." To their 
 insight the course of time flows in the midst of the eternal, the 
 physical is environed and permeated by the spiritual, the natural 
 by the supernatural, the finite and conditioned by the infinite and 
 the absolute. 
 
 III. MIRACLES EPOCHAL IN THE SPIRITUAL AND THE PHYS- 
 ICAL SYSTEMS. Miracles are essential at epochs botli in the evo- 
 lution of the physical system and in the progress of man in the 
 spiritual system. 
 
 Here the objection recurs in another form. Admitting the 
 existence of God and the spiritual system, still the action of God 
 in harmony with perfect reason must be uniform and continuous, 
 
MIRACLES. 487 
 
 and a miracle would be an interruption of this continuity. By 
 working a miracle God would interrupt and contradict himself. 
 A miracle would imply some failure of the divine action to bring 
 to pass the intended effect, some discovery of a defect in the 
 original plan or inefficiency of the energy exerted to carry it 
 through. A miracle would then be an act of God to correct a 
 mistake, to mend a break or to make up for a failure. It there- 
 fore would be incompatible with the essential idea of God, the 
 absolute Spirit, perpetually revealing the thought of his reason 
 in accordance with its unchanging laws in the action of perfect 
 wisdom and love. The objection in this form is urged by Theo- 
 dore Parker, F. W. Newman and others. 
 
 The general answer is that miracles are not wrought to mend 
 breaks, correct mistakes or to make up for failures, but are 
 epochal, or at least incidental, in the evolution of the universe 
 and the progressive realization of its archetypal plan. 
 
 The objection, in the form now under consideration, rests on 
 the false assumption that every miracle is an event entirely iso- 
 lated. This implies that it has no unity with other events in the 
 universal system and no intrinsic connection with its progressive 
 development ; and that it has no design but to excite the wonder 
 of the observers and to accredit the miracle-worker as a messen- 
 ger from God. This is the conception of Hobbes in his witti- 
 cism in the Leviathan, that miracles are like pills which must be 
 swallowed whole without chewing. The same must be the concep- 
 tion of Matthew Arnold who, in the chapter on miracles in Liter- 
 ature and Dogma, selects as a type of all miracles the conversion 
 of a pen into a pen-wiper. From this conception his inference is 
 true enough : " Suppose I could change the pen with which I 
 write into a pen-wiper, I should not thus make what I write any 
 the truer or more convincing." Such are not the Christian mir- 
 acles ; but are rather miracles of the kind which the Jews asked 
 for and Jesus refused. It must be admitted, however, that some 
 defenders of Christianity have had only this conception of a mir- 
 acle and thus have opened their defenses to successful assault. 
 The answer to the objection is, that miracles are not isolated 
 events, but are included in the archetypal plan of the universe, 
 are subordinate to its archetypal end and essential in its normal 
 development. Hence in working a miracle God does not inter- 
 rupt the continuity and uniformity of his action in progressively 
 realizing the archetypal plan of perfect reason, and does not con- 
 tradict himself. 
 
488 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 In the first place, this form of the objection is already an- 
 swered in the answers to its other forms. If the physical system 
 is not alone, if there is a God and a spiritual system, if the spir- 
 itual environs and permeates the physical, if they are not in an- 
 tagonism but in harmony, if the thought, law and order of the 
 spiritual find expression and its ends are subserved in the phys- 
 ical, if the physical system is from, by and for the spiritual, then 
 God immanent in the universe may cause in nature effects which 
 we call miraculous without interrupting the uniformity and con- 
 tinuity of his own action in realizing the plan of his eternal love 
 and wisdom. 
 
 In the second place, it is not true that miracles are occasioned 
 by defect, mistake or failure. The truth is that they are essen- 
 tial in the progressive development of the plan of the absolute 
 Reason. They mark the epochs in its progress both in the phys- 
 ical system and in the spiritual. The infinite cannot at any point 
 of time be completely revealed in the finite. As the revelation 
 of God, the universe must be endlessly progressive. Incidental 
 to this progress! veness there must be epochs in which powers 
 and agencies of the spiritual are manifested in the natural, higher 
 than any that have ever appeared before. This implies no sup- 
 plying of a newly discovered defect, no mending or correcting, 
 no interruption of the uniformity and continuity of the action, 
 no departure from the unity of the system, but only its progres- 
 sive and orderly development. 
 
 This progressive development we trace through the physical 
 system to the spiritual ; thence onward in higher and higher de- 
 velopment of the spiritual. They constitute together one all- 
 comprehending system in which God is continuously and pro- 
 gressively revealing himself. 
 
 In the evolution of the physical system matter becomes fitted 
 to be the medium for the manifestation of a higher energy. God 
 infuses this higher energy into nature so soon as at any point it 
 has become capable of receiving and manifesting it. Then be- 
 ings of a higher order, and a higher plane of existence and action 
 appear. The evolution is thus marked by epochs. 
 
 In this evolution of the physical system, so far as it has taken 
 place on this earth, four great epochs are noticeable. As we do 
 not suppose the formation of this earth was the beginning of 
 God's revelation of himself in and through the finite, we may 
 assume the primitive stuff, the homogeneous, the nebulous mat- 
 ter, the primitive fluid, or by whatever name called, as already 
 
MIRACLES. 489 
 
 created. Then we find four epochs. The first is the beginning 
 of motion. The second is the beginning of life. The third is 
 the beginning of sensitivity. The fourth is the beginning of ra- 
 tional free personality in man. In the production of man the 
 process of the physical evolution on the earth reaches its consum- 
 mation. The zoological process is consummated and the psycho- 
 logical and spiritual process begins. There is not to be the 
 genesis of a higher species bub the educating, civilizing and per- 
 fecting of man. Thus the physical evolution has reached its 
 destined goal and consummation in the appearance of rational 
 free personality in man. 1 
 
 Where the evolution of the physical system ends the progress 
 of the rational, moral and spiritual system begins. Nature itself 
 has carried us upward to the supernatural. This progressive de- 
 velopment we have traced through the physical system to the 
 spiritual. Thence we trace it onward and upward through higher 
 and higher developments of the spiritual system. 
 
 In the history of man as revealed in Christianity there are three 
 great epochs : the creation of man ; the coming of God in Christ 
 reconciling the world unto himself and in the Holy Spirit estab- 
 lishing his kingdom of righteousness on earth ; and the consum- 
 mation of man's earthly history in Christ's second coming, dis- 
 closing in judgment the final issues of man's spiritual history 
 during the whole period of the existence of the race in its natural 
 life on earth, and raising him to a higher plane of existence. As 
 the evolution of the natural carries us up to the personal, the 
 spiritual, the supernatural, so the progress of the spiritual carries 
 us up to the life which is heavenly and eternal. 
 
 Besides these three, Christianity recognizes other stages of 
 progress which constitute epochs, and are intermediate and less 
 distinctly marked. Some of these are noticeable in the history 
 of God's revelation of himself before Christ's coming. 
 
 It is asserted that the criticism of the Old Testament has 
 proved that the Israelites, in all the earlier centuries of their his- 
 tory, knew nothing of monotheism, and that their religion was 
 fetichism or some very low form of heathenism. Some even speak 
 of the effrontery of Christian scholars in daring to maintain that 
 monotheistic ideas were known in Israel. But the examination 
 of their arguments seem to me rather to prove than to disprove 
 the knowledge of the one God. For example, they commonly 
 argue from Abraham's proposed sacrifice of Isaac that the re- 
 1 The Destiny of Man, by John Fiske, pp. 30, 31. 
 
490 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 ligion required human sacrifices. They coolly overlook the fact 
 that, according to the narrative itself, the human sacrifice is for- 
 bidden. They argue from the facts that the most of the ten 
 commandments were known in Egypt, and that some of the 
 Mosaic usages and institutions resembled those of Egypt, that 
 therefore Exodus is not historically credible. When it is replied 
 that this confirms its credibility, it is quietly replied that this 
 knowledge of Egypt may have begun centuries later, in the time 
 of the kings. Other arguments doing equal violence to the narra- 
 tive are common. 
 
 The Old Testament itself purports to be the history of the 
 education of a people, called out of idolatry and still surrounded 
 by it, in the knowledge of the one true God. It presents to us 
 a people steeped in the spirit of idolatry and, in spite of all in- 
 fluences to the contrary, often relapsing into it. It discloses the 
 difficulty of educating them and the slow and faltering progress 
 which they made to the knowledge of the true God. It also dis- 
 closes the presence of that higher knowledge of God from the 
 beginning of the history and the earnest inculcation of it by the 
 more enlightened minds. It discloses the presence and agency 
 of a supernatural power from the beginning, and thus gives con- 
 sistency to the Old Testament and is an internal evidence of its 
 historical credibility. Mr. Spencer says it is impossible for a 
 rude people in the earlier stages of development to receive the 
 ideas of a later and higher civilization. This is exemplified in 
 the slowness and difficulty of training Israel in the knowledge of 
 God, as narrated in the Old Testament. On the other hand the 
 facts that the higher ideas were present in the minds of some, 
 that they were inculcated in teaching, embodied in laws, or- 
 ganized in ritual and institutions, however imperfectly, prove 
 that this higher knowledge was not the result of natural develop- 
 ment but of supernatural influence. The life of Israel is always 
 gravitating toward idolatry. The literature of Israel is always 
 pointing to the one God, to the moral requirements of his law, and 
 the value of the service of the heart and the obedience of the life 
 above all lip-service and sacrifice. And it gradually opens the 
 outlook of prophecy and promise to the transition of the kingdom 
 of God into a universal kingdom of righteousness and good-will 
 in the Messianic times. The literature of a people is commonly 
 the outgrowth and revelation of its life. Plainly the literature 
 of Israel is not the outgrowth and revelation of its natural life 
 and development. It is the revelation of a light and power above 
 
MIRACLES. 491 
 
 that natural life, educating and directing the people to higher 
 and spiritual ideas and ends. This gives consistency and credi- 
 bility to the history recorded in the Old Testament. The argu- 
 ments against its general historical credibility derive their force 
 largely from the foregone conclusion that such supernatural influ- 
 ence, direction and education are impossible. 
 
 In this preparatory period we find the continuity of the king- 
 dom of God and of his redemptive work among men advancing 
 through successive subordinate epochs or stages to the coming of 
 Christ. 
 
 One of these is the first distinct historical appearance of a 
 kingdom of God on earth. They who yield to God's gracious 
 drawing, return to him in loyal trust and service and become the 
 willing recipients of his seeking and waiting grace, are reunited 
 with him in the new life of faith and love and constitute a people 
 or kingdom of God on earth. The first distinct historical appear- 
 ance of this people or kingdom of God is in the call of Abraham. 
 Worshipers of God had existed before, but we have no clear his- 
 torical knowledge of a people separated and distinct as a people 
 of God. As the state had its beginning in the family, the church 
 had its beginning in the same. Abraham, yielding to the divine 
 seeking and drawing, comes out from idolatry and idol-worshipers, 
 in trust and service of the true God. In his attempted sacrifice 
 of Isaac he is instructed that the offering of human sacrifices 
 practised among other peoples to propitiate the divinity, is not 
 permitted in the worship of the true God ; that God himself will 
 provide the sacrifice, and that what is required of the worshiper is 
 loyal trust, obedience and service. It is the beginning of the 
 teaching, more fully unfolded afterwards, that the sacrifice which 
 man is to provide is a broken and contrite heart. Here is the 
 first clear historical notice of the beginning of the kingdom of 
 God on earth, consisting of a distinct people, reunited with God 
 and recipients of his grace through their faith or trust in him 
 and their willing obedience and service. This is the kingdom 
 of God on earth, which abides forever, and the progress of which 
 gives the deepest significance to human history. 
 
 Another intermediate epoch is the deliverance of the people 
 from Egypt, and the formal institution at Sinai of their political 
 and ecclesiastial organization under the government of Jehovah, 
 and on the basis of loyal trust and allegiance and of righteous 
 life as declared in the ten commandments. 
 
 Here also the gift of prophecy must be noticed. The gift of 
 
492 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 prophecy appears in the time of the patriarchs and of Moses. 
 More distinctly the prophetic office is recognized in Samuel's 
 time. It existed through the whole period of the kings and con- 
 stituted one of its striking characteristics. It reaches its mrst 
 remarkable development in Elijah and Elisha and in the proph- 
 ets whose writings appear in the Christian Scriptures. While 
 prophecy is not epochal as marking a point of time by its origin, 
 it is so as a divine power entering into the course of human his- 
 tory. In its essential meaning, as the direct communication of 
 God with a human spirit and the testimony of one whose heart 
 God has touched to what he knows of God through his expe- 
 rience of the divine influence in his own soul, it remains a power 
 in human history through all time. 
 
 Thus we find in the history of the earth a continuous progress 
 marked by epochs. It is first the evolution of the physical sys- 
 tem through successive epochs to the appearance of the spiritual 
 system. Then it is continued in the advancement of the spirit- 
 ual system through successive epochs to the final consummation 
 of man's history in "the new heavens and the new earth wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness." 
 
 In each of these epochs in the physical system, the bringing in 
 of the higher beings and the higher plane of existence involves 
 all which is essential in the miraculous. Otherwise the lower 
 produces the higher ; that is, there would be an effect without 
 a cause. And each epoch is the introduction of new invariable 
 factual sequences or secondary laws of nature, and therein of a 
 new range and higher manifestation of the course or order of 
 nature. 
 
 Analogous to these are the epochs in the spiritual system. 
 They introduce higher spiritual energies and a course and order 
 of spiritual activities which had not appeared before. And as in 
 nature so in the spiritual sphere, the higher power of God intro- 
 duced miraculously into human history in one of these epochs, 
 remains and continuously exerts its energies in humanity to pre- 
 pare for a greater epoch and a higher plane of spiritual life. 
 The revelation to Abraham of God in covenant with a people 
 that trust him as their God, remains a permanent possession of 
 mankind and a permanent power of spiritual elevation and prog- 
 ress. The kingdom of God on earth, organized under Moses 
 under a covenant of righteousness, continues among men in vary- 
 ing forms and works for righteousness to the end of the earthly 
 history of man. The spirit of prophecy, in its broadest sense as 
 
MIRACLES. 493 
 
 the communication of God's grace within the experience of the 
 individual enabling him to testify what he has learned from God 
 within the secrecy of his own soul, is a power in the kingdom of 
 God forever. And all that divine, gracious and redeeming en- 
 ergy, which came into humanity in Christ and was made spiritual 
 and universal in the descent of the Spirit, abides with us forever. 
 This is analogous to the epochs in the evolution of nature. The 
 first sensitive cell which appeared on the earth was the coming 
 into nature of a power which was never to cease to modify and 
 elevate it. When the first rational man appeared, it was the 
 coming into nature of a lord of nature, who was to use its forces 
 and its treasures, and to modify the earth itself and subdue and 
 civilize it. 
 
 And man himself is to be educated and developed and the 
 spiritual system to be advanced from epoch to epoch, like a 
 growing plant. Our Lord himself compares his kingdom to the 
 corn growing through successive epochs ; first the blade, then the 
 ear, after that the full corn in the ear. As matter must be pre- 
 pared to be a medium for manifesting a higher form of energy, 
 so in the spiritual system man must be educated and developed 
 to receptivity for the divine influence in higher forms and for 
 the higher revelation of God therein. Such a higher manifesta- 
 tion of God constitutes an epoch in the development of the spir- 
 itual. The greatest is the coming of God in Christ reconciling 
 the world unto himself. This coming was delayed long after 
 man began to exist, till he could be educated and developed to 
 receive the new incoming of God. So the coming of man him- 
 self was delayed long after the earth existed, till matter could be 
 elaborated into a medium capable of the manifestation of a per- 
 sonal spirit, and the earth be fitted for his habitation. The New 
 Testament points us forward to a future epoch corresponding in 
 glory with that of the coming of God in Christ. It is the new 
 heavens and the new earth, when the long conflict in the history 
 of the earth between the natural and the spiritual will be ended, 
 when in the spiritual body and a corresponding environment the 
 groaning and travailing in pain of the whole creation together 
 will cease in the revealing of the sons of God ; when the appar- 
 ent antagonism between man and his environment, in the preva- 
 lence of disease and death, in the devastation of flood and fire, of 
 drought and famine, of pestilential agencies in the air, the earth 
 and the water, will be no more; when "God shall wipe away 
 every tear from their eyes ; and death shall be no more ; neither 
 shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more." 
 
494 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Hume objects that a miracle is incredible because contrary to 
 universal experience. But against miracles such as we are now 
 considering, which constitute epochs, this objection has no force. 
 It might be urged with equal pertinence against epochal miracles 
 in nature. When life first appeared it was a new reality ; it had 
 never appeared on the earth before. Nothing can be more cer- 
 tain than that life on earth had a beginning. And it is evident 
 that nothing has ever been found in organic matter which can 
 account for its beginning. And there is no objection to believing 
 that it began, in the fact that when it had begun it remained. 
 We may say the same of the new revelation of God in Christ. 
 Christ's coming into the world introduced a new power of spirit- 
 ual life, and it has remained. It is more powerful in the world 
 now than ever before. 
 
 The miracles which we have been considering may be called 
 epochal miracles. Besides these there are the incidental mira- 
 cles which do not constitute epochs. Such are the miracles of 
 healing by Christ and his apostles. These are not essential in 
 God's redemption of men in Christ. Any one of them might 
 have been omitted, and Christianity would have remained essen- 
 tially unchanged. 1 Miracles of this type are usually clustered 
 about the great epochs of redemption or some peculiar exigency 
 in the progress of God's kingdom. Accordingly we find in the 
 biblical history that miracles were not continuous, but were for 
 the most part concentrated in a few epochs. They appear at 
 the coming of Christ and the introduction of his reign of grace 
 in the world. They are to appear at his final coming at the 
 end of the natural life of mankind. Another epoch of miracles 
 is at the call of Abraham, when the reign of God in his cov- 
 enant of grace with men begins to emerge into the light of his- 
 tory. Then much more at the deliverance from Egypt, when the 
 theocratic kingdom is given a political and ecclesiastical organ- 
 ization and enters on the second period of its development. Then 
 in the times of Elijah and Elisha, attending the fuller develop- 
 ment of the prophetic office and the clearer outlook to the Mes- 
 siah. The action of God specially manifesting himself and con- 
 
 1 u Miracles as mere facts are, the most of them, of very little moment. 
 Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them could be swept away with no loss to 
 faith, but with great gain rather." Dr. Bascom, Natural Theology, p. 230. 
 This is an extravagant assertion. The only truth in it is, that no one of the 
 " incidental " miracles is essential to Christianity. But they are all subservi- 
 ent to good ends in the work of redemption. 
 
MIRACLES. 495 
 
 stituting these epochs is miraculous in its essence. It is so, for 
 example, in the coming of God in Christ, in Christ's resurrec- 
 tion and ascension, in the descent of the Spirit on the day of 
 Pentecost. These epochs and the miraculous action essential in 
 them belong to the plan of the spiritual system. The accom- 
 panying non-epochal miracles are important in its progressive 
 realization. They are in harmony with the redemptive work 
 and have intrinsic connection with its advancement. When once 
 we have knowledge of the reality of any miracle, all a priori 
 objections founded on their impossibility or their incredibility 
 are nullified. When once we recognize the existence of the 
 spiritual system in which God is realizing his highest ends, and 
 the subordination of the physical system to it, the incidental 
 miracles no longer seem isolated. They are incidental to the 
 great spiritual epochs around which we find them clustered, inci- 
 dental manifestations of the spiritual energy working in these 
 epochs. And each and all of them have some intrinsic connec- 
 tion with the great spiritual work of God in redeeming the world 
 from sin. Ami on account of their intrinsic harmony with the 
 work of redemption, it is worthy of note that, however incredible 
 miracles seem in other records, we are never conscious of surprise 
 in reading of them in the life of Christ and the biblical record 
 of God's action in redemption. The central and all-pervading 
 thought that this is the record of God's action in redeeming men 
 from sin is so vast, the realities opened to us are so stupendous, 
 the scenes disclosed are so sublime, every step in the progress of 
 the narrative is so manifestly the step of the Almighty, that the 
 miracles harmonize with the grandeur of the whole revelation. 
 They seem to us no more surprising or incredible than the rain- 
 bow with which God adorns the retiring storm, or the stars with 
 which he nightly gems the sky. A miracle is not a surprise to 
 higher intelligences, who see the spiritual as it is revealed in 
 nature and the spiritual ends subserved through it. 
 
 We see, therefore, that miracles, as included in the plan of 
 God's wisdom and love and essential to its realization, are not 
 isolated events. They are not mending breaks, nor patching 
 newly discovered defects, nor correcting errors and failures. So 
 in the physical system the appearance of life, then of sensitivity, 
 then of rationality, are not a mending, patching or correcting, 
 but are essential stages in the orderly and progressive develop- 
 ment of the system. 
 
 With this view of the grandeur of the epoch-making miracles, 
 
496 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 both in the physical system and the spiritual, and with the Chris- 
 tian conception of the central significance in human history of 
 the great fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto 
 himself, we may form some estimate of the littleness of the con- 
 ception of those who regard Jesus as only a man on a level with 
 other teachers and reformers, and who, with M. Arnold, find no 
 meaning in the narrative of his birth except that it is a mythical 
 representation of the old asceticism that virginity is superior in 
 purity to marriage. 
 
 A third answer to this form of the objection is, that it rests 
 on the error that miracles are significant only as credentials of 
 the divine mission of the man who works them. The objector 
 here entirely overlooks the epochal miracles, which reveal in great 
 epochs the divine and spiritual forces developing in their uniform 
 and progressive course both the physical system and the spiritual. 
 He thinks only of the non-epochal miracles which are incidental 
 to peculiar conditions of the great course of the spiritual ener- 
 gies, as electric sparks and lightning flashes are incidental to the 
 continuous flow of the electric currents. These miracles wrought 
 by Christ and his apostles are indeed evidences of a divine mis- 
 sion. They appealed to them as such. But they were not wrought 
 with the primary design of furnishing evidence, any more than a 
 benevolent man does a benevolent deed with the primary design 
 of proving his benevolence. They have intrinsic connection with 
 the work of redemption, and are incidental to existing conditions 
 in the progress of the work. As such they have evidential value. 
 A supernatural effect reveals a supernatural cause. As miracles 
 they reveal a spiritual presence and power, as electric sparks re- 
 veal the presence and power of electricity. As benignant mira- 
 cles wrought in furtherance of the work of redeeming men from 
 sin to God, they reveal the benignant character of the spiritual 
 power, as the electric spark reveals electricity in its peculiar char- 
 acteristics. Accordingly it is written of the first miracle of Jesus 
 that in it he manifested his glory. M. Renan insists that the only 
 adequate proof of a miracle would be to do it under the scrutiny 
 of scientific experts and to repeat it as often as demanded. This 
 would be reducing the miracle to an ordinary experiment in phys- 
 ical science. He demands that the proof of a miracle should be 
 proof that it is not a miracle but an ordinary event in the course 
 of nature. He thus begs the question. A miracle assumes the ex- 
 istence of God and a spiritual system. It is essentially an effect 
 in nature manifesting the presence and power of spiritual agency 
 
MIRACLES. 497 
 
 acting according to spiritual laws and for spiritual ends. M. Re- 
 nan's demand implies that no such spiritual power and system 
 exist ; that all which exists or can manifest its existence is that 
 which is included in the physical system and in its factual se- 
 quences as already known. It is impossible to prove a super- n 
 natural effect if no supernatural cause, order, law or end exists. 
 
 Nor may we regard miracles merely as wonders designed to 
 call attention to the words of a divinely commissioned teacher. 
 John Foster says that in miracles God rings the great bell of 
 the universe to call the attention of all people, and then through 
 Christ and his apostles and prophets preaches the sermon. But 
 God does not reveal himself primarily by sermons, but by moving 
 and acting among us, especially in the grand progress of redemp- 
 tion. As in a fog at sea, suddenly for a moment a topsail breaks 
 through the mists on our view, revealing the great and peopled 
 ship which is moving unseen on its destined course, so in a mira- 
 cle, through the mists of sense men catch a momentary glimpse 
 of God and powers of the spiritual world as they move unseen 
 through the course of the ages, redeeming man from sin. 
 
 IV. MIRACLES AND LAW. The objection now recurs in an- 
 other form. Miracles, it is said, however explained, involve an 
 unlimited and unconditioned possibility ; anything may happen. 
 Whereas nothing is possible except what accords with the deter- 
 minate laws of physical science. 
 
 This assumes that God is a capricious almightiness. In ref- 
 erence to this new way of putting the objection, the following 
 remarks are pertinent. 
 
 In the first place, the objection in this form assumes that 
 the range of possibilities is determinate, and limited by scien- 
 tific law. The theist insists that this very statement necessarily 
 carries us beyond the physical system to a mind or reason pre- 
 scribing to it laws, and energizing in it and regulating its devel- 
 opment within those scientific laws. Blind force cannot regulate 
 itself by laws. The very recognition of scientific law assumes a 
 scientific mind which is regulating nature in accordance with sci- 
 entific law. If, then, in that scientific mind there is any truth 
 or law not yet revealed in the factual sequences of nature known 
 to us, or any rational end not yet attained in nature, the possi- 
 bility of miracle in its essential significance is established. Thus 
 the very statement of the objection assumes the possibility of 
 miracles. They do not set aside law, but reveal it in a new and 
 higher significance and application. 
 
 32 
 
498 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The energy of the absolute Reason will be uniformly accordant 
 with reason in two respects. It can never effect an absurdity, 
 for this would be to annul the constituent elements of reason 
 itself. No power, not even almightiness, can do this. Here, then, 
 is an absolute limit of possibility in the fact that Reason is abso- 
 lute, ultimate and supreme. No power can effect what is absurd. 
 This is the rational order. 
 
 There is another respect in which the power or will of God 
 will be in harmony with reason. In his own free choice he will 
 act in eternal accord with all the principles of reason, with all its 
 laws, and for the realization of all its ideals and ends. This is 
 the moral order. God always acts in perfect love and wisdom. 
 
 Here, then, is the twofold order of the universe, the rational 
 and the moral. It is not true that there is an unlimited possibility, 
 that anything may happen. The absolute Reason in energizing 
 does nothing but what is accordant with reason. The objection 
 of Professor Royce, that if a single moth is singed the system 
 is proved to be unreasonable, rests only on a superficial view of 
 the case. 1 It assumes that creation must be complete at a stroke. 
 But a finite system cannot be complete, but must be progressively 
 developed. If, as Professor Royce says, the universal Reason is 
 always at the goal, yet he can never bring the finite being to that 
 goal, for that would involve the absurdity of making the finite 
 equal to the infinite. Almightiness cannot create a person with 
 a moral character, for moral character can be formed only by the 
 free acts of the moral agent himself. To create a person with a 
 moral character would be as absurd as to create a person a hun- 
 dred years old. According to this writer, since moths are actually 
 singed in this world, this is a world not regulated by rational law ; 
 therefore it is a world of unlimited possibilities, in which any- 
 thing may happen, even miracles ; but miracles only in their false 
 meaning as actions exempt from all law. 
 
 In the existing system sin is not only possible but we know 
 it in our own experience and observation to be actual and real. 
 Then God meets it not only by law but also in redemption. He 
 seeks men who have separated themselves from him in sin and 
 draws them, with all the resources of moral influence, to return 
 to himself. Here then is necessary, not merely education of in- 
 
 1 " The first starving family, or singed moth, or broken troth, or wasted 
 effort, or wounded bird, is an indictment of the universal Reason that, always 
 at the goal, has wrought this irrational wrong." The Religious Aspects oj 
 Philosophy, p. 263. 
 
MIRACLES. 499 
 
 nocent but undeveloped beings, but also the redemption of met* 
 who have sinned, with their discipline, purification and develop- 
 ment to a right spiritual character and life. Here also is a new 
 explanation of pain, as having place in a reasonable system- 
 How is discipline possible or sin punishable without liability to 
 pain ? Here also is a new occasion for the miraculous interven- 
 tion of the spiritual powers in the course of nature and of human> 
 history. But this is with no unlimited and unconditional possi- 
 bility. Man must be redeemed by methods accordant with the 
 eternal law of reason, and by redemption must be brought back 
 to willing and complete conformity with that law. And this fix- 
 edness of law in redemption is explicitly recognized in the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of the Atonement. 
 
 While there is here no unlimited and unconditioned possibility, 
 there is a possibility of development and progress within the lines 
 of law, leading to epochs both in the physical and the spiritual 
 systems far in advance of the factual sequences hitherto known in 
 human experience. 
 
 Physical science itself leads on to positions which suggest the 
 possibility of miraculous effects in nature by the intervention 
 of spiritual powers. At every advance in its brilliant career of 
 discovery it reveals anew its inadequacy to answer the questions 
 which the discovery suggests, and forces attention on God and 
 the spiritual system for the answer. It has been said that it is 
 only the extraordinary which led men to think of the supernat- 
 ural. But science has revealed the unity of the cosmos and the 
 uniformity and continuity of all its complicated action under the 
 reign of law. And by disclosing this -it forces us on God and 
 the spiritual system for explanation of it. For science is show- 
 ing itself to be nothing but the discovery of reason in nature and 
 the interpretation of its physical processes in the forms of reason 
 which they reveal. 
 
