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BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

The Philosophic Basis of Theism. An
examination of the Personality of Man, to
ascertain his capacity to know and serve
God, and the validity of the principle un
derlying the defence of Theism. 8vo, #3.50.
The Self-Revelation of God. 8vo, $3.50.

(V

GOD

THE CREATOR AND LORD OF ALL

BY
SAMUEL HARRIS, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY IN YALE UNIVERSITY

Volume I.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1896
[All rights reserved]

Copyright, 1896,
By .Charles Scribmer-'s Sons.

SKnttoersttg i^ress:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

" He," — Pantaenus, Clement's teacher and predecessor, in the Head
ship of the School at Alexandria, — "the true Sicilian bee, gathering
the spoil of the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, engen
dered in the souls of his hearers a deathless element of knowledge.
. . . The Stromata will contain the truth which is mingled with the
doctrines of philosophy, or rather covered and hidden in them, as the
edible part of a nut in the shell. For in my opinion it is fitting that
the seeds of truth be kept for the husbandmen of the faith, and no
others. I am not oblivious of what is babbled by some, who in their
ignorance are frightened at every noise, and say that we ought to
occupy ourselves with what is most necessary and which contains the
faith ; and that we should pass over what is beyond and superfluous,
which wears out and detains us to no purpose in things which con
duce nothing to the great end. Others think that philosophy was
introduced into life by an evil influence for the ruin of men. But I
shall show . . . that philosophy is in a sense a work of Divine Prov
idence. . . . The course of truth is one. But into it, as into a peren
nial river, streams flow from all sides. . . . Some who think them
selves naturally gifted, do not wish to touch either philosophy or
logic; nay more, they do not wish to learn natural science. They
demand bare faith alone, as if they expected, without bestowing any
care on the vine, straightway to gather clusters from it. The Lord is
figuratively described as the vine, from which, with pains and the art
of husbandry according to the word, the fruit is to be gathered. We
must prune, dig, bind, and do the other necessary work. . . He
who brings everything to bear on the development of the right life,
producing examples from Greeks and Barbarians, is an expert
searcher after truth, and is like the touchstone, which is supposed to
distinguish the genuine gold from the spurious. He is a much-know
ing gnostic and can distinguish sophistry from philosophy . . . rhet
oric from dialectics, and the opinions of the sects in philosophy from
the truth itself. How necessary it is for him who desires to be par
taker of the power of God, to examine intellectual subjects philosophi
cally. . . . For if we act not for the Word, we shall act against
reason. The work accomplished through God is a rational work." —
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book I., chaps. £., v., ix.

" The more the chaff of a false faith flies away before any wind of
temptation, the purer will be the mass of grain to be deposited in the
granaries of the Lord." — Tertullian.
'.' It seems to me evidence of negligence if, after we are confirmed in
Christian faith, we do not seek to gain an intelligent knowledge of it."
— Anselm, Cur Deus Homo; sub initio.
"That intellectual light that is within us is nought else than a certain
participated likeness of the Uncreated Light, in which are contained
the eternal reasons." — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima
Primae, Quaest. 84, a. 5.
" It is an assured truth and a conclusion of experience, that a little
or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man
to atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back
to religion; for in the entrance of philosophy, when the second causes
which are next unto the senses do offer themselves to the mind of
man, if it dwell and stay there, it may induce some oblivion of the
highest cause ; but when a man passeth on farther and seeth the
dependence of causes and the works of Providence, then, according
tp the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe the highest link of
Nature's chain must needs be tied to Jupiter's chair. To conclude,
therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied
moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too
well studied in the book of God's word or in the book of God's works,
divinity or philosophy ; but rather let men endeavor an endless pro
gress or proficiency in both. Only let men beware that they apply both
to charity, and not to swelling ; to use, and not to ostentation. And
again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings
together." — Lord Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book I. See
also "Essays Civil and Moral," xvi. and " Meditationes Sacrae, of
Atheism." " Without school-divinity, a divine knows nothing logically ; nor will
he be able to satisfy a rational man."— Selden, Table-Talk.
"As it is owned, the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood;
so, if it ever comes to be understood before the restitution of all things
and without miraculous interpositions, it must be in the same way as
natural knowledge is come at ; by the continuance and progress of
learning and of liberty; and by particular persons attending to, com
paring, and pursuing intimations scattered up and down it, which are
overlooked and disregarded by the generality of the world. . . Nor
is it at all incredible that a book, which has been so long in the
possession of mankind, should contain many truths as yet undiscovered.
For all the same phenomena and the same faculties of investigation,
from which such great discoveries in natural knowledge have been
4

made in the present and the last age, were equally in the possession
of mankind several thousand years before. And possibly it might be
intended that events, as they come to pass, should open and ascer
tain the meaning of several parts of Scripture." — Bishop Butler,
Analogy, Part II., chap. 3.
" The teacher of doctrine holds the highest position among the
spiritual upbuilders of humanity, and in this respect stands higher
than the lawgiver and artist. . . . What these are unable to accom
plish, that alone the living word of doctrine effects. It descends into
the depths of the human heart, pulsates in every artery, reaches every
grade of culture, approaches children not less than adults. As the
magic of art from the rough marble evokes a god, so the mightier
magic of the word of God from the undeveloped human spirit evokes
the divine image in man into joyous existence." — Hagenbach,
Encykl. Theol. § 7, pp. II, 12.
" The real will never find an irremovable basis till it rests on the
ideal." — James Russell Lowell, Democracy and Other Addresses,
p. 22. "Wisdom Supreme, the world is thine,
The cup whereof thou art the wine,'
The light, the shade that ebbs and flows,
Whatever comes, whatever goes —
All things begin and end in thee.''
Richard Henry Stoddard.
" I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ,
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it."
Browning, A Death in the Desert.
" Whoever reads these writings, wherein he is equally convinced, let
him go on with me; wherein he equally hesitates, let him investigate
with me; wherein he finds himself in error, let him return to me;
wherein he finds me in error, let him call me back to him. So let us
go on together in the way of charity, pressing on toward Him of Whom
it is said, Seek ye his face evermore." — Augustine, De Trinitate,
Book I., chap, iii., 5.

CONTENTS

PART I

PAGES
GOD THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT . 1-462

CHAPTER I
THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION
Its significance as distinguished from current misconceptions.
II. Theological investigation accords with the spirit and teaching of
the Bible. III. Essential to the preservation and purity of Christian
belief. IV. Essential to the preservation and purity of Christian
character and life in the development of the individual and of the
kingdom of God. V. Essential to the effective preaching of the
gospel. VI. Man's knowledge of God progressive. VII. Theology
to be studied in reference to the questions of the day  1-43

CHAPTER II
GOD THE ABSOLUTE SPIRIT : MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION
OF HIMSELF AS SUCH
I. Revelation, belief, reason. II. Nature and the Supernatural.
III. The fundamental reality. IV. Transcendence and immanence.
V. God's revelation of himself contained in the Bible .... 44-113

CHAPTER III
GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING
I. Self-existence. II. Omnipresence. III. Eternity. IV. Plenitude.
V. Practical influence  1 14-127

Vlll CONTENTS
CHAPTER IV
GOD IS A SPIRIT: REASON PAGES
I. God's knowledge is archetypal. II. Universal. III. Perfect as
knowledge. IV. God the absolute Reason in relation to the consti
tution of the Universe. V. Theistic realism  128-176
CHAPTER V
GOD IS A SPIRIT : WILL
I. Almighty power. II. Freedom. III. Love  I77-I9S
CHAPTER VI
GOD IS A SPIRIT : FEELING  196-209
CHAPTER VII
THEODICY : THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN
I. Basis in the supremacy of reason absolute in God. II. Sorrow and
suffering. III. The fact of sin. IV. Theodicy and the revelation
of God in Christ. V. Pessimism. VI. Mystery  210-293
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRINITY : THE BIBLICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE REVELA
TION OF GOD IN CHRIST
I. Christ the Son of Man. II. Pre-existence and humiliation. III. God
in Christ. IV. God in the Holy Spirit. V. The one only God,
Father, Son or Logos, and Holy Spirit  294-340
CHAPTER IX
THE TRINITY: ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE
I. The idea of God. II. Historical confirmation  341-365

CONTENTS IX
CHAPTER X
THE TRINITY : ITS PRACI'ICAL SIGNIFICANCE PAGES
I. Christ presents it as central in the organization, worship, and work
of his church. II. The Trinity, as revealed in God in Christ recon
ciling the world unto himself, gives to Christianity, as revelation,
doctrine, and life, its distinctive and essential significance and power.
III. Confirmed by the common and persistent belief in it. IV. His
torically associated with the highest spiritual experience and power
of the church. V. The denial of the Trinity has disclosed a ten
dency to false rationalism. VI. The Christian conception of the
Trinity meets spiritual wants disclosed in all religions and realizes
ideas which all the ethnic religions have been feeling after.
VII. Truth of the doctrine is independent of philosophical and
speculative questions discussed within the church and of the failure
to attain agreement in answering them  366-407