 On the other hand by its discoveries and inventions science has 
 prepared men's minds to expect the unexpected and to regard the 
 extraordinary as the ordinary. It has taught us that the two- 
 foot rule of our own experience is inadequate to measure the pos- 
 sibilities of the universe through all time. It has been common 
 to appeal to the evidence of the senses as giving the highest cer- 
 tainty. But physical science has almost established the opposite 
 conclusion ; the farther from sense and the more completely ideal 
 our view of nature, the nearer to reality. The earth which seems 
 to the senses to be flat, is shown by science to be spherical ; the 
 
500 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 seeming firmament is dissolved and opens out into boundless 
 space ; the reality of sound is undulations which cannot be heard ; 
 the reality of light is vibrations which cannot be seen. Appear- 
 ances to sense have to be corrected by ideas of reason. Mathe- 
 matical forms and formulas which are pure creations of the mind 
 remain unchanged. Men have been wont to regard matter as 
 solid and real, spirit as shadowy and unreal ; but science indicates 
 the contrary. Matter is never inert but always energizing, never 
 at rest but always in motion, never stable but always in flux. Sci- 
 ence suspects it may be nothing but force occupying space ; it 
 conjectures that it was a fluid imperceptible to sense until it be- 
 gan to move; it finds the mightiest of energies in the ether, 
 imperceptible to sense, with the tension of adamant and so ethe- 
 real that it penetrates all bodies and is not known to obstruct 
 motion. Here again science points beyond the material and the 
 physical to the spiritual, the supernatural and the divine, as the 
 deepest reality and the true seat of order and law. 
 
 Familiarized as we are with the discoveries by science of won- 
 ders which but lately would have been regarded as impossibili- 
 ties, what shall hinder our believing that in the interest of the 
 spiritual system and for its ends God may sometimes reveal him- 
 self in nature in ways transcending its factual sequences which 
 we call laws ? And if so, that it would be not without laws, not 
 interrupting the continuity and uniformity of the system ? It 
 would be, on the contrary, an effect in nature in accordance with 
 the higher laws of the rational and moral system holding the 
 lower laws in abeyance. Human knowledge can never rid itself 
 of its one-sidedness and become full-orbed and harmonious with 
 itself, till it recognizes both the physical and the spiritual and 
 their unity in one great system of the universe. And when we 
 see that the physical system and its laws are a revelation of the 
 spiritual system and its laws, and that the former is subordinate 
 and tributary to the ends of the latter, certainly we may not 
 make man's present experience of the factual sequences of nature 
 the bound of all that is ever to be known. Professor Jevons 
 says : " We can imagine reasoning creatures dwelling in a world 
 where the atmosphere was a mixture of oxygen and inflammable 
 gas like the fire-damp of coal-mines. If devoid of fire, they 
 might have lived through long ages unconscious of the tremen- 
 dous forces which a single spark would call into play. In the 
 twinkling of an eye new laws might come into action, and the 
 poor reasoning creatures, so confident about their knowledge of 
 
MIRACLES. 501 
 
 the reign of law in their world, would have no time to speculate 
 on the overthrow of all their theories." l 
 
 From this point of view miracles are not only possible but prob- 
 able. Nature exists for the ends of the spiritual system. Here 
 is the one all-dominating final cause, which discloses the signifi- 
 cance of nature and the unity of the universe. It is probable 
 that for the great ends of the spiritual system God may reveal 
 himself in the physical system in effects transcending the factual 
 course of nature and the constitutional power of man. Nor can 
 we assign a limit to the progress of this development of the uni- 
 verse in accordance with rational law and for the accomplishment 
 of rational ends. 
 
 And this, also, physical science itself seems to indicate. Ac- 
 cording to Mr. Fiske, man is the end to which the whole evolu- 
 tion of the physical system on earth tends. When rational man 
 appears, there is to be no evolution of a higher species but the 
 education and civilization of the man. Rational and moral cul- 
 ture take the place of physical evolution. Here is a being who 
 is an end in himself, and not a mere medium for the evolution of 
 another and higher species. Here the energies of the physical 
 and spiritual systems are concentrated on this being to educate- 
 and develop him to higher and higher character and powers. 
 Here is a new order and sphere of existence. And who shall say 
 how far this progressive development of man may proceed ? If 
 here is a being who is an end in himself, if, so soon as he appears, 
 the physical evolution gives place, as to him, to spiritual culture, 
 and the energies both of the physical and spiritual systems serve 
 him to promote his progress, who shall say that the progress may 
 not be endless; that man's life may not issue in immortality? 
 For if he is not immortal, then the whole conception becomes 
 self-contradictory. If man ceases to exist he ceases to be an end 
 in himself. He becomes a mere physical creature dissolved again 
 into the physical system. Evolution reached its utmost in him 
 and dismissed him into the sphere of the rational and the spirit- 
 ual, as an end to be served and not as means and material for 
 physical uses. All nature and all spiritual agencies begin to edu- 
 cate and develop him. But it was all a mistake. Nature takes 
 him back into itself and grinds him up for its own uses. Nor 
 can we say that it is the race which nature serves and all spirit- 
 ual powers educate and develop. For at some time in the future., 
 if materialism is true and no spiritual system exists, the whole 
 1 Principles of Science, p. 745. 
 
502 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 process of evolution will be ended, the world will become motion- 
 less and silent and all life will cease. It is only as nature goes 
 back to the supernatural as its cause, and leads up to and issues 
 in the supernatural as its end, that the universe can go on forever. 
 The only ends worthy of so great a process are the ends which 
 may be realized in man immortal. In accomplishing these ends it 
 cannot be incredible that God should reveal himself in ways tran- 
 scending the factual sequences of nature, yet without interrupt- 
 ing the continuity of the system. 
 
 V. WHAT THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES SIGNIFIES. 
 We infer that philosophically and logically there is no middle 
 ground between admitting the possibility of miracles and denying 
 the existence of a personal God, of the spiritual and moral sys- 
 tem, and of free will. To deny miracles on the ground of their 
 impossibility involves the denial of the personal God. Strauss 
 sank gradually down to this denial. Others have passed through 
 the same descent. History seems to exemplify the truth that 
 there is logically and philosophically no stopping place between 
 denying that God can reveal himself miraculously and some form 
 of atheism. Therefore the controversy of the rationalistic and 
 skeptical criticism is not with Christianity but with theism. The 
 real question is, Is there a personal God and is there a system of 
 rational free agents under his government? 
 
 It is true, as already shown, that any incidental miracle of 
 healing and the like is not of the essence of the redemption 
 through Christ. It is conceivable, though not probable, that 
 God might have come in Christ as he did, without working any 
 miracle of this kind, and the redemptive action and the revelation 
 of God in it remain in their essential significance the same. But 
 when miracles are denied on the ground that they are impossible, 
 the denial rests on a conception of the universe which excludes 
 the immanence of God in nature and the connection of the phys- 
 ical system with the spiritual as manifesting or expressing its 
 truths and laws and subordinate to its higher ends. Thus it de- 
 nies that conception of the universe in its relation to God, and of 
 the physical in its relation to the spiritual and supernatural, on 
 which the essential significance of redemption by God in Christ 
 and of Christianity rests. It is incompatible with any action of 
 God in the epochs either of physical evolution or of spiritual de- 
 velopment and progress ; and in fact with any intervention of the 
 supernatural in the natural, directing it by spiritual and super- 
 natural laws to spiritual and supernatural ends, and thus reveal- 
 
MIRACLES. 503 
 
 ing in the universe God and his kingdom, and in nature that which 
 is above nature. 
 
 This denial excludes personal immortality. The transition of 
 man at death into the spiritual sphere and a higher and immortal 
 existence involves every supposition respecting God and the su- 
 pernatural in relation to the physical which miracles involve. 
 Strauss rejected personal immortality; and in the dedication of 
 his second and modified Life of Jesus to a deceased brother he 
 boastfully declares his disbelief. The pathetic lines of Georgt| 
 Eliot are familiar, in which renouncing all belief in personal ex-( 
 istence after death, she recognizes immortality as possible only in 
 the survival of our good influence : 
 
 " O may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence . . . 
 So to live is heaven." 
 
 And Matthew Arnold reaches the same conclusion. "What 
 really is Christmas ? The birth-day of Jesus. What is the 
 miracle of the Incarnation ? A homage to the virtue of pureness 
 and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent 
 and the miracle of the temptation ? A homage to the virtue of 
 self-control and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. 
 What does Easter celebrate ? Jesus victorious over death by 
 dying. By dying how ? Dying to re-live. To re-live in Para- 
 dise, in another world ? No, in this. What then is the king- 
 dom of God ? The ideal society of the future. Then what is 
 immortality ? To live in the eternal order which never dies. 
 What is salvation by Christ ? The attainment of this immor- 
 tality. Through what means ? Through means of the method 
 and the secret and the temper of Jesus." 1 Here is the denial of 
 immortality veiled under high sounding words. 
 
 In like manner the denial of the possibility of miracles is 
 equally a denial of the possibility of communion with God in 
 prayer, of the forgiveness of sin, of a people redeemed from sin 
 by the immediate action of God's grace, and of the establishment 
 and progress of the kingdom of God on earth. For the possi- 
 bility of these and of miracles rests ultimately on the same funda- 
 mental conception of the universe in its relation to God and as 
 comprising the two systems, the physical or natural and the spir- 
 itual or moral, which is the supernatural. 
 
 In this deeper sense the possibility of the miraculous is of the 
 1 A Comment on Christmas, Contemporary Review, April, 1885. 
 
504 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 essence of Christianity and the denial of its possibility involvea 
 the denial of that which is distinctive and essential in Christian- 
 ity. Christianity implies primarily a supernatural, divine action 
 in the redemption of sinful man ; and secondarily, a supernatural 
 revelation of God in that action. The whole conception involves 
 the miraculous. 
 
 In conclusion, it is evident that the question with the objector 
 is not merely as to the possibility of any or all of the incidental 
 miracles, like the healing of a sick man by a word. It is the 
 fundamental question whether God can be active in the universe, 
 evolving nature to higher planes ; and in the spiritual system, 
 educating and developing free personal beings and redeeming 
 sinners from their sin. In fact the question goes deeper even 
 than this. For if miracles are shown to be impossible, the same 
 arguments equally prove that there is no God, no spiritual sys- 
 tem, no free will of man. That is, they equally prove that the 
 physical system comprehends all and that rational free will does 
 not exist either in God or man or any personal being. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION OF GOD IN 
 NATURE, MAN AND CHRIST. 
 
 NATURE and the supernatural are commonly regarded as recip- 
 rocally repugnant. They have been distinguished as the orderly 
 and the anomalous ; as the realm of law and the realm of caprice. 
 The Christian revelation, as involving the supernatural, has been 
 regarded as outside of nature and acting in it only by irruption 
 and interference. 
 
 Their unity and continuity are sought in vain by pulling the 
 supernatural down into the natural and submerging it therein. 
 This simply annuls the supernatural. It would be to make a 
 desert and call it peace. And because the supernatural cannot 
 be banished from human thought, presently within the all-era- 
 bracing nature the dualism reappears, and the problem of finding 
 the unity and continuity of the physical and the spiritual, the 
 natural and the supernatural, forces itself on us anew. 
 
 And their unity and continuity cannot be found in any theory 
 of monism, pantheistic or materialistic. These seek the ultimate 
 ground of the universe in some form of the unconscious and im- 
 personal and exclude conscious rational and personal free will. 
 
 The course of thought in this volume presents a solution of 
 this problem, which preserves the distinction between the natural 
 and the supernatural and at the same time discloses their unity 
 and continuity as progressively expressing the archetypal thought 
 and realizing the archetypal ideal and end of the absolute Rea- 
 son immanent and energizing in them. 
 
 It remains to consider more particularly the significance of this 
 unity and continuity. 
 
 I. UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF GOD'S REVELATION IN NA- 
 TURE AND MAN. Nature and the supernatural are in unity 
 and continuity as the continuous and progressive revelation of 
 God, the eternal and universal Reason. 
 
 The attempt of some writers to find this unity by supposing 
 the uniform sequences, called laws of nature, to be extended over 
 
506 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the spiritual system can be only abortive. The laws of nature 
 which declare mere uniform factual sequences are laws only in 
 a secondary sense. In the lapse of time these sequences may 
 change and give place to new arrangements. On the contrary it is 
 the principles and laws of reason which extend over nature, and 
 its ideals and ends which are progressively realized in the cease- 
 less course of nature. It is these principles and laws which per- 
 sist in all physical sequences, survive all their changes, reappear 
 and persist in every new arrangement. Such, for example, per- 
 sisting unchanged through all changes, are the law of causation, 
 the law of uniformity and continuity, that the same complex of 
 causes must everywhere and always produce the same effect, the 
 law of the correlation and conservation of motor-force, the princi- 
 ples of mathematics, the laws of falling bodies, of gravitation, of 
 the dispersion of force, and all laws of mechanics founded on 
 mathematical principles. These are the true laws of nature. 
 It has been shown that the fundamental axiom of physical science 
 that the sum of all force, potential and energetic, is always the 
 same, can be true only if there is a God ; that all science de- 
 pends on the assumption of the universal Reason in harmony 
 with human reason ; that it is only in the recognition of this ab- 
 solute Reason, which we call God, that the rationale and signifi- 
 cance of the laws of nature are found. Thus it is the principles 
 and laws of the supernatural which are regulative in the natural 
 and are revealed in the factual sequences which are called the 
 laws of nature. The factual sequences and arrangements them- 
 selves, though they may last as long as the rotation and revolu- 
 tion of the earth, begin, are subject to change and pass away. 
 It is the same in the spiritual or supernatural system. Men are 
 born and die. Nations arise, flourish and decay. Literatures, 
 forms of government, civilizations have their periods and the old 
 gives place to the new. But the principles of truth, the law of 
 love and the standards of perfection, beauty and worth are the 
 same forever. 
 
 The most pregnant words ever written are the first four words 
 of Genesis : " In the beginning God." Godless theories conceive 
 of the universe as the less developing itself into the greater, the 
 lower lifting itself to the higher. Thus the evolution becomes 
 the continued production of effects without a cause. Theism 
 says : " In the beginning God." In the evolution God is always 
 immanent, directing and energizing, preparing what is to be the 
 medium for the manifestation of something new and higher; and 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 507 
 
 at successive epochs bringing in the higher, as soon as a fitting 
 sphere for its action and a fitting medium for its manifestation 
 are prepared. The evolution is God's continually greatening 
 revelation of himself. 
 
 Thus God's revelation of himself is not limited to a few tran- 
 scendent but isolated facts of the supernatural, which we call 
 miracles. The universe itself in its whole progressive develop- 
 ment is the revelation of God. In the evolution of the physical 
 system and in the education, redemption and development of 
 man, God's revelation of himself goes on through all time. From 
 the lowest form of primitive matter to the highest form of finite 
 spirit the universe is the continuous and progressive revelation of 
 God. And the natural and the supernatural are in unity and 
 continuity as the continued revelation of the thought and realiza- 
 tion of the ideal and end which are archetypal in God, the eternal 
 and ever energizing Reason. 
 
 God's expression of his thought in the finite begins in the nat- 
 ural or physical, evolving in it successively higher and higher 
 stages of existence. The supernatural appears at length in man. 
 But here is no break in the continuity of the divine action. So 
 soon as matter in its evolution has become susceptible of being 
 quickened into organic life and the world has become fitted to 
 sustain it, the ever energizing Reason quickens it into life. And 
 when the world has become fitted to be the habitation of man 
 and a living organism has become capable of being the medium 
 for the manifestation of spiritual life, God breathes into it a liv- 
 ing spirit. Thus in man a being appears in whom the physical 
 and the spiritual, .the natural and the supernatural are united. 
 The cosmic physical forces sweep through man's organism as they 
 do through the trees. But man is conscious of the powers acting 
 on him, he apprehends, defines and comprehends them in thought, 
 enunciates them in their intellectual equivalents in systems of 
 science, and appropriates the forces and resources of nature to 
 his own use and to the accomplishment of his own plans and 
 chosen ends. He is above nature because he knows it and in- 
 telligently directs and uses it. On the other hand he finds under- 
 lying his science and revealed in it the principles and laws, the 
 ideals and ends of reason, which, if the science is real, must be 
 the Reason that is universal. In nature, when scientifically 
 known, he finds the principles and laws, the ideals and ends of 
 his own reason revealed, and therein knows his own reason as 
 the likeness of the Reason that is universal and supreme. Thus 
 
508 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 man is the being in whom nature and the supernatural meet, and 
 in whom the light of the absolute Reason shines. In him the 
 physical system and the spiritual meet and are in unity as the 
 revelation of God. 
 
 Physiology itself brings us face to face with this great fact. 
 It discloses the fact that every thought, volition and feeling is 
 accompanied by molecular motion of the brain. It forces on us 
 the question, What is the relation of the molecular motion to the 
 conscious mental action ? In answer to this question the follow- 
 ing positions have been taken. 
 
 Comte denies that consciousness is a legitimate source of 
 psychological knowledge and ignores mental phenomena as out- 
 side of the legitimate sphere of science. But this position is itself 
 unscienti6c. It assumes a scientific knowledge of man while tak- 
 ing no notice of a whole class of indisputable facts. In fact it 
 implies that science itself, being a mental phenomenon, is not 
 scientific, but is excluded from the sphere of scientific knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 Materialists answer that the conscious mental phenomena are 
 caused by the molecular action. Mr. Huxley has said : " We 
 have as much reason for regarding the mode of motion of the 
 nervous system as the cause of the state of consciousness, as we 
 have for regarding any event as the cause of another." But thi& 
 is a physical impossibility, and as such is denied by science. 
 Motion proceeds only from motion, and in all its transformations 
 cannot produce any thing but motion. If it were transformed 
 into thought it would disappear as motion. This would be con- 
 trary to the law of the correlation and conservation of force. It 
 would be a miracle in the extreme of its false meaning, as an 
 event contrary to all law. Mr. Huxley himself, though he has 
 declared motion to be the cause of the phenomena of conscious- 
 ness and thus claims to give a scientific account of them, does 
 really exclude them from scientific recognition. He calls men 
 " conscious automata." He insists that thought and feeling are 
 merely " indices of changes which are going on in the brain." 
 Thus he teaches that conscious mental action is not a force or 
 energy ; it does no work ; every demand of physical science is 
 met without it. Consciousness is a mere register which some- 
 how has become attached to some machines. The machine 
 would be just as perfect and efficient without it. Hence if 
 every thing were going on in the world as now, but without 
 consciousness, every formula of science would be met and every 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 509 
 
 demand of science satisfied as completely as with consciousness. 
 Thus all these known facts of consciousness are arbitrarily ex- 
 cluded from the sphere of legitimate scientific investigation. 
 
 A third answer is that the molecular motion of the brain is 
 caused by the action of the mind. This answer may be accepted 
 by those who believe in the existence of rational personal beings. 
 It is denied as unscientific by all who do not believe this. The 
 reason given is that if the mind is a cause of motion the effect 
 will be a miracle. This is plainly a begging of the question. It 
 is asked: Is this an effect of a cause other than matter and 
 motor-force? The answer is, No; because the supposed cause 
 would be other than matter and motor-force. Here it is assumed 
 as a universal postulate that there is no causative energy in the 
 universe except that of matter manifested in motor-force; or 
 rather that of motion. We are told that " all the forms of 
 energy have now been proved to be but modes of motion." 
 When mental phenomena are known which confessedly are not 
 modes of motion, they are arbitrarily ignored as beyond the pale 
 of science. But that is not science which refuses to seek a scien- 
 tific explanation of known facts. 
 
 It should be noticed, however, that the reason given for this 
 denial is a recognition of the fact that a miracle in its essence is 
 no more than a causative action of a rational power or mind on 
 nature. It does not consist essentially in the interrupting of the 
 order and laws of nature. 
 
 A fourth answer is that consciousness and the molecular mo- 
 tion may be two aspects of the same reality, dual as it appears to 
 us, but one as it is in fact. Both mind and motion are simul- 
 taneously concerned in the one causal energy. " Motion is sup- 
 posed to be producing nothing but motion ; mind-changes pro- 
 duce nothing but mind-changes ; both producing both simul- 
 taneously, neither could be what it is without the other, because 
 without the other neither could be the cause which in fact it is." 
 In the absence of mind the molecular action of the brain could 
 no more be what it is ; in the absence of brain the conscious 
 mental action could no more be what it is. This is illustrated 
 by the vibrations of the chords of a harp and the music which 
 we hear. These are two different ways of viewing the same 
 reality. If either the vibrations or the mental act were wanting 
 there would be no music. 
 
 Such a theory was proposed by the late Professor Clifford. 1 
 
 1 Lectures and Essays, vol. ii. pp. 31-70, Body and Mind ; vol. i. pp. 223- 
 253, The Unseen Universe. 
 
510 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 It declares that mental phenomena are not a form of motion and 
 cannot be accounted for by motion. On the contrary, it declares 
 that mental phenomena are a causative energy acting on nature ; 
 that mind is a cause other than motor-force, though acting jointly 
 with it. It thus recognizes mental phenomena as within the pale 
 of science and as legitimate objects of scientific investigation. 
 And the conception of this universe going on automatically just 
 as it does now, but without consciousness, becomes impossible. 
 This theory also, while distinguishing the physical and the spir- 
 itual, declares their real unity and cooperation. 
 
 In these respects this theory is a real advance. But it does 
 not give the full significance of the union of the physical and the 
 spiritual in man. According to Professor Clifford mind is merely 
 a series of subjective impressions. He says this is all which he 
 finds in his own consciousness. He thinks there is no room in 
 the universe for ghosts, or superior intelligences or bogies of any 
 kind. But this contradicts the obvious fact of the unity of con- 
 sciousness. A series of impressions cannot in each separate im- 
 pression be conscious of itself in the unity of a series. This is 
 mere nonsense. The theory also contradicts the common con- 
 sciousness of men. Professor Clifford says " if the rnind were a 
 force we should be able to perceive it." The fact is that, with 
 the exception of the professor and a few theorists, men are con- 
 scious that they do perceive it. When a man thinks or wills or 
 exerts his energy, he is conscious that it is himself who thinks 
 and wills and acts. He cannot utter his consciousness without 
 declaring this belief; I think, I will, I act. In fact man's 
 knowledge of force or energy originates in his consciousness of 
 himself exerting or resisting it. 
 
 The theory contradicts not only consciousness and common 
 sense, but reason also. It is a constituent element of reason 
 regulating all thought, that there can be no thought without a 
 thinker, no action without an agent, no motion without some- 
 thing which moves and something which causes the motion, no 
 quality without a being, no phenomenon without something 
 which appears and something to which it appears. No chemistry 
 of thought can dissolve this unity, no ingenuity of skepticism can 
 annul the principle of reason which compels us thus to think. 
 It underlies all rational thought and knowledge. Men may spec- 
 ulate as to the nature of the being. They may call it thought or 
 they may call it force. But all the same the thought or the force 
 is hypostasized as objectively real and the hypostasized thought 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 511 
 
 or force is distinguished from the subjective consciousness of it. 
 Whatever is presented in consciousness is known also in the forms 
 of reason as a phenomenon of being. 
 
 We must then advance beyond this theory to find the signifi- 
 cance of the unit}' of mental phenomena and molecular motion. 
 When once it is admitted that the molecular motion of the brain 
 is not the cause of conscious mental acts, then physiology and 
 biology disclose an effect for which within their sphere no cause 
 can be found. And when they further admit that mental phe- 
 nomena are a causal energy acting on nature, they point up to 
 the only reasonable position remaining, that conscious mental acts 
 are acts of a rational personal being. In man as a personal be- 
 ing his power is enlightened by reason and is thus self-directing 
 and self-exertive. But he is in nature while above it, a personal 
 spirit in and acting through a physical organization. And in this 
 personal spirit, conscious of itself and revealing itself through an 
 organized body, is the synthesis and the only synthesis of motion 
 and thought, of physical force and rational will, of matter and 
 spirit. Physiology and biology have brought us forward to a 
 point of view from which we must see man as at once natural 
 and supernatural, as a personal being, in nature yet above it, and 
 acting in and on it from above. 
 
 In this union of the natural and the supernatural in man we 
 have a point of view from which we see the possibility and prob- 
 ability that there may be a conscious mind acting as causal en- 
 ergy along the lines of physical force and directing them. And 
 we see both the possibility and the probability that the absolute 
 Being, that is the ultimate ground of the universe, is the absolute 
 Reason ; and that the energy acting in the universe goes back for 
 its origin to the absolute Power that is inseparable from the ab- 
 solute Reason, that is one and the same with it, Reason energiz- 
 ing ; and this is God. Professor Clifford denies this. He argues 
 that we know conscious mental phenomena only as connected 
 with the action of a brain ; and there can be no God that acts in 
 conscious rationality, because we know of no great brain through 
 which his consciousness would be possible. But the professor's 
 experience is too limited to justify this inference. To argue that 
 because human intelligence is connected with a brain therefore 
 God cannot be intelligent except through an infinite brain is an- 
 thropomorphism in its grossest form. We return upon him the 
 question of the skeptic to the theist : 
 
512 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 " Think you this mold of hopes and fears 
 Could find no statelier than his peers 
 In yonder hundred million spheres?" 
 
 If we are to reason from experience, the legitimate inference is 
 that because mind, as we know it, is conscious therefore all other 
 mind in the universe must be conscious. And since Professor 
 Clifford recognizes mind as a causative energy distinct from 
 motor-force and finds it necessary to suppose some element of 
 mind in every motion in nature, the inference seems to be inev- 
 itable, even from his own position, that that which is ultimate 
 in the universe must be mind. And since the highest order of 
 power known to us is mind-power, we must infer that the ulti- 
 mate and absolute cause of the universe must be mind-power ; for 
 it cannot be of an order inferior to beings actually existing in the 
 universe. Still more when we see that man, as a rational person, 
 is supernatural and spiritual, we must recognize the supernatural 
 and spiritual in God. Thus physiology and biology bring us to 
 the door which opens from the darkness of the impersonal and 
 physical into the realm of the spiritual and the presence of God. 
 
 The fact that man's mind acts through a physical organization 
 does not justify the inference that it must perish when the phys- 
 ical organization dies and is dissolved. Behind the world per- 
 ceptible to sense is a world of molecules and ethers entirely im- 
 perceptible. Behind this imperceptible world, science is finding 
 itself obliged to assume atoms of a secondary order, some friction- 
 less fluid, some homogeneous, still more remote from sense. Evo- 
 lution assumes that the imperceptible universe existed before the 
 perceptible, and that the latter is evolved from the former. But 
 behind this imperceptible world, and beyond and above it, we 
 find mind revealing itself. If now it is admitted that mind in 
 man is a causative energy, in the consciousness of which man 
 knows himself as a personal being, and in this consciousness his 
 knowledge of being in its deepest reality originates, it is entirely 
 supposable that this personal spirit may have in itself energy to 
 survive the catastrophe of death, taking with it or finding for 
 itself in the extra-sensible sphere a finer medium through which 
 to act in consciousness. And this is the more reasonable because 
 God is ever energizing in the progressive evolution of nature and 
 the progressive development of the spiritual system. And as in 
 a great epoch of evolution he breathed the human spirit into this 
 mortal body, it is in analogy with the whole course of the evolu- 
 tion that death should be another epoch in which man is lifted to 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 513 
 
 a higher plane of being. Thus physiology and biology open to 
 us an outlook of hope and probability to immortal life. 
 
 In following scientific thought into the extra-sensible world 
 and tracing its venturesome speculations respecting different or- 
 ders of atomic existence therein, the thought may naturally sug- 
 gest itself that a still finer mind-stuff may underlie the most re- 
 fined of the extra-sensible matter and manifest itself by acting 
 therein. But this implies that the mind-stuff is merely a finer 
 form of matter, therefore only the medium through which a 
 mind or spirit may reveal itself. It is not the mind or spirit 
 itself. The ultimate unit of the spiritual system is a conscious 
 rational person. The spiritual system can be conceived only as 
 consisting of rational persons, in unity by participating in the 
 light of a common rationality and acting in free will under one 
 and the same moral law. It is a system, which, as it is observed 
 to exist on earth, began at the great epoch when rational man 
 appeared. It is not impossible nor incredible that a spiritual 
 sphere may exist in the visible world, but imperceptible by the 
 human senses ; that as through the natural eye we see the phys- 
 ical world, so with the spiritual eye, were it opened, we should 
 see a spiritual world. Milton says : 
 
 " Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth 
 Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep." 
 
 This is a poetical conception. But poetical conceptions some- 
 times picture the deepest truths. This, however, is widely dif- 
 ferent from the conception of an underlying and impersonal 
 mind-stuff. 
 
 That which underlies the finite universe, which is the deepest 
 reality both in the physical and the spiritual systems, which is in 
 fact the constitution of the universe, is the archetypal thought 
 eternal in the absolute Reason. And science, as it passes from 
 perceptible matter to the ether, from molecules to atoms, and 
 thence to atoms of a second order, has entered on a course of 
 thought which can stop nowhere but in the absolute Reason, 
 which is God. The only ultimate ground on which the finite 
 mind in its inquiries can rest is the Reason that is universal, un- 
 conditioned and eternal ; it is the truths, the laws, the ideals of 
 perfection and good, eternal and archetypal in God, the eternal 
 Reason, and the eternal wisdom and love of God by which they 
 are progressively expressed and realized in the finite. The truths, 
 laws and ideals, the wisdom and love are eternal and unchan^e- 
 
 33 
 
514 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 able. The finite forms, arrangements and sequences in which 
 they are progressively expressed and realized are variable. It is 
 in these variable arrangements and sequences that man's free will 
 finds scope for action and that miracles are possible. 
 
 Hence in the progressive expression of the divine thought there 
 are epochal miracles, in which a new and higher expression of the 
 eternal truths, laws and ideals is attained and a higher order of 
 being and action appears. 
 
 And in connection with this progressive realization of the ar- 
 chetypal thought, incidental miracles wrought by men are possi- 
 ble. We have seen that the natural and the supernatural are 
 united in man, and that the action of his rational free will on na- 
 ture is essentially the same in kind with miraculous action. We 
 call the effect of an action of this kind a miracle only when it 
 reveals a power transcending that of man as known in common 
 experience. But man in his progress advances beyond himself. 
 If Newton when two years old had written the Principia, it would 
 have been a miracle. It was no miracle to write it in his mature 
 years. Is there potential in man a power of mind over matter, 
 which, in an analogous way, may be developed with the progres- 
 sive development of man, so as to be capable of doing works which 
 done in his present immaturity would rightly be called miracles? 
 As in the progress of Christ's kingdom on earth all man's powers 
 become more fully and harmoniously developed, as he comes into 
 closer union with God in the life of faith and love and more 
 receptive of the divine gifts, as thus his thought and will are 
 brought more into harmony with the constitution and powers of 
 the universe, it is conceivable that he may find himself in the ex- 
 ercise of a power over nature which we should now regard as 
 miraculous. It would only be the essentially miracle-working 
 power in every free will developed in unison with God's will and 
 revealing itself in mightier works. The miracles of prophets and 
 apostles would still be wonders and signs as well as mighty works, 
 because so far in advance of the spiritual development of man 
 within the kingdom of Christ in their time. They would be signs 
 of the presence and gifts of God and a prophecy and promise of 
 the more complete development to come ; " solitary early flowers " 
 revealing the power of the returning sun already quickening the 
 earth and giving promise of summer. And our Lord said, in ref- 
 erence to some of his miracles : " Greater works than these shall 
 ye do." And if this conception should be realized it would prove 
 that miracles cause no break in the continuity of nature, that the 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 515 
 
 supernatural is ever present and directive in the natural, and that 
 Jesus is the ideal man more completely than we have been wont 
 to suppose. 
 
 II. UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF GOD'S REVELATION IN NA- 
 TURE, MAN AND CHRIST. The unity and continuity of nature 
 and the supernatural, the unity of the human and the divine r 
 are further disclosed in the revelation of God in Christ. As in 
 man the spiritual and supernatural appears in the physical, so- 
 in Christ the divine appears in the human. And in this higher 
 stage of the revelation its unity and continuity are not inter- 
 rupted. 
 
 1. Christ's coming constitutes a new epoch in the progressive 
 development of the world and in the revelation of God therein. 
 The universe, so far as we know it in the history of this earth, 
 is in continual development and progress from the lower to the 
 higher. The progress is marked by epochs in which succes- 
 sively higher orders of being and spheres of action appear and 
 the ever immanent God makes new revelations of his archetypal 
 thought. Such epochs are the beginning of motion, the introduc- 
 tion of organic life, the introduction of sensitivity, the introduc- 
 tion of rational personal beings. In the last the great transition 
 is made from the natural to the supernatural, and the moral and 
 spiritual system appears. Then, after due preparation in the edu- 
 cation and development of man, in the fulness of time, is the 
 great epoch in which God comes in Christ reconciling the world 
 unto himself, and therein making the consummate revelation of 
 what he is in his relation to man and of what man is in his rela- 
 tion to God, disclosing to human view the archetypal principles 
 and laws which guide God's action, and the archetypal ideals and 
 good to be realized in the history and destiny of man. This is 
 the great revelation of God. Whatever may be said of the pre- 
 vious epochs, he would be a bold skeptic who should venture to 
 affirm that the Christ was merely a natural product of a physical 
 and godless evolution. In this epoch Christ comes, as the Head 
 of a new humanity, bringing the divine into the human to estab- 
 lish the kingdom of heaven on the earth, to quicken men by a 
 new birth of the Spirit, to lift them from their submergence in 
 the life of nature to spiritual life in union with God in faith and 
 love, and to diffuse and perpetuate among them the Spirit of God 
 with all heavenly influences to draw them into Christ's kingdom 
 of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. And we 
 look forward to another epoch, when Christ will come again at 
 
516 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the consummation of the work of redemption and the close of 
 the natural life and earthly history of man, when the kingdom 
 of Christ on earth will be completed and will exist with all who 
 have been gathered into it in a higher order of life and in a new 
 and celestial environment, where it will go on forever in ways of 
 glory beyond the power of man to conceive. 
 
 Thus the coming of the Christ is the central epoch, and the 
 Word made flesh and dwelling among us is the central power in 
 the continuous and progressive development of this world from 
 its primitive homogeneous matter to the glory of the new heavens 
 and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 
 
 As in man the natural and the supernatural or spiritual are 
 in unity, so in Christ is the unity of the human and the divine. 
 And since man unites the natural and the spiritual, in Christ 
 is consummated the unity of the natural, the spiritual and the 
 divine. From him goes forth the divine Spirit, invisible but bear- 
 ing the divine light and life and love, to touch all hearts and to 
 unite himself in perpetual indwelling with every man who opens 
 his heart in faith to receive him. So in the new era introduced 
 at this great epoch of the coming of God in Christ reconciling 
 the world unto himself, men one by one are touched by the Spirit 
 bearing the heavenly influences, and with victorious allurement, 
 with most loving and sweet force of persuasion, drawn into the 
 kingdom of Christ. 1 And in the consummation of this progres- 
 sive revelation, Christ's earthly kingdom is itself glorified in the 
 heavenly. 
 
 2. Christ brings the divine into the human as an abiding power 
 of illumination, renovation and reconciliation. The divine abides 
 in the human in the Spirit of Christ. So in previous epochs the 
 personal, after it appears, abides and works in organic nature, 
 and the organic life abides and works in the inorganic. 
 
 Christ brings the divine into the human as a power of illu. 
 mination. In the Bible, Wisdom is personified as present in the 
 formation of the world, directing it "as a master - workman." 2 
 The evidence of the presence and direction of this master-work- 
 man is found in nature by science. It is the declaration of this 
 
 1 " Victrix delectatio." Augustine. " Amabili et suavissiraa persuasionis 
 necessitate. . . . Ut nulla vis major amore, nee fortior neeessitas charitate, 
 quae et instar olei effusa in nobis, suavissima delectatione nos perfundit, et 
 insrar catenae fortissimae nos constringit." (II. Cor. v. 14.) Turrettine, Inst. 
 Loc. 15, Quaest.4,xviii.,xxi. 
 
 2 Prov. chap. viii. 30. 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 517 
 
 wisdom in nature which constitutes science. Science rests on the 
 assumption that the reason whose master-workmanship is revealed 
 in nature is the same in kind as the reason in man that discovers 
 it in nature ; that man participates in the light of the Reason that 
 is universal. When God comes into humanity in Christ, the eter- 
 nal Reason reveals itself in him ; the light, which lighteth every 
 man, comes into the world in Jesus, who himself is man. And 
 Paul says that the spiritual light which shines on us from God 
 is through Christ : " Seeing it is God, who said, Light shall shine 
 out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 
 
 Christ brings the divine into the human not merely to illu- 
 minate, but also to renovate and reconcile. From him proceeds 
 the Spirit as the quickener of spiritual life. Thus, from Christ, 
 the light, the life and the love of God penetrate and transform 
 humanity. 
 
 This is strikingly set forth in the First Epistle of John. He 
 announces as his theme the eternal Logos that came into the 
 world in Christ. He says that he presents this to them, that 
 all to whom he writes may be, like himself, in fellowship with 
 this divine being. He says, " Our fellowship is with the Father 
 and with his Son Jesus Christ." We are brought back to our 
 normal condition of union with God through Christ by partici- 
 pating in the influence of the divine Spirit carrying the energy 
 of redeeming grace through the world. John proceeds to declare 
 that in Christ the divine Light, the divine Life and the divine 
 Love are penetrating and pervading humanity to bring man into 
 fellowship with God by participating in these. The eternal Rea- 
 son that lighteth every man is come into the world in Christ, 
 and through him every mind darkened by sin may participate in 
 the divine Light and see all things as they are related to God 
 and illuminated by the light of the eternal Reason. " God is light 
 and in him is no darkness at all. If we walk in the light, as 
 he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another and the 
 blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin." Christ is also 
 44 the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested 
 unto us." And from him this Life goes out into the world, a life- 
 giving energy in which also we participate : " This is the prom- 
 ise which he promised us, even the life eternal." In him also 
 the divine Love is energizing in the world to bring all men to 
 participate in it and so to be animated with a love like the love 
 of God revealed in Christ. And thus partaking in the divine 
 
518 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Light and Life and Love, men become children of God by a spir- 
 itual and divine birth, and constitute a new humanity as children 
 of God under the Headship of Christ. And so the separation 
 from God is ended, and in union with him men have sure hope 
 that they shall realize in themselves the ideal of humanity set 
 before them in Christ. " Behold what manner of love the Father 
 liath bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God ; 
 and such we are. . . . Beloved, now are we children of God, and 
 it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. But we know that 
 when he shall be manifested, we shall be like him ; for we shall 
 see him even as he is." In Christ are the eternal Light, Life and 
 Love of God, entering and penetrating humanity to seek and to 
 save the lost. 
 
 3. Christ, thus bringing the divine into the human, in illumi- 
 nating and renovating man, takes up and vitalizes all spiritual 
 truth and motives of other religions and of the ethnic philos- 
 ophies. 
 
 The line of divine revelation which issued directly in his coming 
 was in the history of Israel. The religion of Israel looked forward 
 to the epoch of his coming with ever brightening prophecy and 
 promise. It was the same course of God's redemptive action in 
 its earlier stage preparing for the epoch when the Christ should 
 come. 
 
 God does not reveal himself only in the history recorded in the 
 Bible. He reveals himself also in the consciousness of men, in 
 the constitution and course of nature, and in the constitution and 
 history of man. His work of preparing men for Christ's coming 
 was not in the history of Israel alone, but in the history of all 
 nations, and in their philosophies and their religions. This is 
 assumed in all the numerous essays and discourses on the prep- 
 aration of the world at the Christian era for the introduction of 
 Christianity. And in fact the Gentiles were found to be at least 
 as ready to receive Christ as were the Jews. 
 
 In polytheism the minds of men were opening more and more 
 to the recognition of a divinity in the course of nature and of 
 human life and history to the minutest details. So Kant said that 
 even in the blindest polytheism a spark of monotheism shimmers 
 through, to the full recognition of which, not primarily reflection 
 and deep speculation, but only the gradual progress of the com- 
 mon intelligence of man, conducts. 1 If science is to comprehend 
 all things in the unity of a scientific system, monotheism is its 
 1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 455. 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 519 
 
 necessary basis. Polytheism was a preparation for it. When the 
 sun and stars, the mountains, the ocean and the air, when every 
 part and power of nature had its god, the polytheism revealed 
 the monotheistic belief that all nature is pervaded by the divine 
 and under divine control. When polytheism regarded its deities 
 as deified men, when in its latest periods in the Roman Empire it 
 had a several deity to preside over every quality, condition and act 
 of men, every stage in organic growth, every form and manifesta- 
 tion of physical force, this was a more full recognition of the mon- 
 otheistic principle and could not be far from recognizing the one 
 omnipresent God. When the Hindu says that he acknowledges 
 300,000,000 gods, it is the expression, in polytheistic form, of the/ 
 monotheistic principle that God is everywhere, and has all wis- 
 dom, all virtue, all power. As all nature and all mankind began 
 to be comprehended in the unity of a scientific and reasonable 
 system, the divinity that rules in the universe could no longer be 
 regarded as many, but as one, as the universal Reason endowed 
 with all wisdom and all moral perfection and all might. In India 
 and the East, and through Stoicism in Greece and Rome, philos- 
 ophy, groping for this unity and universality of the divine, had 
 thought it might be found in pantheism. But this gave only a 
 dead unity without conscious personality or free spiritual life in 
 God or man. The unity was found in the one living God, already 
 known in Israel, and brought into humanity in Christ, the source 
 of spiritual life for all men. 
 
 Thus all that is true in polytheism is comprehended by Chris- 
 tianity, into which it faded like the many stars into the one light 
 of the rising sun. Monotheism was the legitimate issue of the 
 progress of the human mind through, the many-starred night of 
 polytheism. But in fact the morning dawned on the world only 
 when, in the coming of Christ, "The Sim of Righteousness" arose. 
 
 Mr. Buckle anticipates a millennial issue of human progress 
 when population will be more and more concentrated in cities, 
 and thus be shut out from the hills and valleys, the rivers, the 
 forests and the fields, and even from the broad sky, and occu- 
 pied solely in business ; and that then all superstition, that is, all 
 belief in God and the supernatural, will be extirpated, and man 
 will be blessed in a wholly artificial life. This implies that the 
 works of man will shut out the works of God, and Gradgrind 
 will reign unmolested and supreme. This would be progress re- 
 versed. It would be night swallowing both sun and stars in total 
 darkness. 
 
520 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 The insufficiency of the ethnic religions and philosophies to 
 meet man's spiritual wants awakened the thoughtful to a con- 
 sciousness of their need of further revelation of God a con- 
 sciousness pathetically set forth by Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Sen- 
 eca and others. The truths respecting God and his relations to 
 man, recognized in the ethnic religions and philosophies and 
 taken up in Christianity, are some of them of fundamental im- 
 portance and none are insignificant. In these religions and con- 
 nected with them men have learned the existence of supernatural 
 beings, of man's relation to a divinity, of moral law, of sin, and 
 of the need of redemption. If all ideas and influences of this 
 kind had been erased from the minds of men and their minds 
 left an entire blank respecting them, then they would have be- 
 come a second time children or savages, and would need anew 
 a long education and development before they could understand 
 and receive the significance of God's revelation in Christ. 
 
 The different nations of antiquity contributed severally to the 
 education and progress of the race : as Greece gave men art, 
 poetry, philosophy ; Rome gave political law and organization ; 
 Phoenicia letters ; Egypt, Babylon, Persia and other nations helped 
 in the development of civilization. This being the fact, we may 
 properly suppose that God was working in and through these in 
 preparing for the revelation in Christ and the development of 
 his kingdom to a spiritual and universal kingdom. And whatever 
 of truth and spiritual motive was in their religions and philos- 
 ophies was taken up and vitalized in Christianity. The Christian 
 Fathers declare that God was preparing mankind for Christ by 
 the ethnic philosophy and culture as really, if not as directly, 
 as by Israel and its prophets. Justin Martyr says: "The whole 
 rare of men had part in the Logos and those who lived in har- 
 mony with reason are Christians, even though they have been re- 
 garded as atheists ; as, among the Greeks, Socrates, Herakleitus, 
 and men like them." " Whatever things have been rightly said 
 among all men are the property of us Christians." 1 
 
 Clement of Alexandria saw in the Greek philosophy an educa- 
 tion of mankind running parallel with the Hebrew prophecy, and 
 consequently in Christianity the growth of the seeds of truth con- 
 tained in each. "Philosophy was a schoolmaster to bring the 
 Hellenic mind to Christ as the law was to the Hebrews." " Let 
 a man milk the sheep's milk if he need sustenance ; let him shear 
 
 1 First Apology, chap. xlvi. ; Second Apology, chap. xiii. "In harmony with 
 reason " is in the original /J.GTO, \6yov. 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE KEVELATION. 521 
 
 the wool if he need clothing. And in this way let me produce 
 the fruit of Greek erudition. . . . Philosophy, a divine gift to 
 the Greeks. . . . Before the advent of our Lord philosophy was 
 necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes 
 conducive to piety ; being a kind of preparatory training to those 
 who attain faith through demonstration. God is the cause of all 
 good things ; but of some primarily, as of the Old and the New 
 Testament ; of others by consequence, as of philosophy. Per- 
 chance philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily 
 till the Lord should call the Greeks. . . . But all (these philos- 
 ophies) are, in my opinion, illuminated by the dawn of the Light 
 (of the Logos). . . . There is then in philosophy, though stolen 
 as the fire by Prometheus, a slender spark capable of being fanned 
 into a flame, a trace of wisdom, and an impulse from God." l And 
 Augustine held that the religion then called the Christian had in 
 its substance been previously with the ancients and had not been 
 wanting from the beginning of human history. He says : " More- 
 over if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Pla- 
 tonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our 
 faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for 
 our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. ... 
 These truths are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they 
 did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's: 
 providence which are everywhere scattered abroad." 2 And Basil 
 compares Christians to bees which gather the honey of all flow- 
 ers. And here is the truth in Bishop Butler's words : " Chris- 
 tianity is a republication of natural religion." 3 
 
 Adolf Harnack says : " Christianity has throughout sucked 
 the marrow of the ancient world and assimilated it. ... The 
 strength and greatness of the gospel has consisted in this, that 
 it could ever attract to itself and preserve everything worthy 
 of life which the ages possessed. Just through this power of 
 assimilation and expansion the Gospel has established its right 
 to be the universal religion, and has proved itself the most con- 
 servative of all forces, because securing endurance to everything 
 worthy to endure." 4 If Christianity adopted festival days of the 
 heathen, it was only to divest them of their heathenism and to 
 consecrate them to Christ. Through human imperfection it has. 
 
 1 Stromata, bk. i. chaps. 1, 2, 5, 13, 17. 
 
 2 Christian Doctrine, bk. ii. chap. 40. 
 8 Analogy, part ii. chap. i. 
 
 4 Contemporary Review, Aug. 1886, p. 237. 
 
522 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 sometimes taken up temporarily elements foreign and enfeebling. 
 But its power to absorb, assimilate and consecrate to Christ what- 
 ever of truth and excellence was in the ethnic religion, philos- 
 ophy and life, is one great evidence that it is divine. 
 
 And equally Christ takes up and vitalizes all those great ideas 
 which the skepticism of our day would substitute for God as the 
 objects of religious worship. 
 
 Mr. Spencer thinks that religion can never pass away because 
 man must always be confronted with the mystery of things. But 
 the merely mysterious and unknowable can never be the object of 
 religious trust, worship and service. And always the larger the 
 area of the visible and known, the larger the horizon of the in- 
 visible and unknown. Christ in his revelation of God awakens a 
 consciousness of his mysterious and transcendent grandeur which 
 no agnosticism can impart. 
 
 Mr. Harrison, on the contrary, insists rightly that the personal 
 and spiritual are essential in the divine. As the object of re- 
 ligious worship, he proposes man, with all which is tender, noble 
 and grand in his history. With great power he sets forth the 
 Great Human Being, the ideal representative of all men in their 
 unity as mankind, of all excellence in humanity which history 
 has revealed or which is possible to man, as the object of adora- 
 tion, the source of inspiration and energy, and the ideal end on 
 the realization of which in humanity all human aspiration and en- 
 ergy should be concentrated. He says : " Religion in its proper 
 full sense means the state of unity and concentration which results 
 when our intellectual, moral and active life are all made one by 
 the presence of some great Principle, in which we believe, whom 
 we love and adore, and to which our acts are submitted, so that 
 the perpetual sense of our dependence on that power goes deep 
 down into all we think, or feel, or do. ... To have religion in 
 any true sense is to have peace." l 
 
 Religion demands all this. But the Great Human Being can 
 never satisfy the demand. It has no intelligence to hear our 
 cries and no power to help. It has no personality, no conscious 
 being. It is a mere abstraction, a subjective creation of our own 
 thought. It is as far from being ;m object of religious worship 
 as is the Unknowable. And in the worship of it, however ele- 
 vated the admiration for all which is great and noble in human 
 history, and however earnest the insistence on the obligation to 
 love man and to consecrate life to his service in the endeavor 
 1 The Creeds: Old and New, Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1880. 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 523 
 
 to realize in him his highest excellence, Christianity is beyond 
 all comparison superior in these very particulars. I will not 
 say Christianity takes up these qualities from this worship of 
 humanity, for unquestionably all which is worthy and inspiring 
 in this worship was derived, however unconsciously, from Chris- 
 tianity. God is revealed in Christ reconciling the world to him- 
 self, redeeming man from sin to the knowledge of God and to 
 union with him, educating and developing him to the realization 
 of his ideal as set forth in Christ, pervading the world with the 
 influence of the divine Spirit, and progressively transforming 
 society into the kingdom of God. This revelation of God is also 
 the highest possible revelation of the capacities and possibilities 
 of humanity, of the worth of man and the sacredness of his 
 rights, of the obligation of all to live in the love and service of 
 man, and of his capacity for wise thoughts and great deeds and 
 noble character. It is the revelation of man to himself as really 
 as it is the revelation of God to man. In Christ is the ideal of 
 humanity in a human person and a human life, the law of love 
 revealed in the concrete ; in him also is the love of God embodied 
 and revealed in a living man and a human life. Here are at once 
 the law, the motive and inspiration to obey it, and the divine 
 grace seeking man in his sins to inspire and quicken, to guide 
 and strengthen him in the way of life, and the divine promise 
 stimulating hope and courage and giving assurance, to all who 
 seek, that they shall find the realization in themselves of the 
 ideal of manhood presented before them in Christ. It is true 
 that God reveals himself in humanity. But this revelation can 
 never be complete, for the history of humanity will never be 
 completed. In Christ, the ideal man, the whole contents of that 
 revelation of God in humanity, are summed up in brief. He is 
 the ideal of man in union with God and the recipient of his 
 spirit and grace. He is the ideal of man in the perfection of 
 his being: " When he shall appear, we shall be like him." He is 
 the ideal man, loving all with a divine love, coming not to be 
 ministered unto but to minister, taking the form of a servant, 
 and spending his energies working with the Father to save man 
 from sin, to develop him to his true manhood in the likeness of 
 God, and to build human society into a kingdom of righteous- 
 ness and good-will.' He is the ideal of man in his subjection to 
 privation, suffering and death, in his conflict with sin, his tri- 
 umph over all the powers of evil, and his ascension glorified to 
 the life immortal. In Handel's Messiah poetry and music com- 
 
524 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 bine to give expression to the significance of this revelation of 
 God in Christ and of this revelation in Christ of what humanity 
 is and is to be. " He shall reign forever and ever." Neither 
 music nor poetry, neither philosophy nor religion, neither law 
 nor gospel can transcend this. It is the highest consummation 
 of thought, feeling and life ; it is the union of the human with 
 the divine. In worshiping God in Christ we worship him in 
 humanity. The Christian has in Christ and God's redemption 
 of man real ground for reverence for humanity not to be com- 
 pared with any possible reverence for the fiction which the pos- 
 itivists worship. 
 
 The agnostic and the positivist each presents a one-sided and 
 erroneous view, and therefore each easily and triumphantly re- 
 futes the other. The agnostic affirms that the Unknowable is the 
 absolute Being, but denies all qualities of personal Spirit. The 
 positivist affirms the personal and ethical contents of the idea of 
 God, but recognizes them only in humanity and denies the abso- 
 lute Being. The one has the contents without the being ; the 
 other has the being without the contents. The synthesis of the 
 two would give us the idea of God. Christian theism gives this 
 synthesis, and thus in the personal God finds the substantial real- 
 ity in unity for these two ideas. 
 
 Professor Seeley of England suggests enthusiasm for physical 
 science as an adequate substitute for religion. But scientific 
 investigation is itself incited by the necessity of seeking the 
 causes, laws and rationale of things, which necessarily carries 
 the thought to God. Interest in nature, admiration of its order 
 and beauty, reverence for the universe as the revelation of God 
 are stimulated and nurtured by religious faith. 
 
 Matthew Arnold conceives of religion as morality lit up with 
 emotion. But Christ is the most complete revelation of the 
 moral law ; and by his teachings and work, his life, death and 
 resurrection, himself more than all others has awakened the 
 emotion and enthusiasm which light up morality. 
 
 Philosophy also claims to be the guide of life. Men have 
 sought in it a substitute for religion. But for all man's spirit- 
 ual needs it is inadequate. And whatever of spiritual truth 
 and motive is in it Christ takes up and vitalizes in the Chris- 
 tian life. 
 
 Skeptics commonly write as if it was indisputable that Chris- 
 tianity rests only on arbitrary miraculous action to the exclusion 
 of philosophy. They also claim that they find more consolation 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 525 
 
 and help in philosophy than in the Christian religion. Mr. 
 Hennell, in his Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity, 
 called Jesus "A Jewish Philosopher." Of this George Eliot 
 says: "To say 'Jewish philosopher,' seems almost like saying a 
 round square ; yet these two words appear to me the truest de- 
 scription of Jesus." 1 She expresses very strongly her perception 
 of the contrast between the Jew and the philosopher. Yet she 
 conceives of Jesus as taking both characters into his own. Both 
 of these writers seem entirely unaware that Paul had presented 
 so similar a description of the wonderful comprehensiveness of 
 Jesus, and that they were using, in opposition to what they took 
 for Christianity, a remarkable conception of Christ which is em- 
 phatically set forth in Christianity itself. 2 
 
 In the first glow of her departure from her early faith George 
 Eliot thought she had found more than a substitute for Christ. 
 Roused by some remark of Mr. Bray on the beneficial influence 
 of evangelical beliefs, she said : . " I say it now and I say it once 
 for all, that I am influenced in my own conduct at the present 
 time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty 
 than I ever had while I held the evangelical beliefs." And about 
 that time she was thinking of writing an essay on the superiority 
 of the consolations of philosophy to those of Christianity. Yet 
 philosophy without religion is necessarily one-sided, incomplete, 
 and inadequate to the spiritual needs. While claiming to dis- 
 close to man the all-comprehending unity of the universe and 
 
 1 Life by J. W. Cross, chap. iii. In her letters and diary as given in her 
 Life, Miss Evans unconsciously reveals the fact that her religion had been 
 exceedingly narrow and superficial. While so many, who have been con- 
 strained of late to yield to the currrent skepticism, have expressed deep sorrow 
 at being obliged to give up their Christian faith, Miss Evans exults in a sense 
 of liberation. She also says that, while evangelical, she had at one time sacri- 
 ficed the cultivation of her intellect and a proper regard to her personal ap- 
 pearance. " I used to go about like an owl to the great disgust of my brother ; 
 and I would have denied him what I now see to have been lawful amusements." 
 She speaks of the suffering of childhood from " colic and whooping-cough and 
 dread of ghosts, to say nothing of hell and Satan, and an offended Deity in 
 the sky, who was angry when I wanted too much plum-cake." She speaks of 
 her soul " as just liberated from the giant's bed of dogmas on which it has 
 been racked and stretched ever since it began to think." In reading her 
 diary and letters it seems to me that what she had renounced was a restraint 
 and constraint, a terror, gloom and asceticism, which have no place in the 
 faith and love, the hope and joy, the genial interest in life and humanity 
 which belong to the religion of Christ; and that she failed to recognize these 
 latter as essentially Christian. 
 
 2 I. Cor. i. 22-24. 
 
526 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 the highest ends of his being, to develop his highest capacities 
 and powers and to give satisfaction and scope for their highest 
 energy, it overlooks broad areas of reality and truth and has no 
 quickening touch for man's highest spiritual capacities and 
 powers. And presently the philosophy itself is found to be 
 breaking down into universal skepticism. This George Eliot 
 found out in her own experience. Speaking of " the first im- 
 pulse of a young and generous mind " when liberated from the 
 "giant's bed" of evangelical " dogmas," she says: " But a year 
 or two of reflection and the experience of our own miserable 
 weakness, which will ill afford to part even with the crutch of 
 superstition, must I think effect a change. Speculative truth 
 begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds." * 
 
 Her experience that even the crutch of so-called superstition 
 is more helpful than the self-sufficiency of a godless philosophy 
 has been a common experience in the history of unbelief from age 
 to age. 
 
 Thus Christ takes up the spiritual truths and motives in all 
 the religions and philosophies of mankind and assimilates and 
 vitalizes them in the divine and spiritual power with which he 
 is renovating men in the new spiritual birth and life, and thus 
 bringing upon the natural life of man the new humanity in which 
 the spiritual predominates over the natural, of which he is the 
 head, and of which he is constituting his kingdom of righteous- 
 ness and peace. 
 
 This comprehensiveness of Christianity was well expressed by 
 Henry More, in the seventeenth century : 
 
 " The true religion sprung from God above, 
 
 Is, like her fountain, full of charity; 
 
 Embracing all things with a tender love, 
 
 Full of good- will and meek expectancy; 
 
 Full of true justice and sure verity 
 
 In voice and heart; free, large, even infinite; 
 
 Not wedged in straight particularity, 
 
 But grasping all in her vast active sprite. 
 