CHAPTER XI
THE TRINITY : PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE REVELATION OF
GOD IN CHRIST
I. Christ the revealer of God. II. God in Christ the reconciler of man
to God. III. God in Christ the revealer of man. IV. The unique
ness of Christ, the ideal man  408-462

PART II
GOD THE CREATOR  463-518
CHAPTER XII
THE CREATION
I. The doctrine of creation. II. The cosmogony of Genesis. III. Specu
lative objections  • 463-490

CHAPTER XIII
GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION
I. The biblical statement in three forms. II. Theological statement.
III. God glorifying himself in sinners. IV. Man glorifying God 491-518

CONTENTS

PART III PAGES
GOD THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENTIAL
GOVERNMENT  5i9"579

CHAPTER XIV
GOD'S GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE
Definition : God's action in the evolution of the universe expressing
his perfections and progressively realizing the archetypal ideal of all
perfection and well-being possible in a finite universe including a
moral system of finite rational free agents. II. Classification as
providential and moral. III. God's right to sovereignty as Lord of
all. IV. God's sovereignty both absolute and exercised under law.
V. Not the sovereignty of arbitrary will. VI. Submission to God's
sovereignty  519-547

CHAPTER XV
GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT: ITS UNIVERSALITY
I. Statement of the doctrine. II. Proof of it  548-568
CHAPTER XVI
PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT : ITS RELATION TO SIN
I. God's purpose of the holy character and actions of his rational
creatures positive ; his purpose of sinful character and action nega
tive. II. In all his action recorded in the Bible God seeks to prevent
sin and to reclaim sinners from it to the life of love .... 569-579

PART I
GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT

CHAPTER I
THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION
Truth is the intellectual apprehension and expression of reality.
As such it is the light and guide of man in the determinations of
his will and the regulation of his feelings. Knowledge of reality
also excites feeling and is the occasion of directing and exerting
the energy in action. Theology is the intellectual apprehension
and expression of what God really is in his relations to the uni
verse, and especially to man, and of what man and the universe
are in their relation to God. It is, therefore, the intellectual
element in religion. ,
The study of theology necessarily begins with ascertaining the
grounds or reasons of our belief in the existence of God and the
reality of his revelation of himself to men ; a belief spontaneous
and inherent in all religions. We find that he exists ; and that
he reveals himself in the constitution and evolution of the physi
cal universe ; in the constitution and history of man ; and pre
eminently in his action redeeming men from sin and developing
his kingdom, culminating in the coming of Christ and the
descent of the Holy Spirit as recorded in the Bible. This may
be called Fundamental Theology, as being the result of our inves
tigation of the fundamental grounds on which our religious belief
in God rests. Naturally we inquire next, What can we know of
God as thus revealed ? What are his relations to the universe, and
pre-eminently to man? What are the relations of the universe,
vol. i. — I

2 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
and pre-eminently of man, to him ? The result of the action of
the human mind attaining and declaring the answers to these ques
tions, so far as possible within the limits of the human mind and
the extent of God's revelation of himself, is called Doctrinal The
ology, or Theological Doctrine. It is sometimes called Dogmatics
and the doctrines, dogmas. But, because these are misleading
and opprobrious words denoting formulas of belief prescribed
and enforced by authority, they cannot be fairly applied to doc
trines which claim assent only as the result of careful investigation
and on reasonable evidence. Therefore conformity with truth
requires the use of the other designations, Theological Doctrine,
or Doctrinal Theology. What is called in the schools Systematic
Theology includes both Fundamental Theology and Doctrinal.
Because theology in its generic meaning is the product of the
human mind ascertaining all that may be known of God through
the various lines of his self-revelation, it must include not only
systematic theology, but also the critical, exegetical, and historical
study of the Bible, the study of the history of the Christian reli
gion and of the kingdom of Christ in its development through
the ages, the comparative study of the religions of the world and
their sacred books and of the relation of all religions to the
history and progress of man, and the study of the practical appli
cations of the knowledge of God to the right development of the
individual and to the progressive transformation of human society
into the kingdom of God. Here is the basis of the several
departments of theological study recognized in the schools.
They may seem too scholastic, complicated, and far-reaching to
be compatible with "the simplicity that is in Christ" (2 Ccr.
xi. 3). But it is evident, on a moment's thought, that they are
merely the different lines of investigation of what may be known
of God through the various lines of the divine action in which he
has revealed himself and is evermore revealing himself to men.
Since God has given us a revelation of himself so grand, and
varied, we greatly dishonor him if, so far as we have opportunity,
we do not use diligence to ascertain its meaning and its practical
applications. In our theological investigation religion with its spontaneous
beliefs is presupposed. In the investigations of theological
doctrine to ascertain what we know of God as revealed, we pre
suppose also, as already ascertained in our investigations in

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 3
Fundamental Theology, the existence of God and the reality of
his revelation of himself in the various lines of divine action
already mentioned, and pre-eminently in the reality of his revela
tion of himself in his action in human history developing his
kingdom and culminating in Christ and the Holy Spirit, the God
in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, as recorded in the
Bible ; and continued through all generations in the Holy Spirit.
At this point in the progress of our investigations we are not
atheists nor disbelievers, but Christian theists. We are to become
as little children in order to enter into the kingdom of God
(Matth. xviii. 3) . In the same spirit, with teachableness and open
ness of mind and willing trustfulness in the divine teaching and
leading, we seek to ascertain what God is, what we are and may
become in our relations to God, what are our duties and privileges
as related to him and our consequent duties to our fellow-men, and
what hopes of promoting their perfection and well-being we are
justified in cherishing. At the same time, I am sure that the
right presentation of what we know of God and of man through
God's various revelations of himself, and pre-eminently through
his revelation of himself in Christ, both commends itself to man's
reason, and meets his moral and spiritual needs. The results of
God's revelation of himself in Christ, rightly apprehended and
applied in the development of spiritual life, meeting man's
spiritual needs and promoting the progress of man through all
the ages since Christ, are decisive proof of the reality of the
revelation as the true revelation of God.
Here we meet the objection that religion is not theology, it is
life. But life manifests itself in intellectual action as really as in
the feelings and in the determinations of the will directing and
exerting the energies. And the intellectual apprehension of
reality stimulates and guides in every sphere of human action as
really as in religion. The danger, therefore, is not in the exercise
of the intellect respecting God and his revelations of himself, but
in the misuse of it. The danger is twofold. One tendency is to
regard truth with merely a speculative interest, dissociating it
from its practical applications to conduct and the formation of
character. Another tendency is to push inquiries beyond the
scope and limits of the human mind, or to insist disproportion
ately on the remoter and minor ramifications of thought. In
former times these tendencies have been obtrusive in theological

4 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
thought. In studying the history of the Christian church we are
saddened at the waste of intellectual and spiritual power in con
troversies on such questions, and often the insistence of each
party on the acceptance of its peculiar ramification of doctrine or
ritual as a condition of Christian fellowship. In the present
reaction from them are indications that thought is swinging to
the opposite extreme. The present demand for religious life
seems to call for life excluding theological truth, instead of life
enlightened, quickened, and guided by it. It seems to overlook
the necessity of carefully ascertaining the truth respecting God as
he has revealed himself, which is essential alike to the quickening
and guiding of right spiritual life.
Froude says : " Thus the religion of Christ was exchanged for
the Christian religion. God gave the gospel ; the father of lies
invented theology." l Sentiments of similar import, though not
always expressed with the same rudeness, have appeared in
popular magazines and newspapers, and have been uttered by
Christian ministers. The demand is for " religion," " the Bible,"
" the gospel," without theology. Therefore I am constrained to
devote this first chapter to the consideration of the real signifi
cance and practical importance of theological doctrine or doc
trinal theology.
I. We must define doctrinal theology in its true significance
in distinction from misconceptions on which the objection is
founded. i. The objection as often presented implies that theological
doctrine is essentially dogma and inseparably connected with
bigotry and intolerance. The first requisite, therefore, is to define
the words. Truth is the correct statement of the intellectual
apprehension of reality, whether the reality be a being, a fact, or
a rational principle, law, or ideal. Doctrine is what a person
believes and teaches as truth. Dogma is a doctrine, not only
held for true, but authoritatively declared as true and the belief
of it to be enforced by penalties for disbelief; therefore to be
believed in unquestioning obedience to authority and not after
free inquiry and conviction in the light of reasonable evidence.
Such was the requirement of the church of Rome before the
1 History of England, vol. ix. pp. 304, 305.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 5
Reformation; and this belief on authority without investigation
was commended as faith.
In the history of the Christian church dogmas have been thus
imposed with the assumption of authority. The spirit of dogma
tism, bigotry, and intolerance has sometimes shown itself even
among those who disclaim the infallible authority of the church.
It is therefore legitimate to expose and rebuke the error ; but not
in so doing to identify theological doctrine with dogma, bigotry,
and intolerance.
The object investigated in theological study is not dogmas, nor
doctrines, nor even truths, but God himself in his relation to the
universe and pre-eminently to man ; and the universe and man in
their relation to God. The special object of the distinctively
Christian theology is " God in Christ reconciling the world unto
himself." So Paul declared, " I determined not to know anything
among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified."
It is therefore the object of theology to attain the fullest possi
ble knowledge of God through his various lines of revelation, and
of the universe and of man as related to him. Though dogma
tism, bigotry, and intolerance have been at times historical facts
in the history of the church, they are no parts of theology. Chris
tian theology does not consist of dogmas declared by authority
and enforced by penalties for non-conformity. It consists of
doctrines expressing the convictions of prayerful and thoughtful
minds, to be received on evidence according as they are found to
accord with the principles, laws, and ideals of reason, and with
the revelation of God through Christ, the apostles, and prophets,
as recorded in the Bible, and to meet the demands of the spiritual
life. Theology, therefore, has no essential connection with bigotry,
dogmatism, and intolerance. Truth is not responsible for the
mistakes and errors of those who seek it. Comte, in his " Poli
tique Positive," presented a scheme of social organization under
the reign of complete Positivism. A committee of savans were
to determine what should be believed as scientific knowledge in
every sphere of human thought. Whoever should refuse to be
lieve any declaration of this committee must be subjected to
pains and penalties, and be no longer tolerated in the commu
nity. Hence Professor Huxley described this scheme of polity
as Romanism with the religion left out. But we should not
be justified, on account of Corote's error, in identifying all