 Bright lamp of God, oh', that all could joy 
 
 In thy pure light." 
 
 4. In thus bringing the divine into the human as an abiding 
 power of illumination and renovation and appropriating and vital- 
 izing all spiritual truth and motive in redeeming men from sin, 
 Christ reveals the true significance and dignity of human life, the 
 worth of man and his highest destiny, otherwise but dimly known ; 
 1 Life, chaps, ii. and iii. 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 527 
 
 and he is also the central source of the spiritual influence which 
 is quickening men to seek the realization of this high destiny for 
 themselves and for all men. 
 
 If the life of nature in man is shut up within itself, if his good 
 is to be found only in getting and self-indulgence, in the grati- 
 fication of desires, then, as has already been shown, pessimism is 
 inevitably the true theory of human life. For the desires are in 
 their essence unrest and uneasiness in the sense of want, and they 
 grow by what they feed on ; and man has spiritual ideas and as- 
 pirations which stretch beyond the life of nature and seek their 
 objects in the spiritual and the divine. Atheism shuts man into 
 the life of nature and shuts him away from the spiritual and 
 the divine. It can show no end, which reason can judge worthy, 
 for the existence of humanity. Physicus has recorded an appall- 
 ing description of the darkness and desolation it brings on human 
 hopes. After speaking of his own former faith in God, now lost, 
 he says : " But now, how changed ! Never in the history of man 
 has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who 
 look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruc- 
 tion, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, en- 
 gulfing our most precious creed and burying our highest life in 
 mindless desolation. . . . The flood-gates of infidelity are open 
 and Atheism overwhelming is upon us." 1 In its coming it has 
 brought with it a remarkable development of pessimism, not only 
 as a sentiment or as poetry, but in the form of philosophy. The 
 two religions which by common consent stand highest on the 
 scale after Christianity are Mohammedism and Buddhism. The 
 latter sinks us in the slough of pantheism, and its necessary prac- 
 tical issue is pessimism. The former is monotheistic. But its 
 God approximates closely to a fate ; it knows little of the high 
 spiritual significance of the life of faith and love ; and even in 
 the future world its heaven is scarcely of a higher order than a 
 life of selfish and sensuous indulgence, not the realm of perfect 
 and universal love. 
 
 It is the Christ alone who reveals the true significance of hu- 
 manity and its highest possibilities and noblest destiny. And 
 through him come the spiritual agencies and motives which 
 quicken men to the new spiritual life and bring them to concen- 
 trate their energies on the service of God and man in the life of 
 universal love. 
 
 He meets all man's spiritual needs by bringing him to union 
 1 A Candid Examination of Theism, by Physicus, p. 51. 
 
528 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 with God in the life of faith and love, and to reconciliation, com- 
 munion and peace with God. He reveals to man his true well- 
 being and highest destiny as renewed in a spiritual birth and life 
 and as capable of spiritual growth and achievement on earth and 
 in the life immortal. He reveals the kingdom of God on earth 
 and in heaven as the realization of the perfect unity and commu- 
 nity of men and of the highest possibilities of humanity. 
 
 And in this he reveals the true worth and dignity of man, the 
 sacredness of both his obligations and his rights, the brotherhood 
 of men as the children of God and redeemed through Christ, the 
 common Saviour, and all those great ideas which have guided and 
 inspired the true political and social progress of man in modern 
 times. Christianity, and it alone, takes up the whole man, spirit- 
 ual and natural, and the whole sphere of his action, individual 
 and social, all his interests and possibilities, science and industrial 
 invention, literature and sesthetic art, work and play, politics and 
 business, morality and economics ; it takes them up with spiritual 
 light and love and life and power adequate to quicken, inspire 
 and guide the progress of the individual and of society toward 
 the realization of the ideal perfection of humanity. 
 
 Thus the historical action of God in Christ is the basis of the 
 only true and complete philosophy of human history. Man and 
 his history and destiny can never be understood without recogniz- 
 ing his relation to God, the fact of sin and God's gracious action 
 in redemption, and the existence and growth of God's kingdom 
 on earth. Christ is central in human history. On him all the 
 lines of divine action and influence before his coming converge; 
 and from him all divine action and influence in redemption go 
 forth into the subsequent life and history of man. Thus God's 
 action in redemption is found to be the deepest power in human 
 history. The history of man in its true and most profound sig- 
 nificance is the history of redemption. Christianity lives in the 
 history of man, its roots struck down into the depths of the past, 
 and in prophecy and promise its branches lifting its verdure and 
 blossoms and fruit to all the heights of the future the veritable 
 tree Ygdrasil around which the moral world is built and on which 
 its stability depends. 
 
 And because the religion of Christ is comprehensive of all spir- 
 itual light and life and power, and is to satisfy the spiritual needs 
 of man in all ages, it is tes.ted by the progress of thought and civ- 
 ilization through all time. In presenting himself as the king of 
 God's kingdom on earth and the Mediator through whom God 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 529 
 
 comes to save men from sin, Christ challenges this test. A god 
 of the Scandinavian mythology was once tested in various ways 
 to prove his power. Among other trials he was challenged to a 
 race and was outrun. He afterwards learned that his competitor 
 in the race had been Human Thought. In all which pertains to 
 man's moral and spiritual life Christ has been tested in the race 
 with human thought for 1800 years and has been always in ad- 
 vance. In fact it is much more than this. He has kept the lead 
 while, by his spiritual quickening of men, it is he himself who 
 has given to human thought its power and speed. 
 
 5. Christianity is the one absolute and universal religion for 
 all men in all ages. 
 
 This is essential in the idea of redemption through God in 
 Christ reconciling the world unto himself. It is God's historical 
 action redeeming men from sin. It is the culmination of all pre- 
 ceding revelations. Christ is the king of God's kingdom on the 
 earth. He is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world ; 
 he tasted death for every man ; from him the Spirit of God is 
 poured on all flesh, and whosoever will may take the water of life 
 freely ; in him God is our Saviour, " who willeth that all men 
 should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth." 1 The 
 aim of Christianity is as broad as humanity and as far-reaching 
 as the continued history of mankind in this world and the next. 
 Its aim in respect to the individual is his spiritual renovation and 
 perfection, begun on earth and completed in his glorification in 
 heaven ; and in respect to society, it is to transform it into the 
 kingdom of God existing on earth and in all generations issuing, 
 like a river into the sea, into the kingdom of the blessed in 
 heaven ; and after the succession of human generations on earth 
 shall have ended, going on forever in the heavenly glory in ways 
 dimly known to us. In this kingdom all possible human perfec- 
 tion and good are to be realized. From its beginning on earth 
 through its everlasting duration " all that life is love." 
 
 Hence the outlook of Christianity is to an ever-progressive 
 education 'and development of man, through his faith and God's 
 gracious dwelling in him through the Holy Spirit, to the realiza- 
 tion in him of all that is true, right, perfect and good, in a life in 
 which all his energies are exerted to the utmost in the service of 
 man, loving his neighbor as himself. Christianity is the religion 
 of promise, the future ever to be better than the past. It is thus 
 the religion for all ages, brightening and expanding as the ages 
 
 1 I. Tim. chap. ii. 4. 
 34 
 
530 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 roll on. And as it is the religion for all ages, so it is also the one 
 only religion for all nations, under the prevalence of which all 
 men may dwell together in love as the children of their common 
 Father in heaven, redeemed by the same Saviour, and animated 
 by the same trust in God and love to God and man. 
 
 Christianity is fitted to be the universal religion, also, by its 
 power of adaptation to new conditions without change of its prin- 
 ciples, its life, character or power. We have seen that, both in 
 the physical system and the spiritual, the principles and laws of 
 reason are unchangeable and eternal, but the arrangements and 
 uniform sequences which manifest or express them are variable 
 and transient. So ii is in the Christian religion. 
 
 This results from the fact that the Christian revelation was 
 primarily a revelation of God through his historical action in 
 redemption, and not primarily of doctrine in formulas addressed 
 to the intellect. Men in all ages study the great facts of God's 
 action and his communications to men in reconciling the world 
 to himself, to learn from them the Way, the Truth and the Life. 
 So they study the ongoings of the physical system to learn the 
 science and laws of nature. Thus Christ is the same yesterday, 
 to-day and forever. His historic life, death, resurrection and as- 
 cension remain unchanged. The Way, the Truth and the Life 
 are the same to all generations. But the significance of Christ 
 to humanity is apprehended progressively ; new applications of 
 Christianity to new conditions and civilizations may be discov- 
 ered, past errors may be corrected, and practical applications of 
 it suited to former conditions may become effete and pass away. 
 It is remarkable that in the Christian Scriptures there is very 
 little of formulated doctrine, very little of argument in defense of 
 doctrine, scarcely any systemization of either doctrine or ethics. 
 There are in the New Testament no prescribed liturgy or forms 
 of worship ; but two sacraments, and those of the simplest form ; 
 no prescribed form of church organization and administration ; 
 very little as to church officers. It is at the farthest remove from 
 being a system of thought, organization, worship and 'life com- 
 pleted and worked out in details, a closed circuit of doctrine, pre- 
 cept and ecclesiastical rubrics to which nothing can be added and 
 from which nothing can be taken away. Therefore in Christian- 
 ity is place for building on unchanging truth in Christ, who is 
 the Logos that lighteth every man, an ever grander structure of 
 religious knowledge and life, and adapting it to the varying de- 
 velopment and conditions of man, from the child to the philoso 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 531 
 
 pher, from the savage to the most learned of civilized men. This 
 is the truth which Rothe meant to express when he said, " Chris- 
 tianity is the most mutable of all things. That is its special 
 glory." And the same characteristic of the Bible is the ground 
 of Dean Stanley's recognition of "the endless vigor and vitality 
 of the words of Scripture ; " and of the conviction expressed in 
 his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, in 1858, that " in that virgin 
 mine, the insufficiently explored original records of Christian! ty v 
 there are still materials for a new epoch ; that another and a dif- 
 ferent estimate of the points on which Scripture lays the most 
 stress warrants the hope that the existing materials, principles, 
 doctrines of the Christian religion are far greater than have ever 
 yet been employed, and that the Christian church, if it ever be 
 permitted or enabled to use them, has a long lease of new life and 
 new hope before it." 
 
 The evils resulting, if Christ and the apostles had presented 
 us a completed and closed circuit of doctrinal formulas, practical 
 rules and ecclesiastical rubrics, have been glaringly manifest in 
 the Papal church with its doctrine of infallibility. Catholic 
 divines at this day are seriously discussing whether the proceed- 
 ings of the papacy against Galileo forbid good Catholics now to 
 teach the Copernican astronomy. St. George Mivart tells us 
 that a much esteemed priest, who often teaches from a London 
 pulpit, lately avowed his belief that the sun and the whole side- 
 real heavens do actually revolve round the earth every twenty- 
 four hours ; adding that it was his belief because he considered 
 that the church was committed to that belief by its decision re- 
 specting Galileo. On the other hand Mivart says he has often 
 heard it said : " How providential was that divine influence 
 which guarded the Pope from addressing to the universal church 
 any decree formally excommunicating all adherents of Coperni- 
 canism thenceforth for all time." 1 And another very excellent 
 priest exclaimed to him : " How glorious it would be if it should 
 turn out after all that the sun did move round the earth, and 
 that therefore the church had been all this time in the right 
 about the matter." 
 
 It is the essence of Christianity that it is the glad tidings of 
 God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself; that the 
 power of God in Christ is ever in it through the divine Spirit; 
 that it is the living and ever present power of God unto salva- 
 tion ; that therefore its principles are not lifeless crystals, formed 
 1 Nineteenth Century, July, 1885, pp. 35, 36, 38. 
 
532 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 with mathematical exactness, but germs of life ; that its divine 
 iight and life and power, forever unchanged, adapt themselves to 
 men in all conditions, are in advance of all moral and spiritual 
 progress, and take up. vitalize and apply all truth respecting 
 God and his relations to men which the religions and religious 
 philosophies of men have brought to light. And as thus compe- 
 tent to be the universal religion, the course of the ages has been 
 the continuous verification of Christianity. As to the individual 
 Christianity is its own attestation in the life of every one who 
 trusts and serves Christ, so to the human race Christianity is its 
 own attestation through the ages in the progress of the kingdom 
 of God. And we are justified in expecting that it will continue 
 thus to verify itself in all the progress of man in the future until 
 the kingdom of Christ is established over all the earth ; and in 
 the realization of practical Christianity in all human life and 
 institutions the demonstration of its divine character and origin 
 will be complete. Renan says at the close of The Life of Jesus : 
 * 4 This sublime man, who still presides each day over the history 
 of the world, it is allowed to call divine, not in the sense that 
 Jesus has absorbed all divinity, but that he has caused his race to 
 make the greatest advance toward the divine. From the common 
 level of mankind there rise pillars toward heaven, which attest 
 a nobler destiny. Jesus is the highest of these pillars. In him 
 is centred all that is good and exalted in our nature. Whatever 
 may be the unlooked for phenomena of the future, Jesus will 
 never be surpassed. His worship will grow young forever. All 
 ages will say that among the sons of men none has ever been 
 greater than Jesus." 
 
 III. UNITY OF LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL AND THE PHYS- 
 ICAL SYSTEMS. Does the continuity of God's action in the uni- 
 verse imply that the laws of the spiritual system and of the 
 physical are the same ? 
 
 1. In seeking an answer to this question we must have regard 
 to the following principles. 
 
 The factual arrangements and order of nature and the uniform 
 sequences commonly called its laws are in their essence variable 
 and transient, and cannot be universal laws extending over the 
 spiritual system. It is only the principles and laws of reason 
 which are every where and always the same. 
 
 Of these unchanging principles and laws some are in the 
 nature of things applicable only to the physical system, others 
 only to the spiritual or personal system. The mechanical law of 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE HEVELATION. 533 
 
 the accelerated motion of falling bodies is a mathematical law 
 universally true of bodies falling to the earth. But it has no 
 application to mental phenomena and is not a principle of the 
 moral law. The law of gravitation is not a law to the free 
 choices of the human will. Thought and volition cannot be 
 weighed. Mr. Spencer's attempt to develop the moral law from 
 the physical principle of the survival of the fittest is an example 
 of this misapplication of natural law to the moral system. On 
 the other hand the law of love is not a law to stones and trees 
 and snakes, nor to the physical energies of impersonal being. 
 The identity of all their laws is not essential to the unity and 
 continuity of the two systems in the universe. 
 
 As personal and impersonal beings are both finite, some prin- 
 ciples of reason pertaining to the existence and interaction of 
 finite beings must be laws to both systems. These we may 
 legitimately attempt to trace. 
 
 Another guiding principle is that in the order of dependence 
 the spiritual precedes the physical ; " in the beginning God." 
 It is the rational and spiritual that is revealed through the phys- 
 ical, not the physical which is revealed through the spiritual. 
 The factual sequences called laws of nature are not carried over 
 upon the spiritual system, like an inundation of mud, smothering 
 all spiritual life. And the unchanging rational principles and 
 laws which regulate the physical system do not originate in it 
 and thence pass over upon the rational and spiritual ; but they 
 originate in the latter and thence pass over and regulate the 
 physical. 
 
 The physical system is an expression or manifestation of the 
 thought not less than of the power of the absolute Reason. This 
 may be said to be the noumenon of which the physical universe 
 is the phenomenon. It is the reality which appears. Therefore 
 the physical universe is in its essence intelligible in all its parts. 
 It is an expression of the archetypal thought of the absolute 
 Reason an expression which, on account of the limitation of 
 the finite, is always progressive and always incomplete. The 
 subordination of the physical appears in the fact that the phys- 
 ical is symbolic of the rational. Mr. Spencer and Mr. Fisk< j , 
 when at the end of their analysis they reach matter or force, call 
 it a symbol. Their whole analysis is an analysis of symbols. 
 Matter and force are symbols of something which is not matter 
 nor force. The homogeneous itself is a symbol of a mysterious 
 Power behind it. This Power cannot be the Unknowable because 
 
534 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 it is manifested or revealed in the universe. What they really 
 find in nature is power revealing thought. It is the thought 
 of the universal Reason. This is the only true sense in which 
 physical things and forces are symbols. The subordination of 
 the physical to the spiritual system appears also in the fact that 
 the spiritual is the prius of the physical, from which it proceeds 
 and for which it exists. Even man, though implicated in nature, 
 is a lord of nature. While the ethnic religions regarded even the 
 gods as submerged in nature or identified with its powers, in the 
 opening of Genesis God is the creator, man has knowledge of 
 him, is under his law and appointed to have dominion over na- 
 ture and to use it. And this lordship over nature is realized in 
 Christ and by all men who are united with God by faith in him. 
 
 2. An example of a law of reason which extends over all finite 
 beings, whether in the physical system or the spiritual, is the law 
 that every beginning or change has a cause. 
 
 This law implies that the greater force must always prevail 
 over the less when they act against each other. The simplest 
 application of this law is to the impact of bodies in motion. 
 The one which has the greater momentum, as the product of its 
 mass and velocity, must prevail over one that has less. The 
 application of this becomes less easy as the arrangements of 
 nature become more complicated, and especially in organic and 
 conscious life. But in all complications the law of causation re- 
 mains true, and the greater power, or the power working at 
 greater advantage, must always prevail over the less when they 
 come into opposition. In the sphere of organic life this is the 
 law of the survival of the fittest. 
 
 This law implies also that a power which, developing its re- 
 sources to the utmost, remains inferior, cannot unaided lift itself 
 to equality with the superior. It must be elevated, if at all, by a 
 superior power. This is simply the law that every change must 
 have an adequate cause ; that that which is not, cannot make 
 itself into that which is ; that no being can lift itself above itself. 
 
 Let us now look at this law in its relation to the personal or 
 moral system. 
 
 The law prevails in the moral system. It is as true of spirit- 
 ual energy as it is of physical. The man who has the higher 
 constitutional endowment and is the better disciplined, trained 
 and educated for any line of action, other things being equal, must 
 prevail in competition with one who is inferior. It is strength 
 not weakness that achieves in the spiritual system not less than 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 535 
 
 in the physical. There must be power to command confidence. 
 It is not weakness but living energy that achieves the realization 
 of truth in the life of man. 
 
 This is not changed into moral law by the fact that it is a law 
 in the moral or spiritual system. It remains simply a law de- 
 claring what the factual action of power must be; the cause 
 must be adequate to the effect; the stronger must prevail over 
 the weaker, when they encounter. 
 
 In the moral or spiritual system, therefore, there are two 
 planes of law ; law in both is law in its deepest significance as 
 unchanging principles of reason in distinction from mere uniform 
 factual sequence. Law in the lower plane is a principle of rea- 
 son declaring what must be the action of power. Law in the 
 higher plane is a law of reason declaring what ought to be the 
 action of a free moral agent directing and exerting his energy in 
 the light of reason. The law of the survival of the fittest is law 
 in the lower plane. The law of love to God and man is the law 
 in the higher plane. 
 
 These two laws, being in different planes, cannot be in con- 
 tradiction, as two straight lines in parallel planes cannot meet. 
 There is certainly nothing immoral in the doctrine that a cause 
 must be adequate to its effect, or that ten pounds cannot balance 
 twenty, or that when two forces encounter, the stronger must 
 prevail. The law of the survival of the fittest declares merely 
 what must result when a stronger force encounters a weaker. It 
 is no more in conflict with the moral law than is the multipli- 
 cation table. Contradiction arises only when law in the lower 
 plane is taken for the universal and supreme law and it is at- 
 tempted to evolve the moral law from it. 
 
 This law in the lower plane is also a fact important to be 
 taken into consideration in determining in any particular case 
 what duty is. When a person sees that the strong must prevail 
 in collision or competition with the weak, he finds himself in a 
 universe in which power always tells. He sees therefore that 
 since he is capable of disciplining, training and developing him- 
 self, he ought to make the most of his opportunities and powers ; 
 to acquire force of character, skill, strength and self-command. 
 It is the law of energetic self-development overriding and subdu- 
 ing the desire for a life of ease and luxurious self-indulgence, 
 He sees also that if there is no law but the might of the strongest, 
 the weaker must go under in the fierce competition of selfish life. 
 Under the law of love he sees that he and every man ought to 
 
536 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 use his strength to help the weak. The higher ought to go down 
 to the lower to lift it up. And because the law of the survival 
 of the fittest is inexorable and unchangeable, he sees that the 
 only effectual way to help the weak is to help them to learn how 
 to help themselves, to develop themselves and make the most of 
 their powers. And when all men obey the law of love and guide 
 their loving action with due regard to the fixed physical laws in 
 the lower plane, then the wretchedness and debasement attendant 
 on the inequalities of human life will pass away. 
 
 Thus the physical law itself, destructive to the weak under the 
 action of selfishness, is helpful in effecting the best moral results 
 under the action of universal love. 
 
 A person seeing himself in relation to his fellow-men and to 
 God in the unity of a system, knows himself under obligation to 
 use his strength and skill, not in the service of himself alone, but 
 of all in their relations to himself and one another in the system. 
 If he has superior power he is under obligation to use it, not to 
 compel the unrequited service of inferiors, but co serve them, to 
 help them to rise. He is not to live to be ministered unto, but 
 to minister. The law is, Greatness for service. 
 
 In this service of love, the Christian, seemingly in spite of 
 himself, is in the way of most effectually developing himself to 
 realize the highest possibilities of his own being. 
 
 In this also he is securing his greatest influence among men. 
 In every sphere of human action, especially in great emergen- 
 cies, history has always shown the need of men of strength and 
 wisdom to be leaders and commanders of the people. In a ship- 
 wreck or a railroad accident, he who retains his self-possession 
 and knows what ought to be done, takes command of the fright- 
 ened company and they do what he bids. So in the greater 
 emergencies of history, when the man of power equal to the 
 emergency appears, the leadership is his. The same holds true 
 in the kingdom of Christ. Whoever by entire consecration and 
 effective service makes himself indispensable, is a bishop, a Chris- 
 tian king of men by divine right. 
 
 Thus both in his own self-development and in acquiring influ- 
 ence over others, the law of greatness for service reveals itself to 
 be also the law of greatness by service. And by the same law 
 the selfish misuse of knowledge and power is precluded. 
 
 Here the law of the survival of the fittest reappears, regener- 
 ated by faith in the God in Christ and by the love of God and 
 man. Man realizes his highest greatness and power in the life 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 537 
 
 of service in love. Love is the mightiest of powers and prevails 
 over all. It is still the strong who prevail over the weak, not 
 by crowding them out of existence, but by purifying them from, 
 ignorance, error and sin, bringing them into submission to the 
 law of love and into harmony with it, and thereby developing 
 them also and making them strong in God. 
 
 But here is something widely different from the law of the 
 correlation and conservation of force which prevails in the phys- 
 ical system. The giving does not impoverish. The expenditure 
 of spiritual energy only increases it. This is our Lord's princi- 
 ple : " He that findeth his life shall lose it ; and he that loseth 
 his life for my sake shall find it." 
 
 What has been said is accordant with the historical progress 
 of man. In the ruder ages men honored physical strength, which 
 to them stood for all greatness and commanded honor, trust and 
 allegiance. As society advanced, naked strength was clothed with 
 intelligence, and intellectual prowess rose to the highest honor. 
 By the invention of gunpowder the weakest and foolishest at 
 ten feet distance is on a level with the strongest and wisest and 
 even commands him. And by innumerable inventions men are 
 brought to a level in their power of production, and the indi- 
 vidual superiority of physical or intellectual power is lessened. 
 But the power which grows and strengthens in the life of love 
 can never be lessened. The world at large has yet to learn the 
 secret, which Christ taught, of gaining power by expending, of 
 finding life by losing it. The high place of honor which in the 
 earlier ages was given to muscular strength and in later times 
 'to intellectual power, must in the better future be given to the 
 moral power of love, to moral and spiritual greatness. Then phys- 
 ical strength and intellectual power, under the presidency of love 
 and quickened and guided by it, will not be less but greater. 
 Then only in the complete harmony of his being man will attain 
 also the highest and best physical and intellectual development. 
 Man's true progress consists in developing spiritual power to con- 
 trol and direct physical force. The progress of Christian civil- 
 ization is marked by increasing reliance on the power of truth, 
 righteousness and good-will, and a proportionally lessening reli- 
 ance on force and violence. 
 
 Mr. Spencer teaches that by the mere physical law of evolu- 
 tion, the survival of the fittest, men who most fully lead lives of 
 righteousness and good-will must have the greater advantage and 
 power and must survive as the fittest ; and thus in the future a 
 
538 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 race of men will be evolved who will find the same enjoyment in 
 serving others as themselves and will be as naturally impelled to 
 it, and there will be a universal reign of love. We welcome his 
 testimony that love is the mightiest of powers ; that the universe 
 shows to scientific observation that it is best for every man to 
 live as if the law of love was supreme ; and that the universe is 
 so constituted that in its actual evolution it has produced a race 
 of rational and moral beings and hereafter must culminate in 
 bringing in the universal reign of love. This accords with Chris- 
 tian ethics and theological teleology. His error is in attempting 
 to develop altruism from egoism, a moral law and system from 
 the mere mechanical principle of the survival of the fittest, that 
 the stronger must prevail in conflict with the weaker. This is 
 impossible, because the only moral law which can be derived from 
 this principle is the law that might makes right; because the 
 physical evolution of men amiable by nature cannot give the idea 
 of obligation and law, of right and wrong, but only of natural 
 impulse and enjoyment ; and because experience shows that the 
 physical law without the moral cannot give the true wellbeing 
 of man. 
 
 The Economics, prevalent since Adam Smith wrote, rests on 
 the principle that unlimited competition springing from self- 
 interest is sufficient to regulate aright all industry in the pro- 
 duction and distribution of wealth. It is in fact only a peculiar 
 application of the law of the survival of the fittest. Accord- 
 ingly Mr. Spencer' has been issuing his warning against legisla- 
 tion regulating work in factories or elsewhere and protecting the 
 workers. But a study of the history of the laissez-faire theory 
 presents facts in abundance to prove that it fails to protect the 
 weak, to secure just and easy relations between capital and labor, 
 and to secure the more equal distribution of wealth ; that it 
 weakens respect for man as the ultimate end of industry and de- 
 grades him into a mere instrument of wealth, as if the man were 
 of less worth than the product of his work and might be sacri- 
 ficed to increase it; and that it develops the all-consuming greed 
 for wealth. 
 
 Doubtless the law of love, isolated from the physical law, has 
 led to mistaken and pernicious charity. Yet it has at least pre- 
 served the love, more precious than gold. And the righteousness 
 and benevolence exercised in accordance with that law are indis- 
 pensable to the development of a true and perfect humanity and 
 of a strong and enduring state. In many ways society must help 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE KEVELATION. 539 
 
 the weak ; and the best wisdom of the people should be employed 
 in devising the safest and most effective means of doing it. The 
 higher must go down to the lower to lift it up. 
 
 We have seen that it is a fixed law, both in the physical sys- 
 tem and the spiritual, that a being cannot lift itself above itself. 
 In accordance with this law of all finite energy, the law of love 
 in the moral system requires the stronger to help the weaker, the 
 higher to go down to the lower to raise it up. 
 
 " Unless above himself he can erect himself, 
 How poor a thing is man." 
 
 God in Christ comes to him with quickening spiritual influences ; 
 and the man laying hold of the divine grace in faith receives the 
 quickening energy of the Spirit of God and by it lifts himself 
 into a new and higher life. 
 
 The coming of God in Christ reconciling sinners to himself 
 sets forth the fundamental law of the universe ; the higher is to 
 go down to the lower to help and strengthen it to rise. This is 
 the law of love, disclosed in Christ who came not to be ministered 
 unto but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many, who 
 requires of his followers greatness for service and assures them 
 of greatness by service. He himself descended and therefore 
 ascended. 1 And as this is the law of love, the fundamental law 
 of the moral system, so it is accordant with the fundamental law 
 of all finite energy, the law of causation, that no being can lift 
 itself above itself. 
 
 In this law we see the continuity of God's action in the uni- 
 verse, the highest ever going down to the lowest to lift it up. 
 God is continually in the evolution of the universe preparing 
 the lower to be the medium for the manifestation of something 
 higher. Thus the evolution is God's ever greatening revelation of 
 himself. At the great epochs in the evolution he infuses into the 
 finite, so soon as it is prepared to receive and manifest it, a new 
 and higher power, beginning a new and higher stage of exist- 
 ence. At every such epoch a miracle-working power is revealed, 
 producing what transcends all which had previously appeared. 
 So in the spiritual sphere God comes into humanity in Christ, 
 making an epoch in the history of man, putting into humanity a 
 new spiritual power of redemption transcending all that had been 
 in it before. Thus Christ, as the New Testament represents it, 
 becomes a new head of the human race, the head of a spiritual 
 race, born anew of the Spirit of God. This epochal action of God 
 1 Eph. chap. iv. 8, 9. 
 
640 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 in Christ is in accordance with the continuity of God's action in 
 the universe, the higher going down to the lower and lifting it 
 up; and, as the lower becomes fitted to receive the higher, in suc- 
 cessive epochs revealing a higher power of God which lifts the 
 universe to higher planes of existence ; first, the physical through 
 successive epochs ; then the great epoch in which, in and from 
 the physical, the spiritual system emerges ; then the spiritual 
 through successive epochs of education and redemption, culmi- 
 nating in Christ ; and looking forward prophetically to the new 
 heavens and the new earth and the heavenly glory in the final 
 coming of Christ. And the epochs in the evolution of the phys- 
 ical system are as really miraculous as the coming of Christ and 
 other epochs in the spiritual system. And the latter are the con- 
 tinuance in the higher spiritual system of the revelation of God 
 beginning in the physical system. And instead of being, as 
 miraculous, foreign to the course of human development, the 
 coming of God in Christ and the redemption of men by him are 
 the key to the history of humanity, revealing its source, its law, 
 its relation to God, its true end and the way of attaining it. 
 When Christ girded himself with a towel and washed his disci- 
 ples' feet, that menial act was sublime and godlike. It was the 
 higher stooping to the lower, the divine to the human to raise it 
 up. It set forth the fundamental law of the universe. 
 
 Thus the law of the survival of the fittest is a principle of 
 reason, which is law both in the spiritual and the physical sys- 
 tems. A being cannot lift itself above itself. Accordingly God 
 revealing himself in the finite is always, as in his revelation in 
 Christ, the higher going down to the lower to lift it up. And 
 this is what the law of love requires. This higher law of love, 
 binding on moral beings, does not annul or contradict the law of 
 the survival of the fittest. It recognizes it as a fact in the law 
 of greatness for service, exemplified in Christ " taking the form 
 of a servant." It finds it also as a fact, in the law of greatness 
 by service, set forth in the exaltation of Christ. By his self- 
 sacrificing love for men he is exalted to reign in the hearts and 
 to receive the loving service of all who know him. Therefore 
 his is the name which is above every name, that in the name of 
 Jesus every knee should bow. Thus while the law of the sur- 
 vival of the fittest is. law both in the physical and the spiritual 
 systems, it remains merely the law of prevailing might. As such 
 it cannot contradict the law of love ; and it is equally true that 
 it can never be identified with the law of love nor developed into 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 541 
 
 it. On the contrary, if made the principle of moral law, it 
 directly contradicts the law of love. The Economics, which 
 excludes the law of love from human industry and business and 
 constructs its theory wholly on the physical law of the survival 
 of the fittest, is indeed "the dismal science." And so is every 
 proposed science of the significance and destiny of humanity and 
 of the realization of the highest wellbeing of man, without the 
 Christ. 
 
 3. A second example of a law common to all finite beings, 
 personal and impersonal, is the law of reception and production, 
 or, in one word, the law of dependence. The action of a finite 
 being must be either reception or production, and the reception 
 must precede the production. God alone can produce without 
 previously receiving. 
 
 This is a law of mechanics. A machine can do its work only 
 as it receives power from without itself. It is a law of organic 
 life. Every living organism is implanted in its environment and 
 sustained and fed from it. Every plant is a centre on which 
 all cosmic powers concentre their service to nourish and quicken 
 its growth and productiveness. The sun, the earth, the air, the 
 waters minister to it. Light, heat, electricity, chemical affinities, 
 gravitation work on it diligently every hour to develop it and 
 perfect its fruit. It is a law of the human body. A man boasts 
 of his strength, but a brief privation of food destroys it ; and he 
 is also receiving from the air, the sun, the earth, from electricity 
 and other cosmic agencies. It is a law of our social life. Every 
 one receives his life from parents ; and in the earlier life of the 
 child it is still enveloped in the life of the parents. In all things 
 we depend on others. Our table is spread with what other hands, 
 some of them working perhaps on other continents, have produced, 
 brought to our doors and prepared for our use. The division of 
 labor implies our reception from others and our faith and trust in 
 them. All our secular life is by faith as really as our religious 
 life. Faith is the bond of society, its cohesive attraction. With- 
 out it society would be disintegrated in anarchy and man would 
 degenerate into something worse than savagery. 
 
 Christ recognizes the same law in the moral system. Man in 
 his spiritual life is dependent on his spiritual environment, as 
 in his animal life on his physical environment. His spiritual 
 environment is, first of all, God "in whom we live and move and 
 have our being." 
 
 In the spiritual system the law of dependence is the law that a 
 
542 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 man can live a right spiritual life only by faith in God ; that all 
 right works must be done in faith. Faith in God is the receptive 
 action corresponding to man's weakness, dependence and need. 
 His active and productive energy, his works, correspond to his 
 freedom, power and obligation. But he is productive in good 
 works only as he is continually receptive of the divine influences. 
 
 Christianity assumes that union with God by faith is man's 
 normal condition. As a finite creature he is always dependent 
 on God. He is free to choose the ends to which he will direct 
 his action and exert his energies at will ; but as a finite creature 
 his freedom does not lift him out of his dependence on God. He 
 can live aright, he can realize the highest possibilities of his being 
 as a man, only as he willingly trusts in God, in the recognition 
 of his dependence on him, and thus comes into his normal con- 
 dition in union with God. God acts graciously on and in him 
 with spiritual influence ; the man willingly receives the divine in- 
 fluence and in harmony with it follows the divine drawing, work- 
 ing together with God. Instead of this being incompatible with 
 man's freedom, it is essential to the exertion of his highest power 
 for good, to his attaining his true perfection and well-being and 
 abiding in his normal condition. This willing trust in God is 
 faith. All right living on the part of man must be by faith in 
 God. This is so not merely because he is a sinner, but because he 
 is a creature and dependent on God. Angels in heaven must live 
 by faith as really as men. And Christianity not only assumes that 
 this union of man with God by faith is man's normal condition, 
 but in its peculiar revelation of God in Christ, the Redeemer, un- 
 folds the rich significance of the fact as no other religion does. 
 
 Christ illustrates this law of faith by the union of a branch 
 with the vine. It must abide in the vine arid continuously re- 
 ceive nourishment from it or it withers. Man in his normal 
 condition is implanted in God and receives continuously his life- 
 giving influence. If by his own free act he closes the avenues of 
 communication from God and attempts to live in self-sufficiency, 
 his spiritual productiveness ceases and his spiritual life withers. 
 
 And this reveals the essential and deepest significance of sin. It 
 is the soul's separating itself by its own free action from God and 
 setting up for itself in self-sufficiency, shutting out the heavenly 
 influences on which the right spiritual life and its productiveness 
 depend. In sinning, man repudiates his condition as a creature, 
 absolves himself from dependence on God and obligation to him, 
 and in his self-sufficiency and self-will, his self-seeking and self- 
 glorifyingi undertakes to produce without receiving. 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 543 
 
 Here we see the fundamental reality recognized in the law of 
 life and justification by faith. A created being can live and de- 
 velop himself aright only by recognizing his dependence on God 
 and trusting in him. Otherwise he acts in contradiction to the 
 deepest reality of his being. Much more, if a sinner is to be saved 
 from sin, it is possible only by his returning to God in faith, only 
 as putting his trust in God he renounces his self-sufficiency, and 
 in the consciousness of dependence and need opens his heart to 
 receive not only God's gracious and free forgiveness but also his 
 heavenly influences, and to live and grow and become fruitful 
 and productive by receiving God's grace and love ; for in a 
 rational free moral agent the .reception cannot be passive, but is 
 possible only by man's free choice. 
 
 Only the love, which trusts God and receives spiritual quicken- 
 ing and nourishment from him, becomes the love which obeys 
 and serves, strong and productive in all works of righteousness 
 and good-will. 
 
 The choice of God as the supreme object of trust is inevitably 
 the choice of him as the supreme object of obedience and ser- 
 vice. Filial trust is filial love. The consciousness of dependence 
 on God is not, as Schleiermacher would have it, consciousness 
 merely of dependence. God is the absolute Reason, perfect in 
 wisdom and love. Man also is reason like God. His trust is a 
 free and rational act, trusting God as he reveals himself our 
 righteous lawgiver and judge, our father, and name above 
 every name our Redeemer. We live by being loved. We 
 strike our roots into the hearts of our loved ones and suck into 
 our lives their richest affections. So in trust we strike our roots 
 into the heart of God and receive into our lives the richness of 
 his love. But trust like this must issue in filial obedience and 
 willing service. The act of trust or receptivity is faith ; the acts 
 of obedience, service, productivity, are works ; and faith working 
 is love. We commonly think of Paul as feeling himself debtor 
 to all men, as living in the intensest energy of self-forgetful love. 
 Yet we find him drawing his spiritual strength from God's love : 
 " The life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith 
 which is in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for 
 me." 
 
 By sin man has sundered the bond of his union with God, and 
 it is only by being restored to this union that he can be saved 
 from sin and condemnation. But this reunion can be consum- 
 mated only as God in Christ redeems men from sin and in the 
 
544 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Spirit brings the influences of his grace upon men, and only as 
 men lay hold on God in filial trust and willingly receive all the in- 
 fluence of his redeeming grace. Thenceforward the divine Light, 
 Life and Love penetrate, pervade and nourish the recipient soul, 
 as the sunshine, air and rain and all cosmic forces penetrate, 
 pervade and nourish the growing plant, and the believer attains 
 " unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the 
 fulness of Christ." He continues always to receive and assimilate 
 the divine communications as the bread and the water of life, the 
 pure milk of the word, and thus is nourished and strengthened 
 for service and productivity in all Christlike work in and for the 
 kingdom of God. 
 
 And this is the result accomplished by Christ in redeeming 
 men. Overpowered in his earthly life and slain by the men 
 whom he came to save, he rose again from the grave triumphing 
 over death, man's last enemy, and opening to his redeemed per- 
 fection and blessedness in immortal life. In the completed union 
 of the divine and the human in himself, Christ, the glorified 
 Head of redeemed and renovated humanity, reigns at the right 
 hand of the Majesty on high, and from him proceed unseen the 
 divine Light and Life and Love, in the Holy Spirit, to all man- 
 kind ; the kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the 
 Holy Spirit comes to all and opens itself to every one who is 
 willing to receive the grace and enter his service and kingdom. 
 It is the work of the Spirit to bring on men the influences and 
 energies of Christ's redemption. When under these divine in- 
 fluences a sinful soul is quickened and guided to Christ, and in 
 filial trust receives him as he is offered in the gospel, then the 
 separating gulf is crossed and the sinner is restored to his normal 
 condition in union with God and begins the new and spiritual 
 life. This is the beginning of the new life described in the 
 Scriptures as being born anew of .the Spirit, quickened from 
 death to life, created anew in Christ, and by many other re- 
 markable representations of the reality of the new beginning and 
 the greatness of the change. Thenceforward the believer, held 
 firmly in union with God by God's grace and his own free and 
 willing trust, continues in spiritual growth toward the complete 
 likeness to Christ, the perfect man. 
 
 We see, then, that the doctrine of justification by faith is not 
 an arbitrary requirement ; but faith is the necessary condition of 
 a right life for every finite person, and preeminently necessary 
 to the justification of a sinner, who by his sin is separated from 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 545 
 
 God and cannot be restored to union with him any otherwise 
 than by trusting God in Christ and willingly receiving his grace 
 as it is offered in the gospel and brought to men in the Holy 
 Spirit. 
 
 Hence the common objection, that a man must be justified be- 
 fore God by right character and not by faith, and that the doc- 
 trine of justification by faith implies a letting down of the au- 
 thority of law and of the obligation to obedience, is groundless 
 and. without force. There is no antagonism nor even antithesis 
 between justification by faitli and justification by right character. 
 Justification is always conditioned on right character. Chris- 
 tianity affirms this : " Ye must be born again." " Follow after 
 the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord." 
 Reason affirms the same. God cannot justify one who persists in 
 sin. Such justification would be immoral in itself and of immoral 
 tendency. But in fact justification conditioned on faith is itself 
 justification on condition of right character. Faith is the only 
 possible beginning of right character, and must be through life 
 the continuous and vitalizing support of all right character and 
 of all good works. In trusting God in Christ the communica- 
 tion with God is reopened. The divine and spiritual influences 
 begin to pour into the soul. And though the man is not yet de- 
 livered from all remaining corruption and evil, yet the new life 
 is begun, and the man is accepted as born anew by his reunion 
 with God ; and by continued faith the new life will pervade his 
 whole being and restore him to the likeness of God and make 
 him productive in God's service. So a scion cut from a tree, as 
 soon as it reopens communication with the tree by being grafted 
 in again, begins to receive of the life of the tree and is reinstated 
 at once a living branch. For a time only a leaf or two may 
 appear, and part of it, dried and dead, may be dropped off with 
 the continued pouring in of the life of the tree. But the connec- 
 tion with the life-giving tree is restored, and after a while we 
 find it a thrifty, growing branch, rich with leaves and new 
 branches and fruit. 
 
 Thus the very fact of justification by faith is itself a reaffirma- 
 tion of the authority and immutability of God's law. It reveals 
 that God even in his redeeming grace cannot accept and justify 
 a sinner who is persisting in sin ; that the great gulf of separa- 
 tion between God and the sinner must be crossed by the sinner 
 before he can be accepted, and he can cross it only as in filial 
 trust he lays hold of God's gracious hand extended for his rescue. 
 
 35 
 
546 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 Thus the Christian doctrine of justification by faith is necessarily 
 the doctrine of all true philosophy and of all true theology, the 
 belief and hope of all true religion. It is grounded on the fact 
 that a created and finite being cannot live aright except in recog- 
 nition of his dependence on God and in continuous trust in him, 
 and that a sinner cannot begin the new and right life except by 
 trusting in God, coming to him in his redeeming grace, and open- 
 ing his heart to receive his illuminating, quickening and renovat- 
 ing influence. And, conversely, work in the lowest calling done 
 in humble trust in God is accepted of him and has the dignity of 
 true Christian service. 
 
 Thus the law that faith works by love and without faith no 
 one can be justified before God, is the application in the spiritual 
 system of the law that reception must precede production, which 
 is the law of all finite energy. 
 
 IV. OBJECTIONS. Two objections remain to be considered. 
 
 1. One objection now often urged is, that it is impossible for 
 Christian theism to bring into a synthesis with itself the immense 
 and varied scientific knowledge, and the intense and diversified 
 activity both speculative and practical which characterize our 
 modern life. No one has presented this objection more forcibly 
 than Mr. Harrison. " Theology lias had periods of wonderful 
 energy. . . . But what can monotheism do now to vitalize and 
 discipline the intellect, absorbed as it is in its deepest struggle 
 with science, fact, history and common sense ? . . . On its own 
 confession it is quite unable to systemize the logic of modern 
 thought, to disentangle the accumulated masses of modern 
 knowledge. . . . Now, since science has surrounded our lives 
 with such a concurrent mass of correlated law, and this sense of 
 law is so wide-spread and familiar to the daily thought of the 
 most ignorant ; now, since our social existence is so developed 
 and has so clothed with noble colors the free resources of man's 
 manifold powers, now it is simply impossible to find the crea- 
 tor in every thought, God in every act. The most mystical of 
 theologians, the most austere of devotees does not ask us to do 
 so. Common sense is too overwhelming to be resisted. The 
 Pope alone holds out and discharges a syllabus now and then. 
 But bishops, priests and deacons, for the most part, sweep the- 
 ology away from the whole field of systematic thought and active 
 life. All we ask, say they, as sensible theologians, is to reserve 
 the idea of God and the scheme of man's salvation for the hours 
 that are given to meditation and prayer, to the spiritual sphere 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 547 
 
 alone. . . . Where is the man who can honestly say, looking 
 around on the vast accumulation of modern knowledge, that he 
 coordinates all his thought around the image of God ; that the 
 idea of God gives him a rational theory of all his acquirements, 
 that he thinks for the service of God and can see that service ful- 
 filled in every thought ? Or who can say in the whirl of our 
 modern industrial activity, that he works and toils for God, that 
 God is the natural object of all human labor, that each product 
 of his hands is a new offering to his creator's wellbeing, that it 
 is a comfort and a use to an omnipresent providence ? Who can 
 utter any one of these phrases in a literal sense, in any but a 
 sophistical and hysterical way ? " l 
 
 In reply to this objection, it is only necessary to expose its mis- 
 apprehensions of what Christian Theism is. 
 
 As to the closing questions, men in the ruder conditions of so- 
 ciety are supposed to have believed that their sacrifices were food 
 to their god and an " offering to his wellbeing," and their service 
 " a comfort and use " to him. But it is surprising that an intel- 
 ligent man should attribute to Christianity a belief utterly foreign 
 to it and from which, as history, doctrine and life, it is at the far- 
 thest possible remove. We must turn on Mr. Harrison his own 
 inquiry, Who could utter any one of these questions, " in any but 
 a sophistical and hysterical way ? " 
 
 It is also a surprising misapprehension that Christianity in its 
 true essence is in contradiction to science and the normal develop- 
 ment of life in modern civilization ; that all theologians except 
 the Pope acknowledge this ineradicable contradiction ; and that 
 all "sensible theologians" conceive of religion and the spiritual 
 life as limited to the hours of meditation and prayer, and, ac- 
 knowledging the contradiction between religion and man's intel- 
 lectual and practical life to be real and ineradicable, hide their 
 eyes from it by declaring the absolute separation of religion from 
 the scientific and the actual life of men ; thus reviving the opin- 
 ion attributed to mediaeval scholasticism, that what is true in 
 philosophy may be false in theology. It is not denied that some 
 theologians have made unwise concessions, and thus have unwit- 
 tingly abandoned positions important to the defense of Christian- 
 ity. But that there is a necessary contradiction between true 
 Christianity and science and the real progress of man, and that 
 this is now commonly admitted by theologians, is a surprising 
 misapprehension of the facts. 
 
 1 Fred. Harrison: Creeds; Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1880. 
 
548 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 And as to the alleged withdrawal of religion from actual life, 
 the contrary is true. The most distinctive characteristic of the 
 Christianity of this age in all branches of the church is its hu- 
 man itarianism, its application of Christianity to the removal of 
 abuses, the reformation of men, the progressive improvement of 
 society in all spheres of human action. It is thus coming nearer 
 to the original ideal in Christ, who, earnest and frequent in wor- 
 ship and prayer, alone, socially and in public assemblies, yet 
 lived among men and went about doing good. 
 
 As to the " wide-spread sense of law," it certainly is not true 
 that Christian theologians concede that there is any contradiction 
 between Christianity and law. The ground taken by Christian 
 writers in defense of Christianity is, that the miraculous element 
 in it, instead of setting aside law, is itself a revelation of law in 
 a more profound significance than the factual uniformity of se- 
 quences, which in empirical science are often supposed to exhaust 
 the whole significance of the word. 
 
 If to "find the creator in every thought, God in every act," 
 means that in every thought and act God is at the moment in 
 the consciousness, the demand is puerile and unreasonable. But 
 so much as this at least is true that we may by thinking " find " 
 God in every thought and act ; that is, when we are seeking to ex- 
 plain either the course of nature or the course of human thought 
 and action, at whatever point in either of them we begin our in- 
 quiries, we are necessarily carried back to God for its ultimate 
 rationale and ground. All science, whether empirical or philo- 
 sophical, rests ultimately on the truth that God, the absolute and 
 universal Reason, exists. 
 
 Mr. Harrison holds an exceedingly narrow and erroneous view 
 of what the Christian religion is ; consequently his objection, that 
 it cannot take up into harmony with itself the thought and life 
 of modern civilization, has no pertinence against Christianity 
 rightly understood. His error in its general tenor is, that accord- 
 ing to Christianity the religious life is limited to meditation and 
 worship ; that all knowledge of the universe is found in the Bible, 
 nnd that whatever science discovers, which is not taught in the 
 Bible, cannot be brought within the pale of Christian thought 
 and feeling, and thus is irreconcilable with Christianity; that the 
 Christian's trust in God's providential and gracious care assumes 
 a direct interference of God in his behalf, which is at once favor- 
 itism to him as an individual and a breach of the uniformity and 
 continuity of the ongoing of the universe ; that so long as eclipses 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 549 
 
 were supposed to be effected by the direct action of supernatural 
 beings they properly awakened religious emotion, but now that 
 their scientific law is known, religion has no more concern with 
 them ; arid, in a word, that as one phenomenon after another is 
 found to be accordant with physical laws, it passes away from the 
 sphere of religion. Only when it is assumed, as it is by Mr. Harri- 
 son, that science will account for all phenomena by physical force 
 acting according to physical laws, are God and religion excluded 
 from the whole range of human thought, feeling and action. 
 
 This narrow conception of religion is strikingly exemplified by 
 Mr. Hamerton: "If I had to condense . . . the reasons why we 
 are apparently becoming less religious, I should say that it is 
 because knowledge and feeling, embodied or expressed in the 
 sciences and the arts, are now too fully and variously developed 
 to remain within the limits of what is considered sacred knowl- 
 edge or religious emotion. It was possible for them to remain 
 within these limits in ancient times, and it is still possible for a 
 mind of very limited activity and range to dwell almost entirely 
 in what was known or felt in the time of Christ ; but this is not 
 possible for an energetic and inquiring mind ; and the conse- 
 quence is that the energetic mind will seem to the other to be 
 negligent of holy things and too much occupied with merely sec- 
 ular interests and concerns." And after speaking of the discov- 
 ery of the physical cause of an eclipse, he says : " Exactly the 
 same process is going on in regard to thousands of other phenom- 
 ena which are one by one, yet with increasing rapidity, ceasing to 
 be regarded as special manifestations of the divine will, and begin- 
 ning to be regarded as part of that order of nature with which* 
 to quote Prof. Huxley's significant language, ' nothing interferes.' 
 Every one of these transferences from supernatural government 
 to natural order deprives the religious sentiment of one special 
 cause or motive for its own peculiar kind of emotion, so that we 
 are becoming less and less accustomed to such emotion (as the 
 opportunities for it become less frequent), and more and more 
 accustomed to accept events and phenomena of all kinds as in 
 that order of nature 4 with which nothing interferes.' The philos- 
 opher says : 4 If you are prudent and skilful in your conform- 
 ity to the laws of life you will probably secure that amount of 
 mental and physical satisfaction which is attainable by a per- 
 son of your organization.' The priest holds a very different lan- 
 guage ; the use of the one word love gives warmth and color to 
 his discourse. He says : 4 If you love God with all your soul and 
 
550 THE SELF-KEVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 all your strength, he will love and cherish you in return, and be 
 your own true and tender Father.' "* Thus science and religion 
 are assumed to be in their essential significance contradictory and 
 reciprocally exclusive ; and it is assumed that if the universe is 
 orderly and continuous under law, all love and wisdom must be 
 excluded from the power that controls it and is revealed in it. 
 
 I have dwelt at some length on these misconceptions because 
 they exemplify the fact that, when our new llluminati write 
 against Christianity, they commonly disclose dense ignorance of 
 what it is, both as set forth in Christ and the New Testament 
 and as actually held in the common Christian belief. 2 
 
 These misrepresentations need no further discussion ; for they 
 have been sufficiently exposed in the presentation and defense of 
 Christian theism in this volume. On the contrary, Christianity 
 is in harmony with all science and its practical applications in the 
 progress of civilization, and is able to comprehend it all in a unity 
 of thought as the ever progressive revelation of God, and in a 
 unity of life by the consecration of all the discoveries, resources 
 and energies of civilization to the service of God in the advance- 
 ment of Christ's kingdom of truth, righteousness and good-will 
 among men. 
 
 2. The greatness of redemption is urged as an objection 
 against it. 
 
 It is said that since science has revealed the vastness of the uni- 
 verse, it is unreasonable to suppose that God would have done so 
 great a work to redeem from sin men on this earth, when the earth 
 itself is but a speck in the immensity of space and amid innumer- 
 able planets, suns and systems. This is now one of the common 
 objections of unbelief. 3 But formidable as it has seemed, it takes 
 
 1 Philip Gilbert Hamerton ; Human Intercourse, Essays, xiii. xiv. xv. pp. 
 213, 217, 178. 
 
 2 Mr. Spencer and Mr. J. S. Mill, repeatedly exemplify this in their criti- 
 cisms of Christianity. The same is true of many others who criticise Chris- 
 tianity as contradicting modern thought and hindering the normal development 
 of life. If their statements of fact on other subjects are no more correct than 
 their representations of Christianity, they are blind guides in every sphere of 
 thought. 
 
 3 Daniel Webster had been troubled with this objection. About two weeks 
 before his death he dictated, and afterwards revised and with his own hand 
 copied and signed, the following declaration, which he said was to be engraved 
 on his tombstone: " Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Philosophical 
 argument, especially that from the vastness of the universe as compared with 
 the comparative insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason 
 for the faith that is in me; but my heart has assured and reassured me that 
 
UNITY AND CONTINUITY OF THE REVELATION. 551 
 
 but little thought to show that it is entirely unreasonable and 
 void of force. 
 
 The first answer is that here again the objection derives all its 
 force from the false assumption that the physical system compre- 
 hends all. When a man contemplates the vastness of the phys- 
 ical system and considers himself as a physical organization con- 
 nected only with the material system, he must be impressed with 
 his own littleness and insignificance. But when he considers the 
 system of rational and immortal persons, opening through suc- 
 cessive epochs in vistas of endless progress, and when he consid- 
 ers himself as in this system, one of the immortals, under the care 
 of God, communing with him and the object of his redeeming 
 love, then he must be impressed with the greatness of man. And 
 the grander the system is and the more glorious its destiny, the 
 grander is the man. Man considered as belonging to the physi- 
 cal system only is belittled by its greatness. Man considered as 
 belonging to the rational and spiritual system is greatened and 
 ennobled by its greatness. The revelation of God by his action 
 in the spiritual system must be commensurate with the grandeur 
 of the system and of the rational ends possible in it. 
 
 A further answer is that whatever God does, be it great or 
 little in itself, he will do it like God, not after a human measure 
 but after the divine. The thing produced may be little, but in it 
 will be revealed the greatness of the God who made it. Hence 
 in everything is a door which opens into the infinite. If we study 
 a blade of grass, or a pebble, or a ray of light, or an electric spark, 
 we soon come to questions which science cannot answer and which 
 bring us face to face with God. The mystery in everything is 
 the finger-print of the infinite hand that made it. Christ says 
 that God cares for a sparrow. If you study the sparrow, you 
 must master the whole encyclopaedia of the sciences before you 
 can know all which is to be known about it. Do you say it is 
 unreasonable and incredible that God should expend so much 
 thought and care on so little a creature ? But what God does 
 must reveal God. Therefore all lines of thought and knowledge 
 are found converging on and revealed in the little bird. Jesus 
 says that God clothes the lily with beauty. And light, heat, 
 electricity, chemical affinity and all the cosmic forces are concen- 
 
 the gospel of Jesus Christ must be a divine reality. The Sermon on the Mount 
 cannot be a merely human production. The belief enters into the very depth 
 of my conscience. The whole history of man proves it." Curtis, Life of Web- 
 ster, vol. ii. p. 684. 
 
552 THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 
 
 tred on the lily to make and direct its growth, the central sun en- 
 ergizes in its service to quicken it, and the resources of earth, air 
 and water are laid under contribution for its nourishment. The 
 lily as it grows is a centre to all the physical powers. Is it in- 
 credible that God should do so much for a single lily ? But if he 
 causes the lily to grow he must do it as God, and the lily must 
 reveal the riches and resources of God. 
 
 How much more, in saving man from sin and educating and 
 developing him to spiritual perfection, must he reveal the God. 
 It is not wonderful that in this work all the mightiest agencies of 
 the spiritual world should be concentred on the man, and that 
 " the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of 
 God " should be revealed. 
 
 A further answer is that it is a characteristic of God's action 
 that giving does not impoverish him and that every one may re- 
 ceive of his fulness. Of this the sun is an emblem. Every indi- 
 vidual receives its light and heat in all their fulness, while leaving 
 the same fulness to all. Every man, every sparrow, every lily is 
 the centre of all the cosmic energies. So in the spiritual system 
 every person is a central recipient of all divine energies. If it is 
 the befitting action of God that the sun should shine and the rain 
 fall and the wind blow on every individual, each having the ful- 
 ness of all, it is also befitting that the Sun of Righteousness 
 should rise and the dew and rain of heavenly influence descend 
 and the divine Spirit breathe on every man. If we may so say, 
 every one has all. It is simply the revelation of the inexhausti- 
 ble and unchanging fulness of God. 
 
 Other personal beings beside man exist or will hereafter come 
 Into being. In what particular way God may reveal himself 
 among them we have no means of knowing. But we know that 
 it will be in some way in which every one may have the opportu- 
 nity to be " filled with the fulness of God." What he has done 
 for man on earth detracts nothing from the fulness of grace with 
 which he may come to personal beings in other worlds. And on 
 the other hand, the existence of innumerable other worlds, peo- 
 pled it may be with rational beings, constitutes no objection ta 
 the fulness of his redeeming grace to men. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abraham, human sacrifices forbidden, 489, 
 491; historical beginning of the kingdom 
 of God on earth, 491. 
 