6 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
science with dogma, and characterizing all scientists as bigoted
and intolerant.
If the doctrines which express the beliefs of men thus attained
by prayerful and earnest investigation are to be identified with
dogmas, it would logically imply that all earnest conviction, propa
gation, and defence of any truth are inseparable from the spirit
of dogmatism, bigotry, and intolerance. It would consign all the
great reformers, and all who have died as martyrs in maintenance
of truth, to the category of bigoted and intolerant dogmatists.
It would be incompatible with the recognition of man as a rational
person ; or, if he is such, it would logically imply that the Chris
tian religion, and in fact any religion, will not bear the scrutiny of
human reason. It even implies that the real knowledge of any
truth by man is impossible ; that all the action of the human
intellect can attain no more than a Perhaps, and that we are not
justified in holding any doctrine as truth with such full conviction
as to devote our energies to' its defence and propagation. The
total result of all the activity of the human intellect would be
written in an interrogation point. It is also in contradiction to
the fact evident through all history that all ages of reformation and
progress have been ages of intense conviction and heroic faith.
It is impossible to divorce life from intellectual belief; and this,
when expressed in words, is doctrine. As Phillips Brooks says,
" No exhortation to a good life that does not put behind it some
truth as deep as eternity, can seize and hold the conscience."
It is sometimes said that any creed of a church is a dogmatic
assertion of authority to command belief. But a creed is simply
a statement of doctrines held for true by persons united in an asso
ciation for a specified purpose. A church declares the Christian
belief of its members ; that is, it declares itself to be a Christian
church. The one essential criterion of Christian fellowship in the
church is credible evidence of Christian character and life. Doc
trinal belief constitutes a part of such criterion only so far as it is
essential to Christian character. But the simplest possible state
ment of what Christian experience and character are, involves a
very considerable amount of Christian doctrine. It involves, for
example, belief in God and knowledge of what he is and of his
relations to man, the possibility of trusting and obeying him, ob
taining his favor, communing with him in worship, the Christian
law of love, and many other Christian doctrines. Recognition of

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION J
common belief and purpose is essential in every voluntary asso
ciation, and none are admitted who do not concur in the prin
ciples and objects of the association. No one ever supposes that
in so doing the association acts in the spirit of dogmatism, bigotry,
and intolerance.
No more is the church subject to this reproach for exercising
the same right. If it may not exercise this right, then it cannot
recognize any doctrine or character distinctively and essentially
characteristic of a Christian, nor the kingdom of God as charac
teristically distinct from the world that lieth in wickedness. Then
no persons may unite in any association as Christians, and no
Christian church may exist. Then, because man is naturally an
organizer and cannot attain his normal development and power
in isolated individuality, Christians, forbidden to unite in any dis
tinctively Christian organization, are not allowed to attain their
full development in Christian character and their greatest effi
ciency in Christian work.
It must also be remembered that a church has no authority to
punish for wrong belief or for lack of credible evidence of Chris
tian character. A church has the power of the keys, — that is, the
right to admit to Christian fellowship or to exclude from it (Matth.
xvi. 19), — but it has not the power of the sword. The State has
the power of the sword, but not the power of the keys (Rom.
xiii. 4). The State has no right to determine the question of
Christian fellowship, or to control the church in so doing.
2. Theology is also charged with wasting mental energy in
endless definitions and distinctions, in pushing inquiry beyond the
limits of the human mind, and in discussing needless questions of
metaphysics and casuistry. It is a fact that instances of this have
often been found in the history of thought on theological doc
trines. But it is an abuse of theological thought, not its legiti
mate use nor the result of its essential tendency. Perhaps the
most remarkable example of it in history is the literalism and
casuistry of the Jewish rabbis. Their studies in casuistry and
their hair-splitting reasoning about words made the study of the
law exceedingly intricate and difficult. Edersheim says: "Ter
rible as it may sound, it is certainly the teaching of Rabbinism
that God occupies so many hours every day in the study of the
law. ... It speaks of the Almighty occupying himself by day
with the study of the Old Testament scriptures, and by night with

8 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
that of the six tractates of the Mishna." He says that a teacher
named Rabbah attained so great a reputation as an interpreter
of the law, that, when a discussion on purity had arisen in the
heavenly academy, Rabbah was summoned from the earth to
attest the correctness of God's opinion on the question under
discussion.1 The inference naturally followed that the highest
possible merit was attained in the study of the Halacha, the
record of rabbinical discussions and decisions in the interpretation
of the law. Devoting themselves to this line of study, with its end
lessly ramifying definitions and distinctions, they became interested
and absorbed in it, so as even to imagine that it constituted the
employment and blessedness ofthe saints in heaven, and of God
himself. Their minds became so microscopic that they were
unable to appreciate the greatness of God and the grandeur of
his service, and of the character developed in the life of universal
love. Hence the contemptuous saying of the Pharisees, " This
multitude (crowd, populace) that know not the law are accursed "
(John vii. 49).
Another result of this word-mongering of the Jewish rabbis was
that, in the intricacy of quibbling questions of casuistry, the law in
its essence was lost from sight. In building their hedge about the
law they hid the law of love itself and made it inaccessible and
ineffectual within the thorny hedge. A rabbi, being asked by one
of his pupils, Which is the great commandment in the law? re
plied, "The law of tassels. So do I esteem this law that once,
when, ascending a ladder, I chanced to tread on the fringe of my
garment, I would not move from the spot till the rent was re
paired." Thus the rabbinical literalism belittled the law, obscured
or entirely hid its essential significance as the law of love to God
and man, and frittered its requirement into the blinding dust of
external conventionalisms and mannerisms, instead of the life of
righteousness and good-will manifested in loving trust in God and
works of loving service to God and man.
A similar tendency has sometimes appeared in various forms in
the Christian church. It has appeared as a tendency to undue
inquisitiveness into the mysteries of God ; and to excessive defi
nition and explication in answering all questions which ramify in
every direction and as far as thought can reach, and into the
utmost fineness into which thought can be split or attenuated, and
1 Edersheim, "Life of Christ," vol. i. pp. 144, 106, 93.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 9
serving no purpose but to illustrate the infinite divisibility of
thought. This reached its most remarkable manifestation in the
scholasticism of the middle ages, with its entities, quiddities,
relativities, formal causes, Johannities and Petreities. Of this
Erasmus writes, " Theology is the mother of sciences. . . . The
ology itself I reverence and have always reverenced. I am speak
ing merely of the theologasters of our own time. . . . Let us have
done with theological refinements. There is an excuse for the
fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular
points; but every definition is a misfortune ; and for us to perse
vere in the same way is sheer folly. . . . Necessity first brought
articles upon us, and ever since we have refined and refined till
Christianity has become a thing of words and creeds. Articles
increase, sincerity vanishes ; contention grows hot and charity
grows cold. Then comes in the civil power with stake and gal
lows, and men are forced to profess what they do not believe, to
pretend to love what in fact they hate, and to say they understand
what in fact has no meaning to them." He refers to the legend
of Epimenides that, getting lost, he wandered into a cave. There
seating himself, and biting his nails and thinking of his many defi
nitions and distinctions, he fell asleep and slept forty-seven years.
Erasmus adds, " Happy Epimenides, that he waked at last !
Some divines never wake at all, and fancy themselves most alive
when their slumber is deepest." * In the time of Alexander of
Hales, the Doctor Irreffragabilis , also called Fons Vitae, it was
debated whether the angels had a higher degree of intelligence
early in the morning or late in the evening. " Gulielmus Pari-
siensis found on computation that there are 44,435,556 devils."
"John Weir, a physician of Cleves, published in 1576 a volume
of some 1,000 folio pages. He makes 72 princes of devils, with
7,405,926 subjects."2
But all this was an abuse of theological thought. It is no
argument against its use in prayerful and careful investigation of
what can be known of God in the varied lines of his revelation of
himself. The erroneous theology of the middle ages is no more
an argument against theology than the medieval astrology is an
argument against modern astronomy or the medieval alchemy
against modern chemistry. It did not pass without censure even
1 Ep. to Colet, and Ep. 81, 85.
2 James Mew, " Nineteenth Century," November, 1891, p. 727.

IO GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
at the time. Bernard of Clairvaux said of Abelard, in rebuke of
his rationalistic inquisitiveness, that "he thrust his head into
heaven and scrutinized the deep things of God." Another saint
says that he saw in a dream or vision an honored Doctor of
Theology with a measuring line in his hand trying to ascertain
the exact height and width of the gate of heaven. Another
rebukes some theologians of his time for their refined definitions
of the eternal generation of the Son of God, "quasi ipsi
obstetricaverint." The Reformation was in part a protest against
the word-weariness engendered by such scholastic discussions.
But even in the reformed churches the tendency to excessive re
finement in definition and in answer to needless, questions has
not entirely ceased. But its continuance, though with abated •
force, is no reason for any valid argument against theology. It
is not a tendency essential to theology ; but is merely incidental
to the limitations of the finite mind. Many theologians deprecate
it, and it is gradually passing away in the progress of theological
knowledge. 3. Occasion for misconception of theology and objection
against it has been given also in the fact that there has appeared
in the church a tendency to a false literalism and a disintegrating
verbal interpretation. This arises from the error of regarding the
Bible as a mere book-revelation, a book of sentences, an arsenal
of proof-texts, each dictated by God and declaring a truth or rule
of life for all persons in all places and all times. Thus the Bible
is disintegrated into texts. It is searched through and through for
isolated proof-texts, to be used in proving a doctrine or justifying
or enjoining a practice. Irenaeus rebukes this tendency and
compares this atomistic use of proof-texts to the breaking-up of
the mosaic of a king made with jewels by a skilful artist, and
forming, by rearranging the jewels, the image of a dog or fox, and
then trying to persuade men that this miserable likeness is the
'true image of the king, by pointing to the jewels as real jewels.1
This has been accompanied with a tendency to use each text in
its literal meaning, isolated from its connection, as a universal
truth or law. Sisinnius, a bishop of the Novatians in Constan
tinople, was in the habit of wearing white garments. On a visit
to Arsacius he was asked why he wore a garment so unsuitable for
a bishop, and where it was required in the Bible. He replied
1 Against Heresies, Book I. chap. viii. 1.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION II
" Solomon is my authority, whose command is, ' Let thy garments
be always white ' (Eccles. ix. 8) ; and at the transfiguration our
Saviour's garments were white as the light." J An instance of
disintegrating literalism is related by Dr. James Freeman Clarke
in 1869 : " In the evening I went to a church and heard a dis
course on, ' Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the
issues of life.' The preacher argued that Solomon must have
known the circulation of blood, and hence the Bible was inspired.
He said also that Job must have known that the solar system is
moving toward the Pleiades when he said, ' Canst thou bind the
sweet influences of the Pleiades ? ' " 2 Cardinal Newman in his
earlier life seemed inclined to a similar literalism. Before he
united with the Catholic Church he appears to have regarded a
life of celibacy as obligatory. He inferred this from the words of
Paul (1 Cor. vii.). In this chapter Paul fully approves marriage.
But because it was a time of persecution and distress he expresses
the opinion that " by reason of the present distress " it is well for a
Christian to remain unmarried ; he explicitly says that on this
point he has no commandment from the Lord, but simply gives
his own judgment. But Newman insisted that this is a rule for
all and for all time. He said, " If the present distress does not
denote the ordinary state of the church, the New Testament is
scarcely written for us, but must be remodelled before it can
apply." Interpretations like these are of the same type with a
rabbinical interpretation of the words of a psalm, " Out of the
depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord " (Ps. cxxx. 1) ; " there
fore it is" good to pray from a low place, not from a high
place." This tendency to disintegrate the Bible into isolated texts
manifests itself also in the impression that some distinctively
evangelical and spiritual instruction must be found in every
isolated verse. Rev. Dr. Ewer says : " Who is that of whom
it is said, ' Lo, we heard of the same at Ephrata and found it
in the wood,' but He of whom the shepherds heard at Bethlehem-
Ephrata, and whom all sinners find on the wood of the Holy
Cross? And what were those two sticks which the widow of
Zarephath gathered on which to bake her bread but the two
1 Socrates, "Ecclesiastical History," Book vi. chap. xxii.
2 His Life, by E. E. Hale.
8 Dr. Edwin A. Abbott, in " Contemporary Review," Jan. 1891, p. 45.

12 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
beams of the Cross on which was prepared the Bread of
Life?"1 A little book has been published entitled, "The
Gospel in the Book of Esther." The author speaks of it as
" This precious story of grace in this little book of God." The
interpretation given is that Haman represents the devil, and the
letters which he sent to all the provinces conveying the sentence
of death on all the Jews denote the condemnation and death
which have come upon all men through sin, which " Satan intro
duced." Mordecai represents faith active and energizing ; Esther
represents " the state into which one is brought by faith," though
with all the race under sentence of death.2 If interpretations
like these are admissible any allegorizing is admissible.
In interpreting the Bible we are not to seek for a double sense,
a deeper meaning hidden under the legitimate significance of the
words. Underlying all interpretation of the Bible should be the
maxim ofthe great Jewish writer Maimonides (A. D. 1 135-1204),
" The law speaks in the language of the children of men." And
Thomas Aquinas said, " All meanings of Scripture are founded
on the one literal meaning, from which alone argument can
be drawn; but argument cannot be drawn from allegorical
interpretations." s
It is also true that underlying all interpretation of the Bible
should be the recognition of the fact that the Bible is the record
of God's historical action through many ages redeeming men from
sin and developing his kingdom until the coming of God in
Christ and the development of the kingdom into Christ's spiritual
and universal kingdom. Even when the historical character of
the revelation is acknowledged, the tendency to disintegrate is
often seen. The significance of the life of an individual, or of
an event or series of events in the national history of Israel, is
1 Four Conferences on the operation of the Holy Spirit, delivered at
Newark, N. J., and repeated by request in Boston, Philadelphia, and
Brooklyn, by Rev. F. C. Ewer, S. T. D., 1880, pp. 43, 44.
2 This type of interpretation by the uneducated is exemplified in an
anecdote related by a distinguished clergyman of South Carolina. Before
slavery was abolished a negro preached on this text in the Song of
Solomon: "The voice of the turtle is heard in our land." He reminded
his hearers that they all knew that a turtle never sings. The noise it makes
is when it plunges into the water. Therefore, he explained, the text means
that a blessed time is coming when all over our country people will be
baptized by being plunged into the water.
8 Summa Theologiae, I., Quaest. I. Article x.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 1 3
found only in the influence of a good example, or a warning
against wickedness in the history of evil-doers. The interpreter
overlooks the fact, patent in every book of the Bible, that the
history recorded is primarily the history of God's action progressive
through the ages in the redemption of men from sin and the
development of his kingdom. Thus he overlooks the unity and
continuity of the divine action and the significance of particular
events in their relation to this unity and continuity of divine
action and revelation. So doing, the interpreter simply scratches
the shell without even seeing the living seed germinating and
ripening within it. So the old maxim is fulfilled, " Qui haeret in
litera haeret in cortice." There must indeed be the careful
investigation of the particular facts and prophecies recorded.
There must be also the study of every fact of the history, of
every prophecy, of every didactic and preceptive passage, in its
relations to the whole revelation in its continuity and unity. We
must have regard to the literary character of the Bible. It contains
history and biography, didactic and preceptive teachings, proverbs,
poetry, rhetorical figures, parables and fables, peculiar national
and oriental coloring of thought, symbols and types, apocalyptic
imagery, inspired prophecy. The interpreter must take note of
these peculiarities. And they are to be- interpreted according to
the reasonable principles and laws of interpreting language.
But always regard must be had to the fact that the Bible is the
record of God's progressive action through the ages developing
his kingdom, and each part must be considered in its relation to
the whole progressive revelation. Here the old principle of
interpretation from " the analogy of faith " reappears with a new
meaning. It is not that we are to interpret particular texts in
accordance with the established creed of the church ; but we
obtain light on the meaning of a particular passage by consider
ing its place and significance in the progressive revelation as
a whole. It is what has been called " the trend of the
Scriptures." And familiarity with the Bible is not so much
holding many separate texts in the memory and facility in citing
them, as it is familiarity with the historical course of God's action
in the development of his kingdom, and experience of the truth
of that revelation of God in guiding and quickening the spiritual
life. 'Thus the Scriptures come to be held in solution in the
spiritual life. We know them as the bread and water of life, by