 Absolute Being, 5 f., 151-229; definition, 
 154; what it is not further known a priori 
 but revealed in the universe, 37, 153, 165, 
 172 f., 181 f. ; existence of, known as a 
 necessary principle of reason and law of 
 thought, 79 f., 151, 154 f.; its denial in- 
 volves universal skepticism, 161 ; objection 
 that a finite mind cannot be conscious of, 
 95 ff; knowledge of, inadequate but posi- 
 tive and progressive, 95 f., 159, 212, 216- 
 219, 382 ; objection that like is known only 
 by like, 82 f., 159 f., 186, 257; denial that 
 it can reveal itself in creation affirms that 
 it is limited, 91, 160, 176, 188 f., 210, 243, 
 302 f . ; agreement of agnostics, pantheists, 
 materialistic monists, and deists in affirm- 
 ing knowledge that the absolute exists, 5, 
 163, 170, 222 f ., 241 f. ; is the a priori ar- 
 gument in its true meaning, 164 ; gives 
 unity to all the so-called arguments, 
 153 f., 164 f.; established by Plato, 162; 
 its great place in the history of philosophy, 
 162-164; non-theistic theories as related 
 to it, 166-206; false ideas of, 173 f., 210- 
 212, 216-219; not a negative idea, 217 f.; 
 not unknowable in itself, 173, 181 f . ; the 
 absolute of philosophy identified with the 
 God whom we worship, 210-216; objec- 
 tion that the absolute is a spirit, but un- 
 conscious and impersonal, 215 f., 334-339; 
 is the all-conditioning, 219-221; basis of 
 apprehending the universe in science, 220; 
 revealed in consciousness of finiteness, 
 160,229 ; personality of, 212-216, 334-339; 
 if unconscious and impersonal, inferior to 
 man, 335; feelings manifesting sense or 
 consciousness of, 17, 378-381 ; absolute 
 knowledge, 48 f., 93 f ., 157-160 ; absolute 
 Spirit, the two elements in the idea of a 
 divinity, 17 f ., 36 f ., 79 f. ; absolute, hy- 
 postasizing the adjective, 218. 
 
 Abuse, use and disuse of faculties, 112 f. 
 
 Acosmic pantheism, 169. 
 
 ^Esthetic sentiments responsive to the pres- 
 ence of God, the absolute Reason, 385- 
 387. 
 
 Agassiz, contrast of vital and physical phe- 
 nomena, 320. 
 
 Agnosticism, Spencerian, 172-182; defini- 
 tion, 168; partial, not complete, 172 f.j 
 rests on developing the absolute a priori, 
 172 ; rests on some false idea of the abso- 
 lute, 173 f. ; rests on an illegitimate ap- 
 plication of the maxim, definition limits, 
 174 f . ; logically involves complete agnos- 
 ticism, 176; inconsistent with itself, 176- 
 181; its principles would consistently lead 
 to theism, 172 f., 181, 240, 249; Hansel, 
 the absolute limited if the absence of lim- 
 itation is predicated of it, 175 ; the ab- 
 solute unknowable because it cannot be- 
 classed, 215 f.; agreement with theism, 
 151, 163, 169, 172, 180 f., 222-224, 240, 
 249, 524: religion of, 21, 419 f., 522; the- 
 istic agnosticism, 95-97, 159, 212, 216-219, 
 382; exaggerated statements of, 219. 
 
 Agreement with theism of non-theistic theo- 
 ries, 163, 169, 222-224. 
 
 All-conditioning, the, implied in the uncon- 
 ditioned or absolute, 219-221. 
 
 Almightiness, not a capricious will unregu- 
 lated by reason, 226 f., 300, 302, 306, 316- 
 319, 366 f., 479 f., 497 f.; effects com- 
 mensurate with the limitations of the be- 
 ings on and through which it acts, 301. 
 
 Analogy, physico-theological proof not an 
 argument from, 332 f. ; of the revelation 
 of God and of the outward world, 48 f., 
 377 f., 398; of the development of reli- 
 gious knowledge and of the science of 
 nature, 135 f., 139, 208, 458, 470. 
 
 Anarchists find belief in God their greatest 
 obstacle, 430. 
 
 Anaxagoras, 65; sun as large as Pelopon* 
 nesus, 208; universe grounded in reason^ 
 165. 
 
 Ancestors, worship of, 18, 21 f., 362. 
 
554 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Animism, 18 f., 28, 42, 44, 63, 207. 
 
 Anthropomorphism, 433-440, 511 f.; Fiske 
 on its necessity, 180. 
 
 Antinomies. See Contradictions. 
 
 A priori argument for existence of God, its 
 true significance, 164; idea of the abso- 
 lute, error of determining what the abso- 
 lute is from it, 172 f., 183 f. 
 
 Aquinas, Thomas, two classes of miracles, 
 446. 
 
 Archetypal thought of God is the constitu- 
 tion of the universe, 79, 115, 192, 219 f., 
 227, 251, 256-260, 289, 292-294, 513. 
 
 Arguments for the existence of God, their 
 unity, 153 f., 164 f.; objection, it is not a 
 legitimate object of proof, 61 ff. ; presup- 
 poses the idea, 36-38, 61; reasons for re- 
 statement, 1-11; objection that inferring 
 God's existence proves his dependence, 
 62; that polytheists used the same, 65. 
 
 Aristotle, 65 ; calls rational ideas essences, 
 78. 
 
 Arnold, M., religion of morality and emo- 
 tion, 22-24, 524; barren realism of the 
 materialist, 100; impossibility of peace in 
 unbelief, 405, 417 ; logia, 458; ideal Chris- 
 tianity, 469; miracles, 487; significance 
 of incarnation, Easter, and immortality, 
 496, 503 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, faith is reason leaning on 
 God, 93. 
 
 Ashmore, religion of China, 385. 
 
 Assimilation of truth, 115-119 ; of error, 
 104-109. 
 
 Assumptions of science. See Postulates. 
 
 Atheism, "bashful atheists," 166; used as 
 equivalent to non-theistic theories, 166 ; 
 types and classification, 166-169 ; positiv- 
 ism, 170 f.; Spencerian agnosticism, 172- 
 182 ; pantheism, 182-201 ; materialism, 
 201-206; its different forms in conflict, 
 221 ; in each form points of agreement | 
 with theism, 222-224 ; theism takes all ' 
 truths recognized in non-theistic theories, 
 224; prevalence of atheism circumscribed 
 and sporadic, 348 f.; short-lived, 349 f.; 
 objection from prevalence of Buddhism, 
 350 f . ; attended with credulity and super- 
 stition, 351; followed by revivals of re- i 
 ligious faith, 351 f. ; removed without ! 
 argument, 352-354 ; does not originate 
 spontaneously, 354 ; puts us to permanent ; 
 intellectual confusion, 372 f. ; involves ' 
 the impossibility of knowledge, 75-82, j 
 246 f., 393, 397 ; belittles man and the [ 
 sphere of knowledge, intellectual suffo- | 
 cation, 382-384, 526-529 ; richness and | 
 strength of character lost, 402-405 ; legit- ! 
 imately issues in pessimism, 403, 527; j 
 
 disastrous in every sphere of human in- 
 terest, 402-418, 526-529; paralyzes mo- 
 tives to self- sacrificing love, and dries the 
 springs of hope and enthusiasm, 417 f. ; 
 historical evidence of its evil influence, 
 429 f. 
 
 "At Home," in nature and the supernat 
 ural, 100, 108, 134-137, 200, 260, 290. 
 
 Atom, ultimate unit of the physical system, 
 184; in solid singleness suggests no be- 
 ginning or cause, 191 ; Clerk-Maxwell 
 on, 203, 238; theory of, incompatible with 
 pantheism, 184 f., 201-203; proof of 
 finiteness of the universe and transcend- 
 ence of the absolute, 237-239; fortuitous 
 concurrence of, 333; vortex atom, 266. 
 
 Atonement, continuity of law in redemption 
 from sin, 499. 
 
 Attributes of God do not imply division or 
 limitation, 226 f. 
 
 Augustine, God found 'within, 101, 116; 
 comprehensiveness of Christianity, 145; 
 God incomprehensible, 219 ; carmen secu- 
 lorum, 432; law distinguished from factual 
 sequences, 480 ; Christianity and Greek 
 philosophy, 521; victrix delectatio, 516. 
 
 Automaton, spiritual, 194. 
 
 Awakening of spiritual capacities, 103-120. 
 
 B. 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 115: on final causes, 320, 
 326 f . ; Baconian revival in science pre- 
 ceded by Luther's in religion, 431. 
 
 Basil, Christians like bees gathering from 
 all flowers, 521. 
 
 Beattie, on final causes, 328. 
 
 Beauty, reveals ideals in nature, 280 f. ; re- 
 veals truth, 369-371; reveals God, 386 f. 
 
 Becoming, absolute, the flux of Heraclitus, 
 189, 199. 
 
 Belief in God, intertwined with all normal 
 action, 94; leads to consecration and sacri- 
 fice, 95; objection that it never becomes 
 knowledge, 97-99; spontaneous in all re- 
 ligions, 15 f., 90 f., 347 f. ; generic, spon- 
 taneous, powerful, persistent, 345-353; is 
 constitutional in man, 353-364; origin of 
 (see Origin); analogy of belief in the out- 
 ward world antecedent to scientific knowl- 
 edge of it, 364 f., 398; rooted in every 
 part of man's constitution as personal, 86- 
 91, 365-397; necessary to reconcile free- 
 dom and dependence, 376; exists ante- 
 cedent to science, 397-402 ; analogy of 
 music, 398; spontaneous and unelaborated 
 in the uneducated is a reasonable faith, 
 352 f., 399-402; practical influence in 
 
INDEX. 
 
 555 
 
 every sphere of activity, 402-418; arises 
 from uniformities, and not merely anoma- 
 lies, 423 f. ; is evidence that God exists, 
 364 f. 
 
 Bersier, encyclicals of criticism, 130. 
 
 Bias, false idea of, 118-120. 
 
 Bible, God revealed in it when it "finds 
 us," 56 f.; studied with only archaeolog- 
 ical and critical interest, 108 f., 129-131; 
 isolated from rational thought, 131 f. ; 
 what it is, 457-466; fitted to be the book 
 of the universal religion, 530-532. 
 
 Biedermann, pantheistic definition of reve- 
 lation, 73; imperfection inseparable from 
 the finite, 303; the absolute is spirit, but 
 unconscious, 335 ; God revealed in redemp- 
 tion through Christ, 470. 
 
 Biology leads to the door which opens into 
 the presence of God, 512, 513. 
 
 Blindness, spiritual, 83, 103-109. 
 
 Boehme, mysticism, 123. 
 
 Boethius, tinder in the soul, 402. 
 
 Boole, false idea of cause, 243. 
 
 Bossuet, immutable principles of reason, 
 375. 
 
 Brain, molecular action of, and thought, 
 various theories, 508-511 ; reveals the 
 supernatural in man, 511-513. 
 
 Browning, Mr., on humanity-worship, 420. 
 
 Browning, Mrs., no reconciliation of man 
 with his environment without God, 403; 
 every common bush afire with God, 86. 
 
 Biichner, Dr., 223. 
 
 Buckle, extirpation of superstition by con- 
 centrating population in cities, 519. 
 
 Bunyan. appropriating and assimilating 
 truth, 116. 
 
 Burnouf, idea of a God precedes the sen- 
 suous conception, 361. 
 
 Bushnell, illustration from concentric 
 spheres, 339. 
 
 Butler, Bp., revelation to be judged by rea- 
 son, 136; republication of natural religion, 
 521. 
 
 Butler, Prof. Wm. A., all science has its 
 root in the invisible world, 262 f. 
 
 Buxtorf , inspiration of Hebrew vowel-points, 
 128. 
 
 c. 
 
 Candor and impartiality, false idea of, 
 
 118 f. 
 Capacity of man to receive God's revelation 
 
 and to know him through it, 74-102; needs 
 
 awakening, 103-120. 
 Caprice not an essential characteristic of 
 
 will, nor implied inalmightiness, 226, 300, 
 
 305 f., 316-319, 479 f., 497 f. 
 
 Carlyle, absentee God, 211 ; the supernatural 
 in the natural, 289; man not coaxed with 
 sugar-plums, 312. 
 
 Carnivorous animals, objection founded on, 
 303. 
 
 Carpenter, Dr., unconscious coordination of 
 experience, 94; notion of force indispen- 
 sable, 244; science points to the origination 
 of all power in mind, 249; what science 
 is, 261. 
 
 Causal energy, law of both in the physical 
 and spiritual systems, 534-541 . 
 
 Causation, principle of, existence of the 
 absolute Being not proved by it, 154 f., 
 499 f. 
 
 Cause, First, absolute Being revealed in the 
 universe as, 233-250; objection that it im- 
 plies a beginning, 240 f. ; objection that it 
 is only adequate to the effect, 241; objec- 
 tion that the effect is the exact equivalent 
 of the cause, 242 f. ; Hegel's objection 
 that inferring a cause from an effect proves 
 that the cause is conditioned by the ef- 
 fect, 243 ; that a cause is a mere antece- 
 dent, 243 f. ; that belief in a cause results 
 from mental impotence, 244 ; that the 
 causal judgment results from association 
 of ideas, as presented by Prof. Clifford, 
 244 f. ; objection of Physicus, 245-247; of 
 Mr. Spencer, 157. 
 
 Cause and will; is the idea of will essential 
 in the idea of cause? 247-250 ; not a par- 
 ticular act of the will of God in every 
 motion, 249, 337-339. 
 156 f., 241 f. 
 
 Cave-men, pictures and implements, though 
 rude, prove rationality, 296. 
 
 Centre to the action of the universe, every 
 man is, 87 f., 367, 377, 422 f., 551 f. 
 
 Certainty, highest, not given by the senses, 
 
 Champollion, science deciphers symbols in 
 nature, 261. 
 
 Chance, creation by, 333 f. 
 
 Chaos assumed by objectors to theism, 
 334. 
 
 Character, likeness of, necessary to mutual 
 intelligibility, 83 ; how a sinner can know, 
 God, 83. 
 
 Charity, when pernicious, 535 f., 538 f. 
 
 Cheever, G. B., atheism removed without 
 argument, 352 f. 
 
 Christ, the great evidence of Christianity, 
 142; characteristics of God's revelation 
 through, 443-473; reveals by what he is 
 and does more than by what he says, 445, 
 446-448, 457-459 ; the ideal inseparable 
 from the historical, 469-473; Head of a 
 new humanity, 471, 515, 539 f . ; central 
 in theology and history, 133 f., 143 f., 
 
556 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 443 f., 450, 473, 516; God's revelation in, 
 continues and consummates the revelation 
 in nature and man, 515-532; the eternal 
 reason in him revealed in human reason, 
 
 516 f . ; the Light, the Life and the Love, 
 
 517 f. ; reveals the worth of man, and 
 quickens to realize the highest possibilities 
 of the individual and of society, 526-529 ; 
 reveals the fundamental law of the uni- 
 verse, the higher going down to the lower 
 to lift it up, 539 f. 
 
 Christian consciousness, 33-36. 
 
 Christianity, takes up the truths of the eth- 
 nic religions, 15, 518-526 ; three principal 
 lines of evidence, 443; distinctive and es- 
 sential fact of, 444, 450 ; teaches that God 
 first seeks men, other religions that men 
 first seek God, 470 f. : objection that it 
 cannot take up and vitalize the varied 
 knowledge and activity of the present 
 age, 546-550; objection founded on the 
 vastness of the universe, 550-552: tested 
 by the progress of thought and civilization 
 in all ages, 528 f., 531 f. ; is the one uni- 
 versal religion, 529-532; this involved in 
 the idea of God in Christ reconciling the 
 world to himself, 529; its power of adap- 
 tation, 530 f . ; only basis for a true philos- 
 ophy of human history, 528. 
 
 Christian pantheism, 212. 
 
 Cicero, 65, 339, 346. 
 
 Civilization, knowledge of God necessary to 
 its progress, 405-418, 430-433. 
 
 Claudius, dispersion of heat, 205. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria, 11, 57, 73, 520 f. 
 
 Clifford. Prof., mind-stuff in every moving 
 molecule, 169 ; the world perceived is my 
 perception, 171 f. ; the causal judgment, 
 244 f. ; effects of atheism, 404; our Father 
 Man, 420 f. ; consciousness and molecular 
 motion, 509-514. 
 
 Clock, its ticking mistaken for its final 
 cause, 330. 
 
 Cole, S. V., the God-sphere, 339 f. 
 
 Coleridge, the Bible; 56. 
 
 Communion with a divinity of the essence 
 of religion, 18, 39 f., 82 f.; excluded by 
 pantheism, 195 f., 201, 225. 
 
 Comprehensiveness of Christianity, 145, 518- 
 526; of theism, 224. 
 
 Comte, theory of religion, 22, 222, 419-421, 
 522-524; his phenomenalism left behind 
 by science, 161 f.; atheism of positivism, 
 167, 170 f. ; admit any cause and God must 
 be admitted, 177; atheists the most illog- 
 ical of theologians, 231 ; prevision the cri- 
 terion of science, 261; excludes efficient 
 as well as final causes, 320; awakening of 
 his religious susceptibilities, 351 f.; on 
 
 consternation, 380 ; man not the lowest of 
 the angels, but the highest of the brutes, 
 412 ; law of the progress of thought, 426- 
 429. 
 
 Concessions of theists unwarranted, 209 f.,, 
 211 f. 
 
 Concrete thought in theology, 3, 4, 57 f., 99- 
 102, 135-137, 140-149. 
 
 Conscience reveals God, 376, 384 f. 
 
 Consciousness, its different meanings, 30 f. ; 
 sense in which God is known in con- 
 sciousness, 31-33; Christian consciousness, 
 33-36 ; elements of the idea of God given 
 in consciousness, 36-38; deeper meaning 
 in which God himself is known in con- 
 sciousness, 38-47, 74; moral consciousness, 
 44 f. ; scientific consciousness, 45; distin- 
 guished from the pantheistic use, 32, 34,, 
 72 f., 259 f. ; in what sense God is the 
 background of self-consciousness, 47, 72 f .,. 
 151, 393 f. ; subject and object of, 33 r . 
 74; of God through the spiritual feelings, 
 377-393; of the individual on a basis of 
 universality, 967 f. ; predicable of the ab- 
 solute Spirit without limitation, 334-339; 
 analogy of unconsciousness of genius,, 
 338 f . " 
 
 Consecration, legitimate issue of religious 
 belief, 95. 
 
 Constitution of man as personal, religious 
 belief rooted in it, 86-89, 365-402; in the 
 reason, 86 f., 366-375; in his moral con- 
 stitution as free will, 89, 375-378 ; in the 
 susceptibility to motives and emotions, 
 87 f., 378-393 ; in every part of his con- 
 stitution as personal, 89, 393-397; showa 
 also by universality, spontaneity, power 
 .and persistence of religious belief, 345- 
 365; objection that if religion is constitu- 
 tional, the object of worship is wholly 
 subjective, 424 f. 
 
 Constitution of the universe is the arche- 
 typal thought of God expressed in it, 78 f. t 
 115, 219 f.. 227, 251, 256-260, 28!). 292- 
 294, 513; if no God, all reason and rca>on- 
 ableness annihilated, 227-229. 
 
 Continuity, law of the physical system, 267 
 272; unity and continuity of the physical 
 and spiritual, 287-292, 341, 505-515*; the 
 law passes from the spiritual to the phys- 
 ical, not from the physical to the spiritual, 
 289 f., 505-508. 
 
 Contradictions in physical science without 
 God, 205, 239 f., 269 f., 272, 292, 381, 
 499 f. ; same true of philosophy, 272. 
 
 Cooke, Prof. J. P., imperfection of the eye, 
 295. 
 
 Copernicus withdrew the seat from the 
 Deity, 317. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 557 
 
 Cork-tree, as evidence of God's goodness, 
 294. 
 
 Correspondence of nature and spirit, shown 
 in human action and language, 264 f. 
 
 Cosmic theism, 180 f. 
 
 Cosmical weather, 170. 
 
 Cosmological argument, 233-250; is the ar- 
 gument from the contingency of the world, 
 234. 
 
 Cosmos-worship, 24. 
 
 Cousin, effect of his lectures in Paris, 163; 
 the absolute cognizable under difference, 
 plurality and relation, 181. 
 
 Creation, not completed at a stroke, 54 f., 
 210-212; difficulty of conceiving a begin- 
 ning, 240 f. 
 
 Credentials, miracles not merely, 496 f. 
 
 Criticism, biblical, authority, 130; isolation 
 from experience and doctrine, 129-132. 
 
 Culture, determines what reality is discov- 
 ered in an object, 66 f. ; and the extent of 
 possible revelation, 68; assimilating and 
 organizing truth into life and growth and 
 power, 115-118; enlarges man's power to 
 know, 117 f. ; ineffective without God, 
 133 f. ; poverty of atheistic culture, 406- 
 416 ; theism deepens and enriches, 422 ; 
 proposed as a substitute for religion, 
 422 f. 
 
 D. 
 
 Dante, God's word never fully expressed in 
 the universe, 300. 
 
 Darwin, ascribes causal force to law, 318 f. ; 
 examples of final cause in plants, 283 f. ; 
 language implying final cause, 320 f., 
 437 ; final cause in the eye, 330. 
 
 Dawson, Dr., 415 f. 
 
 D'Azeglio, miracles, 476. 
 
 Deaf-mutes acquiring the idea of God, 
 356 f. 
 
 Death, objection founded on, 303. 
 
 Definition or determinateness limits, misap- 
 plication of the maxim, 174-176, 186-188, 
 213. 
 
 Degeneration of religions, 29, 361, 426 f. 
 
 Deism, 140. 
 
 Dependence, sense of, 390 f. ; not the only 
 root of religious belief, 25, 391, 394 f. 
 
 Descartes, the infinite not a negative idea, 
 217 ; objection to evidence from final 
 causes, 324. 
 
 Development by action and use, enfeeble- 
 ment by disuse or abuse, 112 f. 
 
 Diman, Prof., belief in God resting on feel- 
 ing only is superstition, 395. 
 
 Discipline, moral, from progressiveness of 
 revelation, 208 f. 
 
 Discontent, revealing relation to the spirit- 
 ual system and to God, 387 f. 
 
 Ditheism, 207. 
 
 Divinity, essence of the idea, as absolute 
 spirit, 17 f., 36 f., 64 f., 378, 389 f.; pro- 
 gressive development of the idea analo- 
 gous with development of scientific ideas, 
 16, 39, 66-68, 207-209, 354, 363, 397- 
 399. 
 
 Dogmatism, issues in rationalism, exempli- 
 fied in Protestant theology, 127-129; the 
 reaction, 139-143 ; continued movement of 
 theological thought, 143-149. 
 
 Dorner, Dr., 13, 28. 
 
 Dumont, Leon, order and law prove the ab- 
 sence of will, 316. 
 
 Drummond, natural law in the spiritual 
 world, his error, 289 f., 505 f. 
 
 Dysteleology, 304. 
 
 E. 
 
 Eckart, mysticism, 123. 
 
 Economics, laisser faire theory, 538, 541. 
 
 Education, in the knowledge of God, 207- 
 209, 493; presupposes capacities and seeds 
 of thought, 355-357, 401 f. ; of Israel in 
 monotheism, 489 - 491 ; of man in the 
 spiritual system, 493; in preparation for 
 Christ, 518-521. 
 
 Ego. See Self. 
 
 Eleatic philosophy, 192 f. 
 
 Eliot, George, ideas often poor ghosts, 144; 
 immortality, 503; Jesus a Jewish philos- 
 opher, 525 ; her experience in substituting 
 philosophy for religion, 525 f. 
 
 Emergencies, revealing hidden powers of a 
 nation, 112. 
 
 Emerson, R. W., follow nature, 196 f. 
 
 Ends, realm of, 285; man an end in him- 
 self, and therefore immortal, 501 f. 
 
 Environment, spiritual, 32 f., 35, 50, 54 f., 
 74, 85 f., 87 f., 93 f., 395 f., 481; the soul 
 closed against it by sin, 104-109. 
 
 Epochal miracles in the spiritual system and 
 the physical, 486-497, 514. 
 
 Epochs, in evolution of the physical system, 
 488 f.; in the history of the spiritual sys- 
 tem, 489-492; continuity in the whole, 489, 
 492-494; Christ the central epoch, 493, 
 515 f. ; why the greater epochs delayed, 
 493; the new power revealed in each 
 epoch remains permanent, 492 f., 516- 
 518. 
 
 Equivalents, intellectual, of objective real- 
 ity, 219 f., 256-260. 
 
 Error incidental to progress of knowledge, 
 60 f., 63-66. 
 
 Ethnic religions, 16-20, 27-29, 42-45, 346- 
 
558 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 348, 350, 358-364, 452 f., 454, 456; and 
 Christianity, 15 f., 470 f., 518-522. 
 
 Evil, sought as good, 106 f.; moral and 
 physical, 297; physical evil an objection 
 against theism, 297-316. 
 
 Evolution, nature not finished, but plastic, a 
 growth, not a casting, 54 f., 210 f., 278- 
 280 ; gradation in the organic and inor- 
 ganic as existing, 277 f. ; process and 
 progress toward an ideal, 278-280, 322; its 
 type the growth of an organism, 286, 322; 
 implies a beginning of motion, and an im- 
 manent power transcending the universe, 
 239 f.; teleology of, 273, 278-280, 2.84, 
 285-287, 325 f., '328-330, 331; demands 
 the recognition of man as personal and 
 supernatural, 343-345 ; points to immor- 
 tality, 344 f., 501 ; the lower man's ori- 
 gin, the more his greatness reveals God, 
 353; demands reason in harmony with 
 man's, regnant in the evolution, 366 f . ; 
 without God, serves no purpose of religion 
 or ethics, 408 f. ; involves epochal mira- 
 cles, 486, 488 f., 492. 
 
 Ewald, Moses the man of God, 462; proph- 
 ecy, 451. 
 
 Experience, knowledge of God in, 30-47, 
 136; God found within, 101 f . ; human, 
 not a measure of the possible, 499-501. 
 
 Extra-sensible reality, points to the exist- 
 ence of Spirit, 513. 
 
 Eye, as showing design, 274, 330; alleged 
 imperfection, 295 f. 
 
 Ezekiel, chap, i., theophany, 71. 
 
 F. 
 
 Factors, in the knowledge of God, 5, 61, 
 122. 
 
 Faith, condition of justification correlative 
 to dependence, and the only basis of right 
 character, 23 f., 105 f., 405 f., 411 f., 541- 
 546; participation in divine love and in- 
 spiration of life, 376 f., 402-405; practical 
 power in every sphere of life, 405-418; of 
 uneducated believers reasonable, 352 f., 
 399-402; reason leaning on God, 93. 
 
 Faith-faculty, 89-95; no new faculty im- 
 parted by God's Spirit, 114 f.; belief in 
 God rooted in the entire personality of 
 man, 89, 94, 393-397. 
 
 Fanaticism, arising from mysticism, 123- 
 126. 
 
 Fear, in the ethnic religions, 42 ; religion of, 
 124 ; a constitutional religious sentiment, 
 380, 396. 
 
 Feelings, divorced from reason, issue in mys- 
 ticism and fanaticism, 122-127; sponta- 
 
 neous belief in God arising from, 347 f., 
 351-353, 364 f., 397-402 ; religious, through 
 which God is revealed, 377-393; bound- 
 less and intense, 389 f. ; relation to reason, 
 122-127, 132-139, 394 f. 
 
 Fe'nelon, Ulysses and Grillus, 106 ; the idea 
 of the finite negative, of the infinite posi- 
 tive, 217. 
 
 Fetichism, recognizes an unseen divinity 
 that can be communed with, 28, 42, 63, 
 167, 207, 359-363; not the primitive reli- 
 gion, and often associated with elevated 
 ideas of the divinity, 361 f., 426 f. 
 
 Feuerbach, objections, 65, 72, 157, 334 ; God 
 identical with man, 73; materialism, 106; 
 definitions of God, 421 ; worship of the 
 great negation, 422 ; religion sacrifices 
 man to God, 125, 198: necessity of postu- 
 lating absolute Being, 162. 
 
 Fichte, I. H., the unconditioned, 151. 
 
 Fichte, J. G., universal Ego is the uncon- 
 scious moral order of the universe, 168; 
 persons known only as finite, 215. 
 
 Final Cause, the objection that knowledge 
 how a thing is done proves that it was not, 
 done intelligent!}', 327, 329 ; the incidental 
 mistaken for it, 330; and efficient cause 
 two aspects of the same, 330 f. ; the ar- 
 gument from, 272-287; is but a part of 
 the evidence from nature, 255, 320 ; objec- 
 tions, 319-331. 
 
 Finch, A. E., will incompatible with law, 
 316. 
 
 Finite, the, possibility of God's revealing 
 himself in, essential to his ill imitation or 
 absoluteness, 91, 160, 176, 188 f., 210, 243, 
 302 ; God's revelation in, progressive and 
 never completed, 299-306, 507, 514; finite 
 things not mere modes of the existence of 
 the absolute, 183, 184 f ., 180 ; knowledge 
 of implies knowledge of the absolute, 160, 
 215. 
 
 Finiteness, not of the essence of personality, 
 214 f ., 335, 337. 
 
 Fiske, John, teleology, 180, 286, 325 f . ; 
 evolution issues in the rational and super- 
 natural, 343-345; permanent intellectual 
 confusion. 372 f . ; anthropomorphism, 180, 
 435; science must postulate universal rea- 
 son in harmony with man's, 192, 439; 
 symbols, 180, 533 f. ; cosmic theism, 180. 
 