14 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
which we spiritually live and grow and work ; as the light of the
Sun of Righteousness, at once enlightening, guiding, and quicken
ing the spiritual life. And we are always to remember that by
disintegrating the Bible into texts, and by scholastic and hair
splitting definitions and distinctions supported by isolated proof-
texts, we may construct a hedge about God's revelation as
obstructive as the rabbinical hedge about the law ; and so may
substitute the letter which killeth for the Spirit that giveth life,
and make the word of God of no effect through the traditions
of men.
It follows that the ultimate appeal is through the Bible to the
God in Christ redeeming men from sin and reconciling the world
unto himself, as revealed in the divine action recorded in the
Bible and in the ever-present Spirit in whom the divine work of
reconciliation is continued through all ages. This must be so,
because God's revelation of himself is by his historic action, and
this has reached its highest form in Christ and the Spirit. God in
Christ is the light of the world, the revealer of all truth respecting
God. God shines in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. God in Christ is
the source of all right spiritual life. He in his earthly life is the
pattern and exemplar of all Christian character, life, and work.
In him are the great motives inspiring the Christian life. In him
are revealed man's likeness to God ; the possibility of man's
union with God and the way of attaining it ; the love of God to
men ; the duty and privilege of man to exercise love the same in
kind with that of God as he has revealed it in Christ. The goal
of all right endeavor is to be like Christ and to lead and help all
men to the same union with God and likeness to him in love.
Thus the ultimate appeal is through the revelation of God
recorded in the Bible to God in the living Christ and the ever-
present Spirit.
4. Another misconception on which the objection to theology
rests is the assertion that theology deals exclusively with abstrac
tions. The whole course of thought in this chapter shows that
this is a gross misconception. Our knowledge of God is not
worked out solely by subjective processes of thought. It presup
poses God's revelation of himself. Theology therefore begins,
like all science, in the observation of facts. God's revelation of
himself is by his action in the constitution and evolution of the

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 15
physical universe ; in the constitution and history of man ; and
pre-eminently in his action redeeming men from sin, and devel
oping his kingdom, recorded in the Bible and continued through
all subsequent ages in the Holy Spirit. The sphere of man's
observation of facts in attaining the knowledge of God is the
whole universe and its evolution from its beginning. Theology
also recognizes the three grades of scientific knowledge, — the
empirical, the noetic or rationalistic, and the theological.1 It be
gins with observing facts. It brings the observed facts into the
light of reason to ascertain their causes and laws, their relations
to one another, and the unity of all in a reasonable system. It
finds their cause and laws, their harmony and unity in a system,
only in the recognition of God, the absolute and universal Rea
son. So, in studying the particular line of God's revelation of
himself recorded in the Bible, we begin with the empirical study
of the Bible to find out what it is and what it records ; we find
the record of God's action continued through many centuries,
developing his kingdom, and so progressively revealing himself to
men. Then studying it in the light of reason we find its signifi
cance, progressiveness, harmony, and unity as the revelation of
God culminating in Christ and the Holy Spirit. Every science
in its sphere discloses God revealing himself to men, and so is
tributary to God's revelation of himself in Christ, perpetuated in
the Holy Spirit, which is the highest form of his Self-revelation.
Thus the sphere of facts on which theology or the knowledge of
God rests is nothing less than the universe itself, its constitution
and evolution, physical and spiritual.
Besides this, each individual, in the exercise of religion, comes
into touch with God, and knows him in personal experience. All
worship implies the reality of communion with God. In all the
religions of the world men have assumed the reality of personal
communion with God. Christ has pre-eminently revealed its
reality in the glad tidings that God is graciously seeking man
before man seeks God ; that whoever in penitential trust yields to
the gracious divine influence finds God already knocking at the
door and waiting to be gracious, and receives the fulness of his
grace. Therefore, theology rests both on the observation of facts
and on personal experience. And theology, or the knowledge of
God, is corroborated by the testimony of millions, in the course
1 See " Philosophical Basis of Theism," chap. xiii.

1 6 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
of the ages, who have themselves both found God revealed in the
universe and known him in their own personal experience.
Therefore, instead of dealing only with abstractions, theology
deals with the fundamental reality of the universe. The range of
its observation and investigation of facts extends through the con
stitution and evolution of the physical universe, and through the
constitution and the entire history of man.
II. The effort to ascertain true theological doctrine is accord
ant with the teaching and spirit of the Bible, to which the objec
tion is in direct contradiction. The utmost diligence in attend
ing to the law and teaching it to children is explicitly and
repeatedly enjoined (Deut. vi. 7-9 ; xi. 18-20). It is spoken of
in the Psalms as the object of intense and enthusiastic study :
" Oh how love I thy law ! it is my meditation day and night "
(Ps. cxix. 97; Ps. i. 2). Jehovah appeals to the people to ex
amine and judge of the reasonableness of his doings. " Come
and let us reason together, saith Jehovah. Are not my ways equal ?
Are not your ways unequal?" (Isa. i. 18 ; Ezek. xviii. 29 ; xxxiii.
17, 20). Christ in his oral teaching was continually correcting
the erroneous conceptions of the Scribes and Pharisees as to the
coming of the Messiah and the character of his kingdom. The
Sermon on the Mount and his farewell address and prayer (Matth.
v.-vii. ; John xiv.-xvii.) are full of the most important theological
instruction respecting the person and work of the Messiah, the
true nature of his kingdom, and the real significance of the revela
tion of God in him. In the Epistles we find a large develop
ment of theological truth and its practical applications. We are
told that the Christian religion is a " reasonable service " (Rom.
xii. 1 ) . We are exhorted to be " ready always to give an answer
to every one who asketh a reason for the hope that is in you "
(1 Pet. iii. 15). We are commanded, "Prove all things; hold
fast that which is good" (1 Thess. v. 21). In fact, the very
conception that God reveals himself by his gracious action, re
deeming men from sin, and developing his kingdom by prophetic
communications, and in the coming of Christ and the descent of
the Spirit, implies that man is to study the revelation, and by the
earnest use of his highest powers find out its true significance.
Here it is objected that this revelation supersedes the use of
human reason in seeking to know God. As a recent writer put it,

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 1 7
" You must not put your lactometer into the pure milk of God's
Word." It is asked. Since God has spoken, what is the need of
human philosophizing? Accordingly we find on the one hand a
type of theologians who are jealous of human reason and dis
parage it ; as if reason were silenced in the presence of revela
tion. We find on the other hand a false rationalism which is
jealous of revelation and rejects it ; as if revelation were silenced
in the presence of reason. Both assume that reason and revela
tion are incompatible and contradictory. But revelation is the
revelation of the highest reason to rational man. Man, as rational,
must receive and interpret it. Neither is sufficient of itself.
Revelation is of reason to reason. It is no revelation except as
there is reason to interpret it ; it remains unintelligible. Human
reason cannot create the historical acts of God in which he reveals
himself; it can only interpret them, and make their light the
guide of life. If God reveals himself to man, there must be
in man powers and susceptibilities adequate to understand and
appropriate the revelation and to live by it. God cannot reveal
himself to oysters and snails, nor even to horses and dogs ;
for they have no capacity to understand the revelation or to
receive it and appropriate it as the guide of life. God makes no
revelation in a magical way, dispensing with the action of the
human powers. In every historical revelation he leaves man to
interpret it. In every illumination of men's minds by the Divine
Spirit, even in the inspiration of prophets and apostles, he re
spects and employs their rational and moral powers, and through
them addresses the rational and moral powers of those to whom
the revelation is communicated. It is these powers, in the likeness
of God, who is Spirit, which constitute man receptive of divine
revelation. As Novalis says : " It takes a God to discern a God."
The very fact that God reveals himself to man is the proof and
recognition of the exaltation of man's reason and of the necessity
of his using it.
Theologians have often depreciated reason in order to exalt
revelation. But in so doing they also depreciate revelation as
much. The greater the revelation, the greater the mind which
can receive it. A man may reveal something of himself to a dog ;
but he cannot reveal his knowledge of the binomial theorem, nor
his knowledge and love of God. A revelation to a dog must be
level to the capacities of a dog. God cannot reveal himself so
vol. 1. — 2

1 8 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
fully to a child four years old as to a Milton or a Newton. The
moral and spiritual character must also be considered. God can
not reveal himself to a Nero or a Heliogabalus as fully as to an
Isaiah or a John. The greatness of the revelation is proof of the
greatness of the rational person who receives it.
Reason, then, must be used in interpreting, appropriating, and
applying the revelation of God in the Bible. And the result
must be theology.
III. Theology is essential to the preservation and purity of
Christian belief. As the objection to it is incompatible with the
teaching and spirit of the revelation of God recorded in the
Bible, so also it unsettles the foundation of Christian belief, flouts
human reason and opens the way to fanaticism and superstition,
and is incompatible with the historical continuity and unity of
the revelation of God and of man's progressive knowledge of
him. i. The objection in its essential significance implies that the
Christian religion and its claim to be founded on God's revelation
of himself will not bear the scrutiny of human reason. It is the
tacit confession that the Christian religion rests on no realities
the knowledge of which can be expressed in logical propositions,
or brought into the unity and harmony of a reasonable system,
or into harmony with physical science or true philosophy, or be
in any way expressed and vindicated to human intelligence and
reason as real knowledge. Sometimes the statement of the ob
jection is an explicit assertion of agnosticism as to God and his
relations to the physical universe and to man. " The value of
theological science has been and is greatly overestimated. Its
value consists chiefly in the fact that it furnishes most palpable
evidence of the complete and irremediable impotency of the
human mind, however well trained, not only to discover any
divine truth whatever by its own exertions, but also to apprehend
revealed truth correctly and to reproduce it harmoniously for
the building-up of the body of Christ, the one blood-bought
church." J What, we may ask in passing, is the recognition of
" the one blood-bought church," which is " the body of Christ "
1 " Anti-Higher Criticism," Address by Prof. Ernst F. Stroeter, Ph. D.,
of Denver Univ., at the Bible Conference, Asbury Park, N. J., Aug. 1893
p. 268.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 1 9
and is to be built up in the world, but the recognition of several
of the most profound doctrines of theology ?
2. Theology is necessary to man as a rational person. The
objection to all theology is also incompatible with any recognition
of man as a rational person. As such he must think, and form
opinions on whatever concerns him. This objection to theology
implies that a person must not think or attempt to attain any
reasonable belief on the most momentous questions pertaining to
the highest interest of human life. This is simply impossible.
Man must think and seek to attain reasonable beliefs on all sub
jects that bear on him and his interests. Therefore theology is
not only demanded, but is inevitable from the very constitution
of the human mind. The demand is for religion without the
ology. But theology is simply the intellectual apprehension of
the primitive data of religion, on which, as realities presented in
God's revelation of himself, all religious experience rests. It is
the intellectual apprehension of the God whom we worship, of
what he is and what are his relations to us and to the universe.
It is simply the intellectual apprehension of what we believe in
our religion and of the reasons why we believe it. Any truth
respecting God, apprehended in its distinctness from and its har
mony with other truths, is theology. Every person who utters any
definite conviction respecting God, man's duty to him, God's for
giveness of sin, or any proposition whatever respecting God's
relation to man or man's relation to God, is uttering theology.
Any preaching of " the Bible," or "the gospel," is a preaching of
some theological doctrine which the preacher has defined in his
own thought and has ascertained to his own satisfaction to be the
truth of God. Even if he uses the very words of Scripture, he has
in his own mind interpreted their meaning and attained the con
viction that the words, as he interprets and applies them, have
the authority of God. Thus men construct and speak theology
without being aware of it ; as Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's
"Bourgeois Gentilhomme," was surprised to learn that he had been
speaking prose all his life without knowing it. Hence those who
denounce theology, in the very act of denouncing it, are wont to
present a considerably full theology of their own. What they de
nounce is not theology, but the theology of other persons which
differs from their own. A writer in a popular magazine, who
says " the world is sick of theology," and urges the substitution of

20 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the gospel instead, says, " The man who preaches the Gospel
preaches a Person ; preaches a life and death and resurrection ;
proclaims the good tidings of a divine message and a divine mis
sion to men ; addresses and works upon the higher sentiments ;
labors for the uprooting of selfishness in the heart of life and the
implanting of love as the dominant motive, and labors for the
transformation of character." In preaching thus he would preach
a considerably full system of Christian theology.
It is evident, therefore, that the objection against theology is
equivalent to a demand for the suppression of all thoughtful study
of the Bible, and of all endeavors to attain any intelligent, reason
able, and consistent ideas of God, of the universe, and of man as
related to him, of immortality, or of any spiritual reality. It rests
on the maxim, " Ignorance is the mother of devotion." Fully
carried out it would carry us back to barbarism ; or beyond, for
even in the religion of savages they think out a theological con
ception of what God is and how he may be served, however fan
tastic the conception may be. Compliance with the demand for
the suppression of theology is simply impossible. Theology is
inevitable. From the nature of the human mind man must think
of realities which concern him. He will think of God and of his
own relations to him.
The alternative, therefore, is not between theology and no the
ology. It is between a theology, on the one hand, drawn with
prayerful, earnest, and rational investigation from the religious
experience of the inquirer himself and of all mankind, from all
God's revelations of himself in the constitution, evolution, and
order of the physical system, in the constitution and history of
man, in Christ and the whole line of revelation recorded in the
Bible, and in the continued presence and action of the Holy
Spirit illuminating and quickening men ; and, on the other hand,
a theology crude, defective, and false. Such was that of one who
said he saw no need of any difficulty in the doctrine of the Trin
ity, as it was just like a tree divided into three branches. And in
reference to the philosophical objection that a cause is nothing
but an antecedent, one replied that it is evident to observation
that a cause is sometimes not an antecedent at all, as when one
is trundling a wheelbarrow the effect goes before the cause. If
we are not to have a theology founded on both Christian expe
rience, careful investigation, and reasonable thought, then we shall

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 21
either have a theology of the feelings blindly believing in accord
ance with the strongest impulses and issuing in fanaticism or
superstition, or we shall worship a God whom avowedly we do
not know and who therefore may be unworthy of the adoration,
trust, and service of a rational being, or we shall fall back on an
unquestioning and implicit faith in authority, whether of ecclesias
tical priests or German critics.1
We are therefore under obligation to use all our powers and
opportunities with diligence to get clear conceptions of God, so
far as he has revealed himself to man. It is but poor respect we
show him if we do not use the rational, moral, and spiritual
powers and susceptibilities with which he has endowed us to
ascertain and understand, and so to prepare ourselves to declare
to others, what he has revealed himself to be and to require.
And in this very search after God we trace the line beyond which
human knowledge cannot penetrate, and there rest with equanim
ity. We gladly use what God has revealed, not wasting our
intellectual energies and resources in trying to define, picture, and
comprehend the mysteries of the absolute Being, who must, as
absolute, always transcend the finite mind. So Paul prays : " that
ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be 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 "
(Eph. iii. 16-19). As Canon Lyddon says: "In no depart
ment of human knowledge is haziness deemed a merit; by
nothing is an educated mind more distinguished than by the
resolute effort to mark the exact frontiers of its knowledge and of
its ignorance, to hesitate only when hesitation is necessary, to
despair only when knowledge is ascertainably out of reach.
Surely on the highest and most momentous of all subjects this
same precision may be asked for with reverence and in reason ;
surely the human mind is not bound to forget its noblest instincts
when it approaches the throne and presence of its maker." 2
He who made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust (mould) in us unused. — Hamlet.

1 See " The Self-Revelation of God," p. 179.
2 Some Elements of Religion, p. 25.

22 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
3. The objection to theology is also incompatible with the
historical continuity and unity of the development of theological
knowledge in the progressive development of the kingdom of
God on earth. The universe is so vast and complicated that
no one person and no one generation can discover all which can
be known of it. And because every particular object is related
to the universe, acting on its environment as well as acted
on by it, no one person or generation can discover all which is
knowable about anything. At every point of time man is the
" heir of all the ages." He begins where the preceding genera
tion left off, and all the discoveries of all the ages lie open
before him to master and use in any line of investigation to
which he devotes himself. And if this is true of the knowledge
of finite things, much more must it be true of the knowledge of
God. Here is the necessity of the historical spirit which appre
ciates and preserves the knowledge gained in the past, while by
further investigation mistakes of the past are corrected, obscuri
ties are removed, and new knowledge is gained. An astronomer
or geologist would be considered insane if he should undertake
to study those sciences without acquainting himself with the dis
coveries of the past. And he is equally insane who investigates
what God is, and what the universe and the men in it are in
their relation to God, with no recognition of what God has
revealed and what men have learned respecting God in former
generations. We must heed the simple but profoundly signifi
cant saying of Burke : " If one would go to any place he must
start from where he is." It is said a pigmy on the shoulder of
a giant can see farther than the giant. But it is only on con
dition that he climb upon the giant's shoulder. Lord Bacon
says, " We are the true antiquity." But this is true only on
condition that we possess ourselves of the wisdom of the ancients
and of the significance and fruits of their history. Thus in each
generation man comes into possession of " the capitalized expe
rience of the race." But he must take possession of his inherit
ance and use it, or it will profit him nothing. In addition to
this, God's revelation of himself is progressive by his continuous
action in the course of human history, disclosing his character
and law, redeeming men from sin and advancing on earth his
kingdom, the reign of universal good-will regulated by righteous
ness in accordance with eternal truth and law. In this way also