 Fliigel, 162, 187, 209. 
 
 Force, sum of always the same, 161, 235 f . ; 
 without God, the absurdity of perpetual 
 motion, 237, 268 f., 480 f . ; surreptitiously 
 ascribed to law or identified with it, 318 f. ; 
 correlation and conservation of, does not 
 account for mind, 343, 508-511; progress 
 marked by relative!}' greater admiration 
 
INDEX. 
 
 559 
 
 in recognition of spiritual influence, 385 f., 
 537. 
 
 Forms of reason, 76-79, 86. 
 
 Formulas, danger of stopping in the words, 
 128 f., 140, 148. 
 
 Foster, John, miracles, 497. 
 
 Fourier, on the passions, 407. 
 
 Freedom, Spinoza's definition, 193 f. ; knowl- 
 edge of free power originates in our con- 
 sciousness of power, 248; of will, God 
 revealed in man's, 89, 375-377, reconcil- 
 iation of freedom and necessity by faith 
 in God, 376, 403-405. 
 
 Fre man tie, on Christian fellowship with 
 agnostics, 146. 
 
 French revolution, atheism of, 166. 
 
 G. 
 
 Galileo, discussion of the cycloid, 262; infal- 
 libility and his condemnation, 531. 
 
 Ghost-theory of the origin of religion, 18, 
 21 f., 64 f., 360-362; ghosts, fear of, 348, 
 391-393. 
 
 God, three factors in the knowledge of, 5, 
 61, 122; origin and development of the 
 idea, 16-20, 21 f., 63-69, 345-364, how 
 mistakes originate, 18-20, 63 f. ; these do 
 not discredit the belief, 16, 64-66; knowl- 
 edge of , rooted in the whole constitution of 
 man as personal, 86-89, 365-402; knowl- 
 edge of, partial but positive, 80, 95-97, 
 159 f , 212, 216-219, 382; the absolute of 
 philosophy and the God of religion identi- 
 fied, 209-216; as absolute reason, the nec- 
 essary postulate of all science, 45-47, 227, 
 366-375; is conscious personal spirit, 212- 
 215, 334-339; falsely conceived as will un- 
 regulated by reason, 211, 299-301, 305 f., 
 316-319, 479 f., 487; legitimate issue of 
 scientific thought, 513 f., seeking man, 470. 
 
 Goeschel, thought and being, 374. 
 
 Goethe, 54, 87, 100, 161, 182, 183, 196, 231, 
 294 f., 310, 382, 413, 418, 463. 
 
 Good, the, 80, 371; repelled as evil, 106- 
 109; the true, 307, 308 f., 310, 311-313; 
 the feelings pertaining to, reveal God, 387- 
 390, and knowledge of God, 416-418. 
 
 Gradation in the organic and the inorganic, 
 277 f. 
 
 Gray, Prof. Asa., science and religion, 319. 
 
 Green, Prof. T. H., aim of philosophy, 251 ; 
 free will supernatural, 474. 
 
 Grote, A. R., if religion is constitutional it 
 has no objective truth, 424 ; Christianity 
 a veneering of paganism, 425. 
 
 Grove, W. R., causation implies the will of 
 God, 249. 
 
 Guilt and sin, consciousness of, implies con- 
 sciousness of God, 384 f. 
 Guyon, Madame, mysticism, 123. 
 
 H. 
 
 Haeckel, Prof., definition of materialism, 
 201; scientific and ethical materialism, 
 223; dysteleology, 304; evolution annuls 
 the evidence from final causes, 326. 
 
 Hamerton, P. G., misrepresentation of 
 Christianity, 549 f. 
 
 Hamilton, Sir Win., unpictured notions of 
 intelligence, 158 ; no partial knowledge of 
 God, 159; great place of the absolute in 
 the history of philosophy, 162 f. ; mis- 
 takes the absolute for the mathematical 
 sum total, 174; negative knowledge, 172, 
 175, 177 f., 217; inconsistency, 178-180; 
 immorality, 179. 
 
 Harnack, Adolf, comprehensiveness of 
 Christianity, 521. 
 
 Harrison, Fred., agnosticism, 180; religion 
 of agnosticism, 408 f., 419 ; worship of 
 humanity, 222, 419 f., 522; accepts Spen- 
 cer's caricature of theism as philosophical 
 and unanswerable, 435 ; they refute each 
 other, 524 ; objection that Christianity 
 cannot take up and vitalize modern 
 thought and life, 546-550; what is de- 
 manded of religion, 405. 
 
 Hartmann, the absolute, 151 ; nature rests on 
 the supernatural, 231; preference of the 
 savage to the civilized, and of brutes to 
 men, 107; God is spirit impersonal and 
 unconscious, 215, 223, 334; not holy, 226; 
 efficient and final cause, 330; the absolute 
 the largest general notion, 187. 
 
 Harvey, final causes, 322. 
 
 Hawthoi'ne, God known from within, 102. 
 
 Hedge, Prof., ideal Christ derived from the 
 historical, 473. 
 
 Hedonism, founded in the nature-side of 
 man, 103 ; basis of, in ethical materialism, 
 223. 
 
 Hegel, 13 f., 43, 75, 91, 120, 145, 187, 200, 
 218, 225 f., 241, 258, 259, 290, 485. 
 
 Heine H., bashful atheists, 166; personifi- 
 cation, 265; Venus of Milo, 390 f. 
 
 Hellenism, as a substitute for Christianity, 
 422 f. 
 
 Helmholtz, imperfection of the eye, 295. 
 
 Hennell, Jesus "A Jewish Philosopher," 
 525. 
 
 Heraclitus, absolute becoming, 189. 
 
 Herbert, Geo., 67. 
 
 Herschel, Sir John, gravitation a result of 
 conscious will, 249. 
 
560 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Hilaire, G. St., final cause and crutches, 
 328. 
 
 Hill, Thomas, 262. 
 
 Historical revelation, 121, 129 f., 133, 444 f., 
 446-451, 457-469 ; and prophetic, 42, 56, 
 451-454. 
 
 History, human, revelation of God in, 423- 
 433. 
 
 Hobbes, miracles and pills, 487. 
 
 Hodge, Prof. C., 209. 
 
 Holiness, pantheistic denial of compatibility 
 with the absolute, 209, 218, 226. 
 
 Holy of Holies, significance, 70. 
 
 Honor and shame, sense of, implies man's 
 relation to God, 388 f. 
 
 Hooker, R., God incomprehensible, 219. 
 
 Horace, purple patch, 92; the garden-god, 
 199; varying errors of atheism, 221. 
 
 Humanity, worship of, 22, 222, 419-421, 
 522-524. 
 
 Humboldt, the extraordinary excites fear, 
 not hope, 380. 
 
 Hume, not the protagonist for Spencerian 
 agnosticism, 177; recognizes final causes, 
 321: no experience in world-building, 
 331-333; absurdity of fortuitous concur- 
 rence of atoms, 333 f. ; mind an agitation 
 of brain, 343; infinite spider, 434; mira- 
 cles contrary to universal experience, 
 494, 499-501.' 
 
 Humor, implies man's superiority to his 
 physical condition, 389. 
 
 Huxley, worship of the Unknowable, 21; 
 the name agnostic, 176 ; misapprehension 
 of Hume, 177 ; the mechanical does not 
 exclude the teleological, 329; materialistic 
 civilization, 413 f . ; science gives no war- 
 rant for materialism, 204; molecular mo- 
 tion the cause of consciousness, 508. 
 
 Hypostasizing the adjectives absolute, infi- 
 nite, finite, 218; the copula, 174. 
 
 Hypothesis, of Newtonian induction, in 
 proving the existence of God, 252, 332 ; 
 verification, 253, 292-294. 
 
 Ideal and historical Christ, 469-473. 
 
 Idealistic pantheism, 168. 
 
 Ideals, progressively realized in particular 
 things and processes, 274-277; in the cos- 
 mos, 277-280; revealed in the beautiful, 
 280 f. 
 
 Ideas, objectively real, 78, 256-259, 437- 
 439; of reason referred to the universal 
 Reason, 79 f.; of Plato, 78, 192, 259, 437; 
 of Hegel, 259 f.; ghostly till embodied, 
 144. 
 
 Illuminism, 81, 416, 550. 
 
 linage of God, man in, 82-86, 337; Lotz 
 on, 337. 
 
 Imagination cannot create the primitive idea 
 of God, 358 ; anticipates philosophical 
 thought in shaping it, 358. 
 
 Immanence of God in the universe, 7. 54 f., 
 140, 199-201, 210-212, 225, 293, 299-301, 
 316-318, 485; and transcendence, 190 f.^ 
 198, 211 f ., 219 f . ; science finds a tran- 
 scendent power immanent in nature, 480- 
 484. 
 
 Immortality, origin of the belief, 64 f. ; indi- 
 cated by evolution, 343-345; longing for, 
 reveals man's relation to God, 388; neces- 
 sary if man is an end in himself, 501 f. ; 
 compatible with man's connection with 
 the body, 512 f. 
 
 Imperfection, metaphysical, 301 f. 
 
 Impotence, mental, not the origin of rational 
 intuitions, 176, 244. 
 
 Incidental miracles, 445, 494 f. ; occur at 
 epochs, no one of them essential to re- 
 demption, 494 f., 502 ; possibility of, 
 514 f. 
 
 Indifference, claimed as essential to scientific 
 and unbiased investigation, 81. 
 
 Individual being, the unit of thought and of 
 reality, 74, 76 f., 184 f., 187. 
 
 Individuality is indivisibility and identity, 
 
 and predicable of the absolute, 337. 
 I Indra, prayer to, 43. 
 
 j Induction, Newtonian, in the physico-theo- 
 logical argument, 252, 332. 
 
 Industrial progress, influence of Christianity 
 on, 430. 
 
 Infinite, sense of, 17, 378-382; series, 155 f., 
 237; never fully expressed in the finite, 
 299. See Absolute, and Progressiveness. 
 
 Inner light, 123. 
 
 Insensibilitv of the sinner to spiritual real- 
 ities and motives, 103-109; capacity to 
 know God remains, 109-114. 
 
 Instincts indicate objective reality, 396. 
 
 Intellectual equivalents of reality, 208, 219 f., 
 256-200. 
 
 Intelligibility of all reality, 79, 236, 256 f., 
 258, 533. " 
 
 "In the beginning God," 506, 533. 
 
 Intuition, rational, confirmed by all science, 
 260-264. 
 
 Inventions useless till civilization grows up 
 to them, 68 ; reveal symbolism in nature, 
 261 f. 
 
 Israel, alleged fetichism and polytheism, 
 
 489 f.; education in monotheism, 68, 
 
 490 f.; its literature not the natural out- 
 growth of its life, 490 f. ; formal institu- 
 tion of political and ecclesiastical organi- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 561 
 
 zation, 491 ; its truth taken up into Chris- 
 tianity, 451-454, 492 f., 518. 
 
 J. 
 
 Jacobi, inference that God exists implies his 
 dependence, 62; reason-sense, 75; reason 
 and faith, 80; difficulty of identifying the 
 absolute Being with the personal God, 209; 
 analogy of sense-perception and spiritual, 
 398 f. 
 
 Janet, religion constitutional, 364. 
 
 Jenyns, Soame, internal evidence of Chris- 
 tianity, 140. 
 
 Jesuits and Canadian Indians, 64. 
 
 Jevons, mathematical equations solved by 
 every atom, 262; experience not the limit 
 of possibility, 500 f. 
 
 Justification by faith, founded on a univer- 
 sal law of finite beings, 105 f., 411 f., 541- 
 546. 
 
 Justin Martyr, the whole race had part in 
 the Logos, 520. 
 
 K. 
 
 Kahnis, German illuminati, 416. 
 
 Kant, consciousness, 32; fixed belief in God, 
 44; thing in itself, 80; results of his 
 philosophy, 163; conception of God, 167; 
 education by progressiveness of revelation, 
 209 ; personality known only as finite, 
 215; the mechanical does not exclude the 
 Ideological, 329; God revealed in the 
 practical reason, 390; idea underlying 
 products of nature, 437 ; monotheism 
 shimmers through polytheism, 518. 
 
 Keary, origin of religion, 359 f. 
 
 Kingdom of Christ, distinctive of Christian- 
 ity, 471 f . ; continuity in Old and New 
 Testaments, 491-493; grows like an or- 
 ganism, 493. 
 
 Knowledge, absolute, 48 f., 157; finite not 
 self-originating, depends on revelation, 
 48 f . ; begins as knowledge of individuals, 
 74, 76 f., 184, 187; intellectual equivalent 
 of reality, 208, 219 f., 256-260; archetypal 
 in God. See Archetypal. 
 
 Knowledge of God, three factors, 5, 61; 
 and belief, 97-99; progressive, 66-68; 
 positive but inadequate, 80, 95 f., 157-159, 
 181 f., 216-219 ; progressiveness analogous 
 with physical science, 16, 39, 139, 208; 
 processes analogous, 58, 59-61, 135 f., 
 148 f. ; in what sense negative, 216-218 ; 
 three stages, 354, 429. 
 
 Koran, lack of roots in history, 461. 
 
 Kuenen, persistence of religious belief, 351. 
 
 Lange, F. A., scientific and ethical material- 
 ism, 223 ; test of materialism, 410 ; poverty 
 of materialism as to culture, 416. 
 
 Lanier, Sidney, 118, 290. 
 
 Laplace, could not find God with his tele- 
 scope, 204; final causes, 325. 
 
 Law, of ethics and physics, 267, 498, 532 f., 
 535; distinguished from factual uniform 
 sequences, also called laws, 316-318, 475, 
 479 f., 481 f., 505 f. ; force surreptitiously 
 ascribed to, 318; nature orderly under, 
 267-272 ; objection, order and law prove 
 the absence of will, 316-319; unity of, in 
 the spiritual and physical systems, 532- 
 546; law of reason extends to nature, not 
 the sequences of nature to reason, 289 f., 
 484 f., 505 f., 535; exemplified in the law 
 of causation, 534-541 ; in the law of re- 
 ception and production, 541-546 ; the law 
 of the higher descending to the lower to 
 lift it up, 539 f . ; law and miracles, 497- 
 502, of least action, 321. 
 
 Le Conte, Prof., objective reality of physical 
 and spiritual, 399. 
 
 Lenormant, redemption in ethnic religions, 
 384 f. 
 
 Lessing, rationalism, 129. 
 
 Lewes, attitude of this age as to skepticism, 
 353. 
 
 Life, pagan conception of, brought back by 
 atheism, 407. 
 
 Light which lighteth every man, 45, 366, 
 367, 377, 516 f., 520 f.,~530 f.; life and 
 love from Christ, 517 f. 
 
 Like known only by like, 82 f., 159 f., 186, 
 257. 
 
 Lilly, W. S-, truth known by feeling, 88; 
 mediaeval verse, 126 f. 
 
 Lilv and sparrow, cosmic forces- starving or- 
 ganic life, 281-283, 551 f. 
 
 Logical notions and processes mistaken for 
 concrete beings, actions, and relations, 
 62 f., 128, 145, 174, 186-188, 198. f., 215 f., 
 243, 259 f., 373 f. 
 
 Lotze, finite personality, 337; analogy of 
 knowledge of God and of the outward 
 world, 398. 
 
 Love, relation to intelligence, 117-119 ; to 
 development and power, 126, 536 f. ; not 
 contradictory to the law of the survival 
 of the fittest, 535 ; kind of service re- 
 
 - quired, 535 f., 538; fundamental law of 
 the universe revealed in God in Christ, 
 539 f. 
 
 Lucretius, fear generates the gods, 42; 
 atoms, 191, 333 ; anthropomorphism, 434. 
 
562 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Luthardt, 94. 
 
 Luther and rationalism, 139, 458 f. 
 
 M. 
 
 Malebranche, positive knowledge of God, 
 217. 
 
 Man, normally in union with God, 81, 105, 
 516-518, 541-546 ; is supernatural in the 
 likeness of God and therefore knows him, 
 83-86, 91 ; participates in nature and the 
 supernatural, and "at home" in each, 85, 
 102, 137, 200 f., 260, 288-292, 341, 474 f.; 
 participates in universal reason, 45-47, 
 79-81, 86, 368, 376 f., 516 f., 520 f., 530; 
 the mirror of the universe, 341 ; revealed 
 to himself in knowing God, 72, 95, 126, 
 198, 225, 355, 515, 523 ; greatness of the 
 physical shows his littleness, and of the 
 spiritual system his greatness, 551 ; natural 
 and spiritual man, 103 f. ; highest product 
 of evolution, 286, 343-345; his personality 
 a proof of the existence of God, 341-345 ; 
 our Father Man, 420 f. 
 
 Hansel, 159, 175, 179 f. 
 
 Martineau, James, physico-theological argu- 
 ment, 319. 
 
 Materialism, 201-206; definition, 169, 201; 
 scientific and ethical, 223 f. ; subjective 
 and objective contradictory, 205 f.; is un- 
 scientific, 253 ; poverty as to culture, 416. 
 
 Matter and spirit, synthesis of, in God, the 
 All-conditioning, 520 f., 238 f. 
 
 Maudsley, Dr., insane infant, 104. 
 
 Maxwell, Clerk, atoms and molecules dis- 
 close a power transcending the universe, 
 203, 238. 
 
 Mead, E. D., germs of rationalism in Luther, 
 139. 
 
 Mechanism, the universe as, distinguished 
 from the immanence of God, 317 ; mate- 
 rialism makes it finite with perpetual self- 
 generating motion, 237, 268 f. 
 
 Medheval Christian verse, more joyous than 
 the ancient pagan, 126 f. 
 
 Messianic prophecy, 142, 452 f., 490 f. 
 
 Meyer, Wilhelm, the mystery of the uni- 
 verse, 151; humanity worship, 421. 
 
 Mill, J. S., immorality of Hamilton's ag- 
 nosticism, 179; positive knowledge of the 
 absolute, 216, 217; law of simplest and 
 fewest assumptions, 255; God's will as 
 almighty caprice, 316 f. ; .physico-theolog- 
 ical argument is induction, not analogy, 
 332 f . ; mind a series of sensations, 342 ; 
 awakening of his religious susceptibilities, 
 351 ; religion without a divinity, 418; 
 miracles possible if God exists, 476 f. 
 
 Miller, Hugh, fear of a corpse, 392. 
 
 Milton, 115, 371,513. 
 
 Mind, not a series of sensations, 213, 246, 
 342, 510; not accounted for by molecular 
 motion, 343 f., 508-513 ; demanded by evo- 
 lution, 343 f., 506 f. ; mind-stuff, 169, 513. 
 
 Miracles, 474-504 ; objection that they are 
 not continued, 70 f. ; possibility involved 
 in redemption, 445 f.; essential and inci- 
 dental, 445 f., 494 f., 514; threefold sig- 
 nificance, 446; definition, 474-476, 478 f . ; 
 possibility, as consistent with the contin- 
 uity of nature, 476-486, 514; epochal in the 
 spiritual system and the physical, 486-497, 
 514, 539; incidental miracles in epochs, 
 494; miracles and law, 497-502; denial of 
 their possibility involves denial of God, 
 502-504 ; free will essentially miracle- 
 working, 474, 475 f., 478 f.; the law rather 
 than the exception, 482; probable, 485 f., 
 499-501 ; current in the ocean, 486 ; not 
 isolated, but in the archetypal plan, 487- 
 497, 507; evidential value, 446, 496; 
 arouse attention, 446, 497; objection that 
 they are contrary to universal experience, 
 494, 499-501. 
 
 Mivart, St. John, present obligation of the 
 censure on Galileo, 531. 
 
 Molecular action of the brain manifests the 
 supernatural in man, 508-513. 
 
 Monism, definition and classification, 167- 
 169; pantheistic, 168, 182-201; material- 
 istic, 168 f., 201-206; agreement with the- 
 ism, 163, 169, 222-224. 
 
 Monotheism and theism, 207; education of 
 Israel to, 490 f. 
 
 Moral ideas, universal, 44 f. ; and religion, 
 22-24, 44 f., 624; incompatible with pan- 
 theism, 193-198; constitution of man, God 
 revealed in, 369, 375-377, 384 f. 
 
 More, Hannah, 392 ; Henry, 526. 
 
 Mosaism, the absolute recognized in its 
 moral law, 390. 
 
 Moses, vision of God's glory, 69 f. 
 
 Motion, perpetual and self-generating, in- 
 volved in the merely mechanical concep- 
 tion of the universe, 237, 268 f. 
 
 Mozley, Canon, survival of the fittest, 319. 
 
 Miiller, F. Max, ethnic religions, 27 f., 29; 
 idea of the infinite not negative, 217; each 
 god worshiped as supreme, 359 ; belief 
 in revelation, 363; sense of the mysterious, 
 378, 381 ; fetichism, 426 f. 
 
 Miiller, Julius, God in the background of 
 self-consciousness, 393. 
 
 Must be and ought to be, laws of, 535. 
 
 Mystery, 205, 381 ; God the greatest of all 
 and the solution of all, 188; the mystery 
 behind all phenomena is known as a being, 
 151, 203-205 ; lies along the line of all ac- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 563 
 
 tion of the absolute in the finite, 212; dis- 
 closed by science, 205, 239 f., 269-272, 
 292, 331, 481 f.; in everything the finger- 
 print of the hand that made it, 551; sense 
 of, a feeling leading to God, 381. 
 
 Mysticism, 122-127; its truth and its error, 
 132 f. ; pantheistic, 199. 
 
 Myths, ethnic, contrasted with theophanies 
 of the Old Testament, 69 ; conditions of 
 their growth, 26 f.; extravagant theories 
 of, 69, 362. 
 
 N. 
 
 Natural man and spiritual, 103-105. 
 
 Natural selection and final causes, 322 f. 
 
 Natural theology, need of restatement, 1-11; 
 defects, 154. 
 
 Natural and revealed religion, distinction no 
 longer available, 448; the real distinction, 
 449-451. 
 
 Nature, symbolic, 180 f., 256-266, 293, 
 533 f.; orderly under law, 2S7-272, 316- 
 318, 475, 479 f., 481 f., 506, 5-35; realizing 
 ideals, 272-281; subserving uses, 281-292; 
 itself revealed in revealing God, 293; 
 false and true idea of, 480-484. 
 
 Nature and the supernatural, line of demar- 
 kation between, 17, 50, 83-86, 108, 253- 
 255, 341, 381 f., 474-476: the natural can- 
 not know the supernatural, 82-84, 103 f., 
 106-109; not in antagonism, 85 f., 87 f., 
 138, 287-292, 484-486 ; man at home in 
 both, 92, 10D, 108, 137 f., 200, 260, 290; 
 synthesis in God the all-conditioning, 220 f., 
 288 f. ; correspondence recognized in hu- 
 man action and language, 264 f. ; unity of, 
 287-292. 
 
 Nature-myths, 69, 362. 
 
 Nature-worship, false theory that it preceded 
 spirit-worship, 359-362. 
 
 Necessity and freedom, origin of knowledge 
 of, 247-249; universe grounded in free- 
 dom, 375 f. ; reconciliation of freedom and 
 dependence through belief in God, 23 f., 
 25, 207, 376, 403-405. 
 
 Newcomb, Prof., 274. 
 
 Newman, F. W., a book-revelation impos- 
 sible, 461. 
 
 Newton robbed the heavens of their gods, 
 317. 
 
 Niebuhr, 225. 
 
 Nihilists, belief in God their greatest obsta- 
 cle, 166, 430. 
 
 Nirvana of the intellect, 176. 
 
 Noire", 326, 335. 
 
 Non-theistic theories. See Atheism. 
 
 Normal condition of man, in union with 
 God, 81, 542. 
 
 Norwich, Bishop of, Bible without theology, 
 
 132. 
 Noumenon and phenomenon, 80, 533. 
 
 o. 
 
 One, the absolute, coexistence with the 
 many, 186, 192 f. ; and all, 182 f. 
 
 Ontologicai argument, its significance, 164 f.; 
 pantheism, 168; knowledge is ontological 
 in its beginning, 77, 165, 184. 
 
 Order of the universe, rational and moral, 
 498; under law reveals God, 267-272; ob- 
 jection that order and law prove the ab- 
 sence of will, 316-319. 
 
 Origin and development, of belief in God, 
 16-20, 38-47, 63 f., 207 f., 346-364; Spen- 
 cer's theory, 18, 21 f., 362; in man's nor- 
 mal development he finds God, 354 ; of 
 the idea of spirit, 17 f., 21 f., 64 f., 160, 
 260 f. 
 
 P. 
 
 Paganism, conception of life renewed by 
 modern atheism, 407, 422; Christianity a 
 veneering of, 425, 521 f. 
 
 Pain and suffering, objection founded, 297, 
 299-311, 498 f. 
 
 Palmer, Courtlandt, supposed argument for 
 atheism, 166 f. 
 
 Pantheism, definition and classification, 
 168 f., 182-184, 198 f.; rests on no rea- 
 sonable grounds, 184-188; involves con- 
 tradictions, 188-190 ; cannot solve the 
 necessary problems of reason, 190-193; 
 incompatible with free will, moral respon- 
 sibility, and religion, 193-198 ; agreement 
 with theism, 163, 169, 222 f.; calls atten- 
 tion to neglected aspects of truth, 199- 
 201 ; false suspicions'of, and criterion, 200, 
 211 f.; truths misconceived as pantheistic 
 better set forth in theism, 199-201, 211 f., 
 224-229; denies the real being of finite 
 things and persons, 168, 225; implies the 
 evolving of the absolute into the imper- 
 fect, or of the imperfect into the absolute, 
 189; logically issues in complete agnosti- 
 cism, 190; theistic misconceptions leadJng 
 to pantheism, 211 f; no "Christian pan- 
 theism," 212; man creates God, 227; its 
 fascination, 197. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, the ideal Christ implies 
 the historical, 441, 473. 
 
 Particular, the, the universal revealed in, 
 367 f. 
 
 Paul, the natural man and the spiritual, 103. 
 
 Peirce, Prof. Benj., 258, 262, 280, 367. 
 
564 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Perfect, the, rational norm of, reveals God, | 
 369-371 ; sentiments responsive to, reveal ; 
 God, 88, 385-387, 389 f , 412. 
 
 Persistence of force is persistent manifesta- 
 tion of the absolute Being, 154 f. 
 
 Personality, false ideas of, 212-216, 246, 
 334-339, 342; potential unconditionedness, 
 213 f., 310 f ; tiniteness not its essence, 
 215 f., 335-337; its essential attributes 
 may be attributes of the absolute, 214, 
 3-37 ; of man proves the personality of 
 God, 341-345. 
 
 Personality of God, essential in the idea of 
 religion, 18, 82-86, 167; objection that, 
 not predicable of the absolute springs from 
 false idea of the absolute, 210 f., 213; from 
 false idea of the God of theism, 211 f . ; 
 from false ideas of personality, 212-216, 
 334-337; involves denying the predication 
 of any attribute, 174-176, 246 f. ; error 
 that God is spirit, not personal, 215 f.. 
 334-339 ; revealed in the constitution and 
 course of nature, 251-341; in man, 341- 
 442. 
 
 Pessimism, "103, 106-108, 312 f., 387, 403, 
 416 f., 462 f., 527. 
 
 Pfleiderer, 13, 42 f., 132 f., 215, 335, 358, 
 3<il, 390. 
 
 Phenomenalism, Comte's, 170 f., 263 f. 
 
 Phenomenon, not separated from the being 
 but filled with it, 77, 79, 80; and noume- 
 non, 80, 533. 
 
 Philo, 43 f. 
 
 Philosophy, Prof. Green's definition, 251 ; 
 taken up into Christianity, 524-526 ; 
 Paul's conception of this, 525; without 
 God, issues in mere subjectivity. 526. 
 
 Philosophy of history, depends on theism, 
 423-433; and on Christianity, 526-529. 
 
 Physical system, God revealed in, 55; re- 
 vealed as power or cause, 233-250; as the 
 personal God, 251-340; subservient to the 
 spiritual, 285-292, 306-311 ; correspond- 
 ence and interaction with the spiritual, 
 100, 138, 287-292, 484-486 ; unity and 
 continuity of the physical and spiritual, 
 85 f., 287-292. 505-515; laws of the spirit- 
 ual system regulative in the physical, not 
 sequences of the physical in the spiritual, 
 289 f., 505 f., 532-546. 
 
 Physico-theological argument, 251-340. 
 
 Physicus, 169, 245 f., 403 f., 527. 
 
 Physiology requires recognition of the super- 
 natural in man, 508-513. 
 
 Pietism, 140, 141, 145. 
 
 Pindar, 383. 
 
 Plato, the soul an oracle, 87, 88 ; on prayer, 
 43;' God geometrizes, 369; ideas, 78, 192, 
 259, 437 f . ; education, 355. 
 
 Platonism, New, and Christianity, 192. 
 
 Plutarch, universality of religion, 346 ; on 
 Plato's ideas, 192. 
 
 Poetry reveals reality as really as science, 
 369-371. 
 
 Political progress, influence of Christianity, 
 430-432. 
 