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 23
the knowledge of God is progressively enlarged by the results
of his action through the ages. The oak is the revelation of
the acorn and the most complete commentary on its significance.
And the kingdom of God in its progressive growth through the
ages, continued by the action of God redeeming men from sin,
transforming human society into itself, and as it will continue
to advance till the consummation of redemption, is the most
complete commentary on the significance of his revelation of
himself in Christ as recorded in the Bible.
The study of theology in this historical spirit develops the his
torical sense, a sort of immediate insight into the significance and
value of opinions. It saves the theologian from the very com
mon mistake of propounding as a new discovery an opinion
fully discussed and exploded in a former age. It creates in him
a healthy caution in receiving new doctrines. It restrains him
from self-confidence and rashness in his speculations. It helps
him to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the per
manent from the transient. It quickens him to reverence for the
great truths which have been embodied in the confessions and
teachings of the church, which have been uttered in its prayers
and spiritual songs, which have vitalized the Christian experience
and inspired the self-sacrificing love of Christian workers, and
have been attested by Christian martyrs and confessors. It turns
the theologian away from needless controversies about minor
matters and concentrates his attention and interest on the great
spiritual realities which concern the practical realization of the
Christlike life and the advancement of the kingdom of God. It
gives him breadth of view, soundness of judgment, capacity to
appreciate the true principles and constituent elements of pro
gress, and so to discriminate between the false and the true, to
counsel and guide wisely in the various movements of his time.
When the historical spirit is wanting in the study and teaching
of theology, the tendency is to isolation in individual subjectivity,
in which the individual shuts himself out from the common
Christian consciousness of the church and the living growth of
Christian experience and theological thought through the ages.
E. E. Hale said, in behalf of the Unitarians : " We have stripped
off every rag. We have destroyed all the machinery. ' Just as
I am without one plea,' but that I am child and thou art father.
This is the whole. Take me in thine arms, Father of my life j

24 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
in thee I live and move and have my being. To proclaim to
the men of to-day religion in this simplicity is the special duty
of the Unitarian church." x But here, in discarding all theology,
he gives us, as is usual in such attempts, a considerably large
Body of Divinity. I heard Wendell Phillips say in a public lec
ture : " In this country we have no institutions. We have
come out of them all and stand free with nothing over us but
the broad blue firmament." 2 But they who come out from all in
stitutions under the open firmament and strip off every rag are
revolutionary Sans-Culottes, who. overturn or pull down but never
build up. They would expect every one to begin intellectually
unhoused, with not so much as a wigwam, and unclothed, in puris
naturalibus of the savage. AH progress then must cease. Each
generation, instead of beginning where the preceding left off,
must begin where it began. The intellectual labor of the human
race would be, like that of Sisyphus in Hades, rolling a stone
up a hill which always rolls back to where it started. Knowledge
would become a Penelope's web, all which was woven in the day
unravelled in the night. This must issue in universal scepticism,
in a creed of one article, — the single affirmation of the right to
.doubt and to ask questions. This isolation in individualism gener
ates self-sufficiency. It substitutes personal infallibility for the
infallibility of the church. It prevents all stability of belief. The
church is no longer a city set on a hill, which cannot be hid ; it
is only a wandering tribe of Bedouins, pitching their tents at
1 Discourse before the Unitarian National Conference at Saratoga, 1876.
2 Professor Allen in his " Continuity of Religious Thought," gives us a
remarkable instance of its discontinuity. He seems to suggest that the
church of to-day in its theological thinking should take a leap backward
over all which has been accomplished by the western churches and begin
its theology and religion anew from the position of the early Greek fathers.
This is the more remarkable in view of the facts that the churches of the
East failed to repel the advance of Mohammedism, failed to be powers
advancing either spiritual Christianity or Christian civilization, and have
but poorly preserved their own spiritual life from being lost in formalism.
On the contrary, the western churches, in the decay of the Roman empire
the general corruption of society, and the invasion of the barbarians
quickened a new civilization, christianized and civilized the barbarians and
the new nations which arose in central and southern Europe, made powers
in civilization the ideas of the sacredness of human rights and the worth
and brotherhood of man which have been the watchwords of modern
social and political progress, and have their missionaries preaching Christ
in every continent and on the islands of the sea.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 25
night only to remove them elsewhere in the morning. It pre
cludes all continuity of knowledge with progressive increase. It
issues in what Rothe calls Neodoxy, a love of novelty taking the
place of the love of the truth. It is divisive, each setting up his
own private opinion or his special reform and riding his hobby with
as much enthusiasm and elation of spirit as if he knew for
certain that he was mounted on one of the apocalyptic horses
which John saw issuing forth to the battle of the Lord. In cor
recting Christian doctrine and purifying Christian life, it rends
rather than repairs, it washes away rather than purifies. As
Aubrey de Vere makes one of his characters say of another, —
" In the washing of the dirt
From off the church, he '11 wash the church to nothing.
I preached against her sins ; there were who said
I hit them hard. He '11 rend away the rags
With shreds of flesh adhering."
Against such individualism Dr. Bellows properly protests : " I
flatly disown all allegiance to those theories of so-called freedom
of thought and inquiry which allow every man's right to assume
the ignorance and folly of all his predecessors ; to approach all
social, political, and religious questions as if he were the first man,
or after the order of Melehizedek without father or mother, —
approach them as though he had the authority and wisdom and
independence of humanity itself, instead of being a mere tendril
of that noble and sturdy vine." 1 This is not the position of
physical science, nor of philosophy, nor theology,
" nor any school
But that where blind and brawling ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments unashamed
On all things all day long."
Theology, therefore, must be studied and taught with candor
and openness of mind ready to correct mistakes and to welcome
the discovery of previously unrecognized meanings and practical
applications of the redemption of men from sin by the God in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself. This is in harmony
with the historical spirit. It is justified and demanded by history,
which is the record of the progressive enlargement and purifying
of the knowledge of Christianity and of its applications. It is not
1 Sequel to " The Suspense of Faith/' p. 39.

26 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
truth which is new, but man's discovery of it.1 And theology is
new only so far as man progressively acquires a larger, clearer and
more correct knowledge of God and the spiritual world, and of
man and human life in their actual relations to these great reali
ties. And this progress does not invalidate the reality of God's
redemption of men through Christ and his building up his king
dom on earth, nor of any truth involved therein.2
This progressiveness of theological knowledge has been recog
nized by the Christian church from the beginning. This is seen
in the continuous and energetic activity of Christian thought
through the ages, seeking to clarify, define and enlarge the know
ledge of God ; and even in the earnest and honest, but not always
wise and good-tempered, controversies as to the true doctrine.
" The history of Christian doctrine, a thing hardly conceived of
before this century, has now been admitted as an important
branch of church history." 3 In studying it a certain progressive
ness is also noticeable in the succession of topics which in succes
sive ages have received attention. The first was naturally the
calling of the Gentiles and the relation of the Christian church to
Judaism ; then the person of Christ and the existence of the one
only God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ; in Augustine's time,
the doctrine of sin ; after Anselm, the atonement ; in the Middle
Ages, questions like those between the Thomists and the Scotists,
having important and far-reaching bearing on theological thought ;
at the Reformation, justification by faith. While the Christian
life of faith and love and the God in Christ reconciling the world
to himself have been always central in Christian belief, it seems
almost as if a course of investigation had been planned for the
church in successive ages, so that the different subjects might be
studied as in a regular curriculum. Thus some particular topic is'
usually found to have been prominent in the thinking of each age,
and each generation has the opportunity and is under obligation to
contribute something to the healthy progress of the knowledge of
God. While we see and lament the imperfections and evils inci
dental to these discussions, it is evident that through them all the
1 John Wilkes was asked by a Roman Catholic : " Where was your
church before Luther ? " He replied : " Where was your face before
you washed it this morning ? "
2 "In Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." (Col.ii. 3.)
3 The Letter and the Spirit; Bampton Lectures, 1888, by R. E. Bartlett,
p. 142.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 27
church has been gradually coming, though with occasional retro
gressions incident to all human progress, to a fuller and clearer
knowledge of spiritual realities. The orthodoxy of to-day is in
advance of the orthodoxy of one hundred years ago. It is more
biblical, more reasonable, more closely connected with the practi
cal needs of humanity, more fully declaring that God is love and
that his law is the law of love, and better adapted to quicken,
enlighten, and develop true spiritual life and Christian work.
Theology, as the human apprehension of all spiritual realities, is
never complete. This is true in the same sense in which astron
omy, as the human apprehension of the stars and planets, as
every physical science, is always incomplete. The single sen
tence "God is love " is so far-reaching and comprehensive in
meaning that the study of successive ages and the experience of
the life eternal can never at any point of time exhaust its full sig
nificance. Theology, therefore, must be studied and taught now
in the expectation of " increasing in the knowledge of God."
This generation also must contribute something towards unfolding
the_ treasures of wisdom and knowledge which are hid in Christ.
Even the criticism of the Bible, which alarms so many, directs
attention to the truth that God made the revelation of himself
recorded in the Bible primarily by progressive historical action
among men, culminating in the coming of Christ and the out
pouring of the divine Spirit " on all flesh." This criticism of the
Bible as thus conceived, when what is true in its results shall be
eliminated from the errors, will doubtless enrich our knowledge
of the real significance of the biblical revelation. Thus in the
future as in the past it will be an ever-strengthening evidence of
the divine origin of the Bible that the diligent study of successive
ages fails to exhaust the riches of its significance, its power of
spiritual inspiration, and its practical adaptation to the needs of
human life in all its changing conditions. And because the Spirit
of God has been poured out on all flesh to abide with us forever,
God is progressively revealing himself in the continued advance
ment of his kingdom, which is the continual renovation of men
into Christians, the gradual incorporation into the laws, institu
tions and customs of society of the principles and spirit of Christ,
and so the gradual transformation of human society into the
kingdom of Christ.
This doctrine of the progress of theological doctrine is some-