 Polytheism, not atheism, 167, 207 f. ; agree- 
 ment with and preparation for monothe- 
 ism, 28, 358 f., 518 f.; alleged religion of 
 Israel, 489 f. 
 
 Positivism, Comte's, left behind by science, 
 161 f., 171, 222; logical result of denying 
 God, 161; denies the necessity of forming 
 a theory of the universe, 170, 222; reason 
 declares it, 171; implies that knowledge is 
 impossible. 170 f. ; Alice in "Through 
 the Looking-glass," 171 f . ; agreement with 
 theism, 222; religion of, 22, 222, 419-421, 
 522-524. 
 
 Postulates of science, as to the sum of all 
 force, implies that the absolute is the 
 transcendent cause, 235 f. ; as to reason- 
 ableness of the universe, implies that the 
 absolute is reason, 236, 258, 298; reason 
 in harmony with man's, universal, 260- 
 263, 436-439; postulates of science rest on 
 thei-m, 372-375, 517, 518 f. 
 
 Practical knowledge and speculative, 115, 
 117-119. 
 
 Practical power of faith in God, 402-423. 
 
 Preaching, a testifying or prophesying, 41 f., 
 451; necessity, 455. 
 
 Priests, religion an invention of, 423. 
 
 Production dependent on reception, a uni- 
 versal law, 105 f., 541-546. 
 
 Progress, belief in, due to Christianity, 
 
 430 f, 451-454; lacking in ethnic reli- 
 gions, 452 f. ; of Christ's kingdom like an 
 organic growth, 493; the spiritual pre- 
 cedes and quickens the physical progress, 
 
 431 ; man's progress in estimating and 
 trusting spiritual power above physical 
 force, 385 f., 537. 
 
 Progress iveness of God's revelation and of 
 man's knowledge of God through it, 66- 
 69, 137-139, 207-209. 211, 299 f., 455 f., 
 482, 506-508 ; analogy to the progress of 
 physical science, 16,' 39, 66 f., 139. 208, 
 363 ; three stages, 137 f., 354, 429 ; Comte's 
 three stages, 426-429; various conflicting 
 theories, 428 f. ; is a discipline and educa- 
 tion, 208 f. 
 
 Proof, indirect, 251-253. 
 
 Prophecy, testifying of God as known in ex- 
 perience, 41 f., 451 ; not merely prediction, 
 452-454; connection with and subordina- 
 tion to historical revelation, 451-454; evi- 
 dential value as prediction, 452 f. ; an 
 
INDEX. 
 
 565 
 
 atmosphere of promise and progress, dis- 
 tinguished from the assumed completeness 
 and fixedness of ethnic religions, 452 f. ; 
 distinguished from the mantic fury of eth- 
 nic inspiration, 454 f. ; prophetic or private 
 revelation, and historical or public, 56, 121, 
 451-454. 
 
 Propitiation and expiation, disclose con- 
 sciousness of God as moral lawgiver, 
 384 f. 
 
 Protestantism, lapse into dogmatism and 
 rationalism, 128 f . ; not its essential ten- 
 dency, 139 f. ; political tendencies, 139; 
 this lapse in England, America and Ger- 
 many, 140 f.-; the reaction, 141-144; its 
 continuance in current thought, 143-149. 
 
 Q- 
 
 Quarles, 231. 
 
 Quatrefages, universality of religion, 347, 
 
 348. 
 
 Quietism, 123. 
 Quinet, 13, 102, 369. 
 
 R. 
 
 Rae, on fetichism, 427. 
 
 Rational constitution of man, God revealed 
 in, 45-47, 75-82, 86 f.. 366-375. 
 
 Rationalism, what it is, 127 f., 469; lapse of 
 Protestantism into it, 128 f., 140 f. ; rela- 
 tion to dogmatism, 127-129; the reaction, 
 141-144; Schleiermacher's influence, 141, 
 145; influence of Strauss, 127 f., 141-143; 
 Lessing, 129 ; present rationalistic tenden- 
 cies, 145 f.; affirms the ideal Christ with- 
 out the historical, 127 f., 146, 469-473. 
 
 Ravaisson, on the absolute, 162. 
 
 Rayleigh, Lord, contradictions and difficul- 
 ties in physical science, 292. 
 
 Realism, Natural, of physical science, 76 ; 
 Rational, 48 f., 59 f., 75-82, 185, 193, 227, 
 256-266, 263; the true basis of physical 
 science, 76, 78, 193 ; contradicted by pan- 
 theism, 185; and idealism united, 7582, 
 193; materialistic, 66 f., 100, 413-417. 
 
 Realm of ends, the personal and spiritual, 
 285, 501. 
 
 Reason, in what sense used, 7; its funda- 
 mental ideas the forms of reality, 76, 78- 
 80 ; reason-sense, 75, 81 ; unaided, 80 f., 
 91, 93, 122; human, like the universal 
 reason and participates in its light, 44, 
 86 f., 366, 372 f ., 438 f., 517 f . ; postulate 
 of all ethics, 44; postulate of all scientific 
 knowledge, 45-47, 155, 220, 227 f., 235 f., 
 
 260-264, 366-368, 436-439 ; shown in 
 scientific prevision, 261; in scientific dis- 
 covery, 261 ; in invention, 261 f. ; in 
 mathematics, 262 ; potential uncondition- 
 edness, 214. 
 
 Reason absolute, is God, 7 f., 79 f.; ener- 
 gizing in the universe and revealed in it, 
 79, 208, 317 f., 479 f.; always at the goal, 
 incompatible with suffering, 498 ; concep- 
 tion of impersonal and unconscious reason 
 at the ground of the universe, 215, 334- 
 339. 
 
 Reasonableness, of the universe, a postulate 
 of science, 79, 236, 256 f., 258; of the 
 faith of unlettered believers in God, 399- 
 401. 
 
 Reception precedes production, a universal 
 law of the finite, 105 f., 541-546. 
 
 Reconciliation, of consciousness of freedom 
 and of necessity through faith in God, 25, 
 195 f., 207, 376, 403 ; of the physical and 
 spiritual, in man, 84-86, 474 f. ; also hi 
 correspondence and subordination, 484- 
 486; not physical laws over the spiritual, 
 but spiritual laws over the physical, 289 f., 
 484 f., 505 f., 533 ; of man and his en- 
 vironment, 287-292 ; 402-405, 493 ; of the 
 human and divine in Christ, 516-518, 
 543 f. 
 
 Redemption from sin, traces of the idea in 
 ethnic religions, 384 f. ; definition, and 
 what it includes, 444; is historical, 444 f. ; 
 involves the miraculous, 445 f . ; is a rev- 
 elation of God, 446-451; of God himself 
 in historical action, not of truths formu- 
 lated in words, 57 f ., 447 ; distinct from 
 and transcends all other revelations, 448- 
 451; in the Old Testament, 444 f., 445 f., 
 452 f., 489-494, 518; God seeks man be- 
 fore man seeks God, 470. 
 
 Relation, known as objective reality, 77 f. 
 
 Relativity of knowledge, 160. 
 
 Religion, 15-29; and morals, 22-24, 44 f., 
 375-377 ; presupposes communion with 
 God, 18, 39-44, 362 ; emergence of man 
 from the life of nature to the knowleoge of 
 God, 103-105 ; origin and development, 
 16-20, 38-47, 63 f., 207 f., 345-364; arises 
 in man's normal development, 353-364; 
 Spencer's theory, 18, 21, 362 ; various 
 theories, 358-363; is generic, 44 f., 345- 
 347; spontaneous, 347 f . ; powerful, 348; 
 persistent, 348-351 ; rooted in man's entire 
 constitution as personal, 27, 89, 353-402; 
 acceptable in man's highest moral feeling, 
 repugnant in his lowest, 408; can never 
 cease, 365, 381; proposed substitutes with- 
 out a divinity, 20-27, 418-423, 522-526; 
 practical efficacy which may be demanded 
 
566 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 of it, 405; all claim a revelation of the di- 
 vinity, 363, 456. 
 
 Renan, 109, 408; perfume of an empty vase, 
 404 ; test of a miracle, 496 ; transcendence 
 of Jesus, 532. 
 
 Reuss, effect of criticism, when isolated, 
 130 f. 
 
 Revelation, presupposed in all knowledge 
 by experience, 3, 48 f., 80 f., 93, 122, 
 363 f. ; what the revelation is, 48-57; what 
 God reveals is himself as distinguished 
 from doctrines, 4, 57 f., 148 f ., 446-451 ; 
 reaction of the mind in receiving it, 59- 
 73; is by historical action of God, 71 f., 
 446-451, 530-532; begins with human sin, 
 444 f., 449; progressive (see Progressive- 
 ness); through a human medium, in its 
 reception and communication, 454-456; 
 not an end in itself, 456 f. ; unity and 
 continuity of, 505-546 ; assumed in all 
 religions, 363, 456; analogous to the reve- 
 lation of the outward world, 48 f., 377, 
 398 ; subjective verified by objective, 5, 
 121; public or historical, private or pro- 
 phetic, 56, 121, 451-454; limit of revela- 
 tion by words, 71, 362-364, 446-448. 
 
 Reymond, Du Bois, the idea of force anthro- 
 pomorphic, 436 f. 
 
 Richter, God's immanence in nature, 293. 
 
 Right, the idea of, 80, 368 f., 376; motives 
 and emotions pertaining to, 88, 384 f., 
 389 f.; practical influence dependent on 
 knowledge of God, 407-410. 
 
 Robertson, F. W., principle on which he 
 taught, 136. 
 
 Robespierre, scenic restoration of the Su- 
 preme Being, 350. 
 
 Rothe, religion is communion with God, 18; 
 miracles and prophecy constitutive ele- 
 ments of revelation, 445: necessity of 
 written record of the revelation, 457 ; self- 
 evidencing power of the Bible. 466 ; Chris- 
 tianity the most mutable of all things, 
 531. " 
 
 Rousseau, Savoyard vicar, 325 ; impossibil- 
 ity of a book-revelation, 461. 
 
 Royce, Prof., 210, 498. 
 
 Ruckert, 397. 
 
 Ruge, humanitarian religion, 421. 
 
 s. 
 
 Sacrifice, human, 28, 125, 489 f., 491 ; Fetier- 
 bach, that it is of the essence of religion, 
 125, 198; the true Christian self-sacrifice, 
 126; and penance, disclose consciousness 
 of God as lawgiver, 34. 
 
 Schelling, atheism of consciousness, 89 ; 
 
 epochs in evolution, 184; religion grow- 
 ing wild, 358. 
 
 Schenckel, God revealed in consciousness, 
 384. 
 
 Schiller, the oracle within, 130; will-power 
 guided by reason, 306 ; beauty reveals 
 truth, 370; feeling before definite knowl- 
 edge, 379 f. 
 
 Schleiermacher, religion the sense of de- 
 pendence, 25, 391, 394 ; influence in the 
 reaction against rationalism, 141, 145; his 
 philosophy opposed to his religion, 209. 
 
 Schweitzer, the absolute Spirit, 65. 
 
 Science, none formulated in nature, 58, 470; 
 materialistic, misses the deepest reality, 
 100, 292, 381-384; physical, its progres- 
 siveness analogous to that of theism, 16, 
 39, 66 f., 139, 208, 363; its processes also 
 analogous, 58, 59-61, 135 f., 148, 458, 
 470; consists in finding rational thought 
 in nature, 257 f., 260 f. ; its contradictions 
 and insuperable difficulties without God, 
 19, 205, 237-240, 269-271, 292, 331, 381, 
 481 f. ; postulates universal reason like 
 man's, 46 f., 75-82, 366, 393, 438 f ; its 
 immense assumptions, 372 f. ; postulates 
 ideas under all which is observed, 78-81, 
 256-266, 437 f.; primitive impulse to in- 
 vestigation, 171, 382 f. ; its anthropomor- 
 phism, 436-439 ; assumes that the uni- 
 verse is intelligible, 79, 236, 256 f., 258, 
 533; enthusiasm for, a substitute for reli- 
 gion, 25 f., 46 f., 524. 
 
 Scientific motives and emotions responsive 
 to God, 382-384. 
 
 Scott, Sir W., 392. 
 
 Seeley, J. R., scientific enthusiasm a substi- 
 tute for religion. 25 f., 46, 524. 
 
 Selection, natural, 319, 321, 322, 326; evi- 
 dence of mind in nature, 275; and man's, 
 315. 
 
 Self, defined as a series of sensations, 213, 
 342 ; potential unconditionedness, 214, 
 310, f. 
 
 Self-consciousness, God in the background 
 of, 47, 72 f., 151, 393 f.; pantheistic con- 
 ception of it, 73. 
 
 Self-sufficiency, 105, 542. 
 
 Seneca, 43, 356. 
 
 Sense does not give the highest certainty, 499. 
 
 Sense-perception a revelation, 48 f., 59 f. ; 
 and self-perception in the same act, 76; 
 and rational intuition, 76-80. 
 
 Sequence, uniform, and laws, 475, 479 f., 
 483 f ., 500, 506. 
 
 Series, infinite, 155, 237. 
 
 Service, Christian law of, 536 f. 
 
 Shadows, not the origin of the idea of spirit, 
 21 f., 360 f. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 567 
 
 Shechinah, the, 468. 
 
 Shelley, human consciousness of the divine, 
 250. 
 
 Shields, Prof., theories of the stages of 
 man's historical development, 428. 
 
 Sicard, Abbd, and Massieu, 357. 
 
 Sidgwick, Prof., indirect proof, 252 ; no 
 ethics without God, 409. 
 
 Signs, natural, revelation through, 52. 
 
 Sin, separates from God, 104-109, 444 f., 
 449 f., 542, 543 f.; repudiates dependence 
 on God, 105 ; consciousness of, not en- 
 nobling, 124 f . ; consciousness of God in 
 the consciousness of sin, 124 f ., 384 f . ; pos- 
 sibility of, involved in finite free agency, 
 297, 498; God meets it with law and re- 
 demption, 498 f . ; its deepest significance, 
 542 f. 
 
 Skepticism, universal, involved in denying 
 the absolute Being, 161 f. ; insists on per- 
 petual uncertainty and indifference, 118 f. 
 
 Smith, R., Bible a book of religious ex- 
 perience, 459. 
 
 Socrates, 43, 365. 
 
 Speculative inquiry divorced from the prac- 
 tical, 115-119. 
 
 Spencer, H., theory of religion, 18, 21, 362; 
 existence of the absolute Being a neces- 
 sary postulate, 151; implied in the per- 
 sistence of force, 155 ; knowledge of the 
 absolute positive, 177, 240; accepts the- 
 istic positions and methods, 177, 180 f., 
 240 ; God unknowable because included in 
 no class, 215 f. ; consciousness of cause in- 
 eradicable, 244; on symbols, 533 f.; lan- 
 guage implying final cause, 321 ; definition 
 of the ego, 342 ; energy in the physical 
 system the same as in consciousness, 181, 
 344; religion of agnosticism, 21, 419 f., 
 522; uniformity reveals the Absolute, and 
 not merely the extraordinary, 424 ; belief 
 in God anthropomorphic, 433 f. ; caricature 
 of theism, 435 ; definition of life, 321, 437 ; 
 rude people incapable of receiving the 
 ideas of a higher civilization. 490 ; error 
 of his ethics, 537 f. ; misrepresentation of 
 Christianity, 550; type of evolution is the 
 growth of an organism, 279. 
 
 Spinoza, his pantheism, 182-184; like known 
 only by like, 186; definition of freedom, 
 193 f. ; spiritual automata, 194; begs the 
 question, 185 f.; sub specie aeternitatis, 
 231; thought predicated of the absolute 
 has no likeness to human intelligence, 184, 
 336 ; contradictions, 189 f . 
 
 Spirit, origin of the idea, 17 f., 21 f., 64 f., 
 160, 360 f.; acting on spirit, 52 f. 
 
 Spirit absolute, the two essential elements in 
 the idea of a divinity, 17 f., 378, 389 f.; 
 
 not impersonal and unconscious, 215, 234- 
 339; feelings responsive to God as, 17, 
 378-381, 389 f. 
 
 Spirit, of God, awakening the spiritual in 
 man, 114 f.; witness of, 106, 119 f., 
 468 f. 
 
 Spiritual, the, in it the deepest reality and the 
 unity of knowledge, 99-102; submerged 
 in the natural, 103-105 ; capacities in in- 
 sensibility, dormant not extinct, 109-114; 
 system, its greatness reveals the greatness 
 of man, 551. See Environment, and 
 Physical System. 
 
 Spontaneity of religious faith, 347, 350-353; 
 spontaneous belief in God a reasonable 
 ground of religious service, 399-402 ; to 
 be held to amid intellectual perplexities, 
 400 f. 
 
 Stael, Madame de, 348. 
 
 Stanley, Dean, vigor and vitality of the 
 Bible, 531. 
 
 Stephen, Leslie, depreciation of reason by 
 theologians, 91. 
 
 Stephen, Sir James, objection that the theist 
 claims faculties which others have not, 
 110; religion not necessary, 406. 
 
 Stewart, Balfour, waste in nature, 485. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, the immanence of God in 
 nature, 140 f. 
 
 Stoics, earlier and later, 356. 
 
 Strauss, his rationalism, 127; influence of 
 his life of Jesus, 141-143; discovery of law 
 dethrones God, 317; science is man's re- 
 membrance of what himself ordered as the 
 unconscious absolute, 336; logical issue of 
 denying the possibility of miracles, 503. 
 
 Strength, physical, intellectual, spiritual, 
 progress measured by dependence on, 
 385 f., 537. 
 
 Subjective, transition from, to objective, 75- 
 80 ; revelation verified by objective, 5, 
 121. 
 
 Substance, cannot account for the universe, 
 191, 201, 224, 226 f., 237; three in one, 193, 
 233 f. 
 
 Suffering, objection to theism, 297-316; its 
 significance revealed by Christ, 298, 310 f. 
 
 Suffocation, intellectual, caused by atheism, 
 383. 
 
 Sumner, C., charged with sentimental pol- 
 itics, 415. 
 
 Supernatural and natural, line of demarka- 
 tion between, 50, 83-86, 253-255, 341, 
 474-476; ignorance of the supernatural, 
 strange and abnormal, 81 ; the natural 
 cannot know it, 82 f. ; antagonism disap- 
 pears, 85 f., 288 f., 289-292; man at home 
 in both, 134-137, 200, 260, 290; sense of 
 supernatural, responsive to spiritual en- 
 
568 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 vironment, 391-393; origin of the idea, 
 17 f., 21 f., 64 f., 160, 360 f. 
 
 Supreme Being, so to regard God makes him 
 hollow, empty, poor, 225. 
 
 Survival of the fittest, the law treated as an 
 efficient cause, 318, 319 ; relation to final 
 causes, 321, 322, 326 ; is the law of force, 
 that the strongest prevails over the weaker, 
 220, 301, 314 f., 534; law of the physical 
 and the spiritual, declaring what must be, 
 not what ought to be, 534 f., 535, 540; 
 everywhere, power not weakness that 
 achieves, 534 f ; not in conflict with the 
 moral law, 535, 540 ; essential in deter- 
 mining what is duty to self and others, 
 under the law of love, 535 f., 538 f.; the 
 law regenerated by love, greatness by ser- 
 vice, 536 f . ; progress of society by devel- 
 oping spiritual power above physical and 
 regulating it, 385 f., 537; error of Spencer's 
 ethics, 537 f. ; fundamental law revealed 
 in Christ, the higher descending to the 
 lower to help it to lift itself higher, 539, 
 540. 
 
 Symbolic, nature is, 256-266. 
 
 Symbols, force and other terms used as, 180, 
 533 f. 
 
 Synthesis, of nature, man and God, 220 f., 
 288 f. ; natural and the spiritual, 85 f., 288f., 
 289-292; of the experimental, historical 
 and rational in the knowledge of God, 121- 
 149 ; of the antitheses of thought and 
 things, spirit and matter, infinite and 
 finite, 219-221; of the universal and par- 
 ticular in human reason and consciousness, 
 367 f. 
 
 Syrophoenician woman, 303. 
 
 T. 
 
 Talleyrand, 133 f. 
 
 Teleology, definition, 272; internal ends real- 
 izing ideals, 272-281 ; in particulars, 274- 
 277; in the cosmos as a whole, 277-281; 
 external ends, subserving uses, 272, 281- 
 287; in particulars, 281-285: in nature as 
 a whole, 285-287 ; is but a part of the evi- 
 dence, 255, 320; objections, 319-331. 
 
 Tennyson, 88. 
 
 Tertullian, on the sacrifice of infants, 28; 
 soul of man Christian by nature, 393. 
 
 Testimony to the reality of God's revelation 
 in experience, 41 f., Ill, 469. 
 
 Th^baud, Buddhism, 350. 
 
 Theism, points of agreement with non-theis- 
 tic theories, 163, 169, 177-181, 222-224, 
 240; takes up aspects of truth attractive 
 in pantheism, 199-201; irreconcilable with 
 false philosophy, 210 f. ; recognizes the 
 
 unity of the universe as dynamic and ra- 
 tional, 168, 184 f., 187 f., 202 f. ; and the 
 absolute Being, 207-229 ; rational ground 
 of the reality of knowledge, 372-374. 
 
 Theologian, three requisites, thinking, pray- 
 ing, trying, 115 f. 
 
 Theology, systematic, 61-66, 127, 132 f. ; con- 
 crete, 4, *99-102, 127-129, 140 f., 144, 147, 
 148 f . ; its progress analogous to that of 
 physical science, 16, 39, 66 f., 139, 208, 
 363; its processes analogous, 58, 59-61, 
 135 f., 148, 458, 470 ; common objections 
 to, unreasonable, 131, 136 f., 147; key to 
 current movement in, 139-149; Christo- 
 centric, 133, 143, 144, 450, 473, 516 ; no 
 theology in the Bible as no science in na- 
 ture, 4/58, 148, 470. 
 
 Theophanies, 69-71, 467 f. 
 
 Theophilus, eyes of the soul, 102. 
 
 Thing in itself, 80. 
 
 Thomson, Rev. Dr., 353. 
 
 Thought, necessary to the knowledge of God, 
 59-73, 132 f., 394 f.; abstracted from being, 
 not the ultimate ground of the universe, 
 373-375; not accounted for by molecular 
 action of the brain, 343, 508-511. 
 
 Tiele, Professor, germs of all religions in the 
 earliest, 20; on Socrates, 43; universality 
 of religion, 347 ; theistic ideas in negro 
 fetich-worship, 427. 
 
 Tradition, theory that the knowledge of God 
 is communica'ted by, 355-357. 
 
 Transcendence, God's, revealed in the uni- 
 verse, 233-250; implied in the postulates 
 of physical science, 2-35 f. ; proved from the 
 essential conditionedness of the physical 
 system, 236 f. ; from the fact that the uni- 
 verse, so far as observed, is an effect, 237- 
 239; from atoms, masses and systems in 
 nature, 239; from evolution, 239; from 
 gaps and breaks which are inexplicable 
 by persistence of force, 19, 205, 239, 269- 
 271, 292, 331, 381, 481 f. 
 
 Transcendence and immanence, 190-193, 
 211 f. See Immanence. 
 
 Transition of knowledge from subjective to 
 objective, 75, 82, 220, 227, 367. 
 
 Tree, Keary's theory of worship, 359 f. 
 
 Trench, R. C., miracles and Antaeus, 477. 
 
 Trendelenburg. the absolute not a negative 
 notion, 217 ; proof of God's personality in- 
 direct, 252; thought and being, 375. 
 
 True, the, idea of, 80, 262 f., 368; motives 
 and emotions pertaining to, 88, 382-384, 
 389 f.; practical influence dependent on 
 the knowledge of God, 406 f. 
 
 Trust in the gods in ethnic religions, 42- 
 44. 
 
 Trustworthiness of the human mind, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 569 
 
 Truth, assimilated into life. 115-118; love of, 
 118 f. 
 
 Tulloch, man's intuition of the spiritual, 93. 
 
 Turgot, author of Comte's theory of progress 
 of thought, 428. 
 
 Turretine, Spirit's influence in regeneration, 
 516. 
 
 Tylor, universality of religious and moral 
 "consciousness, 45, 347, 348 ; primitive im- 
 pulse to ascertain causes, 383. 
 
 Tyndall, materialism not favored in hours of 
 'clearness and vigor, 224; primitive impulse 
 to ascertain causes, 383 ; identifies will 
 with caprice, 316 ; language implying 
 final causes, 321; no rudiment of a faculty 
 for knowing God, 357. 
 
 TJ. 
 
 Uhlhorn, 29. 
 
 Ulrici, knowledge and belief, 99, 114, 202; 
 divinity of nature-religions, a power behind 
 nature, 361. 
 
 Ultimate units of thought and being, 184. 
 
 Ulysses and Grillus, 106. 
 
 Unaided reason, 80 f., 91, 93, 119 f., 122. 
 
 Uniformity and continuity of nature, theism 
 alone gives the explanation, 254 f., 316- 
 319 ; these and not merely the anomalous 
 reveal God, 19 f., 424; prove a directing 
 mind, 267-272; these facts distinguished 
 from rational laws, 475, 479 f., 483 f., 
 506. 
 
 Union with God man's normal condition, 
 105 f., 542-546. 
 
 Unity of the proofs of the existence of God, 
 153 f., 164 f.; all things in systems and 
 of these in one all-comprehending, 265 f., 
 287-292, 505-515; is dynamic, rational 
 and moral, 168, 184 f., 191 f, 254 f.; ab- 
 solute reason necessary to, 354 f., 371 ; of 
 nature, man and God, 85 f., 219-221, 
 287-292 ; and continuity of law in the 
 physical and the spiritual systems, 532- 
 546. 
 
 Universal revealed in the consciousness of 
 the individual, 367; in the particular, 367- 
 372. 
 
 Universe, mechanical conception of, 140, 237, 
 268 f., 317, 480 f.; type of, an organism, 
 286, 481; not a finished mechanism, but 
 plastic, 54 f., 210, 277-280 ; its constitu- 
 tion is the archetypal thought of God ex- 
 pressed in it, 79," 115, 192 f., 219 f., 227, 
 256-260, 289, 292-294, 513; revelation of 
 God, 54 ; every man a centre to, 87, 367, 
 422 f., 551 f. 
 
 Unlettered Christians have a reasonable faith, 
 399-402. 
 
 Use, disuse and abuse of faculties, 112- 
 
 114. 
 Uses, nature subserves, 281-287. 
 
 V. 
 
 Varuna, prayer to, 42. 
 Veneering of paganism, Christianity, 425. 
 Venus of Milo and Heine, 390 f. 
 Verification by observation not required in 
 
 scientific hypothesis, 253; of the theistie 
 
 hypothesis, 253, 292-294. 
 Vine and branch, parable of, 105, 542. 
 Virchow, materialistic dogmatism, 204. 
 Vowel-points, Hebrew, inspiration of.. 128. 
 
 w. 
 
 Wace, faith-faculty, 90, 92. 
 
 Waitz, advanced religious ideas of negro 
 tribes, 427. 
 
 Wallis, Bible a lantern rather than a light, 
 457. 
 
 Waste in nature, 296, 331 ; Goethe on, 294 f.; 
 Prof. B. Stewart on, 485. 
 
 Webster, D., necessity of religion, 417 f. ; 
 objection from the vastness of the uni- 
 verse, 550 f. 
 
 Whately, progressiveness of revelation, 456. 
 
 Whitman, W., 107. 
 
 Whitney, Prof. W. D., definition of religion, 
 15. 
 
 Will, free, is reason energizing, 375; is su- 
 pernatural, 17, 50, 83-86, 253-255, 341, 
 474-476; potential unconditionedness, 214; 
 is its idea inherent in cause? 247-250 ; 
 God revealed in the sphere of, 89, 375- 
 377 ; pantheism incompatible with, 193- 
 198 ; is the same with miracle-working 
 power, 474, 475 f., 478 f., 504, 514 f.; de- 
 nial of the possibility of miracles is the 
 denial of free will, 502-504. 
 
 Will of God, regulated by reason, 199-201, 
 305 f., 316-319, 479 f., 497-499; objection 
 that order and law prove the absence of 
 will, 316-319; not a separate volition 
 causing every motion, 249, 337-339. 
 Wilson, W. D., evolution without begin- 
 ning, 209 f. 
 
 Wisdom, a master workman, 516. 
 Witness, of the Spirit, 106, 119 f., 468 f. ; 
 
 of the believer, 41 f., Ill, 468 f. 
 Wonder, a feeling responsive to the abso- 
 lute, 379 f. : of ignorance and of knowl- 
 edge, 424: a miracle not merely a, 497. 
 Words, revelation through, inadequate, 51, 
 71, 362 f ., 446-451 ; the living Word and 
 
570 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 the written, 447 f . ; of the Master, 448, | 
 
 458. 
 
 Wordsworth, John, law and process, 279. 
 Wordsworth, Wm., 371, 376, 378. 
 Wright, Chauncey, cosmical weather, 170. 
 
 Yoga, 123. 
 
 Y. 
 
 Z. 
 
 X. 
 
 Xenophanes, anthropomorphism, 434. 
 
 I Zeller, on the Absolute, 162. 
 Zeno, logical puzzles, 193. 
 
I -.. ' 
 
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