28 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
times strangely misrepresented as being a mere politic adapta
tion of a creed, to the popular taste, irrespective of its truth.
De Tocqueville, in a letter to a friend on Progressive Catholi
cism, in 1854, said : " I share your feelings about the impertinence
of Progressive Catholicism. It is detestable, aside from the
question of faith. A religion is absolutely true or absolutely false.
How can it make progress?" A writer in a recent periodical
says : " The facts of theology are, or ought to be, as imperious as
the facts of natural science. Unwillingness to believe a thing
because it would, if true, be inconvenient or disagreeable, or
shock a prejudice, is in all other domains of thought or activity
accepted as evidence of unfitness for any serious process of ratio
cination, or even for the orderly conduct of life. ... A creed
which simply professes to express popular opinion on certain
topics at certain periods, and which is therefore open to change
at greater or less intervals to suit the changes in popular taste or
feeling, ... is not the kind of creed on which the great religions
of the world were founded and to which the leading churches owe
their existence." It never occurs to objectors of this type that
every science, in its correction of errors, its discovery of new
truth, and its application to the arts of life, is progressive in the
same sense in which theology is so, and that in theology, not less
than in physical science, the realities with which it deals and
the truth and facts already known remain unchanged through all
the changes incident to this progress in man's knowledge of
them. IV. Theology is practically necessary to the preservation and
purity of Christian character and life in the development of the
individual and of the kingdom of Christ.
This is analogous to the relation of all science to the practical
conduct and work of life. We do not expect the mass of the
people to be scientists. Yet the welfare and progress of the
individual and of society depend on science and the progress of
scientific discovery. Industrial inventions, their use and applica
tions, depend on mechanics, chemistry, and other physical sciences.
The preservation of health and the physical development depend
on the science of hygiene. The progress of the individual and of
society depends on the sciences of civil polity and jurisprudence,
economics, biology, and sociology. The sciences teach the true

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 29
ends to be aimed at and the true methods of realizing those
ends. It would be just as pertinent to insist on substituting the
practical work in these directions for the scientific knowledge
which enlightens and guides that work as to insist on substituting
the practical work of religion for theological knowledge. The
ology is the knowledge of God, and of the universe and of man
in their relation to God, attained by careful investigation of all
sources of knowledge. It discloses what is the true ideal to be
realized in the Christian life, the truths which present the most
powerful motives to seek its realization, and the methods most
effective to secure its realization in the individual and in society.
It guards against fanaticism and superstition ; against a dry ration
alism which recognizes no God, regards man as sufficient for
himself, and issues in abstractions ; against attempts to propagate
a godless morality and a godless philanthropy ; against attempts to
renovate society primarily by changing man's outward circum
stances and condition instead of renovating the men and women
who compose society to the new and higher life of love ; against
thus disregarding the fundamental principle of human progress
enunciated by Christ, Make the tree good and the fruit will be
good also (Matth. xii. 33) ; and against relying for the reforma
tion of society primarily and chiefly on civil law enforced by the
Government. I heard a preacher say in the pulpit : " I would
rather worship a rainbow than worship a dogma. I would rather
worship the sun than be imprisoned in the darkness and coldness
of a creed." But neither dogma nor creed is an object of wor
ship. It is, in fact, saying, I would rather worship God than have
any knowledge of him. It would be just as pertinent and just
as witty (or foolish) to say, I would rather eat wheat than eat a
chapter of organic chemistry describing the chemical constituents
of the soil needed for its growth ; I would rather eat an apple
than be imprisoned in the darkness and coldness of a systematic
treatise on vegetable physiology. Accordingly Mr. Gladstone
says : " Those who take for the burden of their song, ' Respect
religion but despise theology,' seem to me just as rational as if a
person were to say, ' Admire the trees, the plants, the flowers, the
sun, the moon, the stars ; but despise botany, and despise astro
nomy.' Theology is ordered knowledge, representing in the
region of the intellect what religion represents in the heart and
life." Therefore theology ought always to be studied in its prac-

30 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
tical bearing on life. It must not be studied in the love of
truth alone, but also in the love of God and man.
Those who declaim against theological doctrine present Chris
tian character and life as its substitute. But right character and
life are always determined by unchanging truth and law. Jesus
said, " Enter ye in by the narrow gate. For narrow is the gate
and straitened the way which leadeth unto life" (Matth. vii. 13,
14). Every way which leadeth unto life, every way leading to
good and right practical results, is narrow and strait, exactly de
fined by the truths which express the realities of the case and
therefore are inviolable laws to all who would reach the goal.
The way to physical health is narrow and straitened under unal
terable sanitary laws. If one would build a house or a bridge he
must conform his action to the plan of the architect or engineer,
and they in making their plans must conform them to the fixed
laws of mechanics, or the structures will be failures. If one would
travel across the continent he must acquaint himself with the rail
road route, study carefully the time-table and rigidly conform to
it. In every enterprise of practical life the way to success is nar
row ; it is exactly accordant with the truths which express the
realities of the case and so are the rigid laws without accordance
with which success is impossible. Christ declares that the same
is true of the spiritual life : " Narrow is the gate and straitened is
the way." The spiritual time-table defines the actual realities of
the spiritual world and the narrow and straitened way by which
alone it is possible to live the spiritual life and reach its true desti
nation. Theology marks the lines of this narrow road and presents
the motives for walking in it ; it is simply the intellectual appre
hension of the realities of the spiritual world, the historical action
of God in his government and redemption of men, the eternal
truths, laws, and ideals which condition and regulate the life of
love to God and man, and the well-being which it insures. There
fore all attempts to substitute character and life for theology are
futile ; truth is, and always must be, the guide of life. It is charged
as a monstrous error that any belief should be held to be a condi
tion of salvation. But what is salvation but a right spiritual life of
love to God and man and the well-being inseparable from it ? And
how can an intelligent person lead this life unless he has know
ledge of God and man, and of himself as related to them, and of
what the life of love is? In the same sense belief of truth is

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 3 1
essential to success in every human enterprise. On the other
hand, if Christian doctrine is studied with no reference to its
practical bearing, it cannot be rightly and fully understood. For
Christianity from beginning to end and in every aspect is prac
tical. It is the revelation of the way by which a sinner may return
to God and be reunited with him, and so realize the highest pos
sibilities of his being ; and of the way in which the constitution
and life of human society are to be perfected by the transforma
tion of society into the kingdom of God. Doctrine is vitalized by
its practical bearing on life ; life is illuminated and the way of its
right conduct is shown by doctrine. The two are inseparable.
The attempt to separate either from the other issues in fatal error.
For these reasons the study of theology and the teaching of it
in the schools, the pulpit, and the press, are fully justified as requi
site for the healthy growth of the individual Christian and of the
kingdom of Christ.1
V. Doctrinal theology is essential to the true and effective
preaching of the gospel. Here we meet the demand that minis
ters must not preach theology but the gospel. Compliance is im
possible. Preaching the gospel is preaching what God has revealed
in Christ and in his whole work of redemption and reconciliation,
and therefore is preaching theology. Now we see also, in view of
the practical importance of theological doctrine for the preserva
tion and purity both of Christian belief and of Christian character
and life in the development both of the individual and of the
kingdom of Christ, that doctrinal preaching is essential for these
practical ends. It has no essential tendency to what Ian Mac-
laren, in the "Bonnie Brier Bush," calls "a promising course of
sermons on the contribution of Hegel to Christian theology."
1 A highly esteemed clergyman, in an address at the anniversary of one of
our Divinity Schools, in 1896, is reported as " showing how Christianity was
at first a man, then a fact, and that then followed a series of theories about
the fact, each more complicated than the one before it, until the emphasis
came to be put, not upon ethics, not upon life, but rather upon the acceptance
of metaphysical systems of theology. He closed with an appeal for a creed
that should embody the golden rule and the brotherhood of man." This
would give mere abstract ethics with no recognition of God immanently
active in the world, active in constituting and evolving the physical universe,
in the moral government of man, in redeeming men from sin and reconciling
the world unto himself in Christ and the Holy Spirit, and in the progressive
development of his kingdom.

32 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
i. A common impression is that a minister of the gospel
preaches merely his own thoughts and opinions ; that the sermon
discloses nothing but the mind of the preacher. O. W. Holmes
caricatures a clergyman as writing for an encyclopaedia an article
on the town in which he is preaching. He represents him as
writing, among other things : " There is a good attendance on the
preached word." Dr. Holmes adds the sneer, " He means his
own sermons." But if there is any such thing as preaching the
gospel, the minister is not preaching merely his own subjective
opinions, nor even the truth considered abstractly. He is preach
ing Christ, and God's gracious redemption of men, reconciling the
world unto himself through and in him. He is unveiling to the
people the present God, his law and his love, the great realities of
the spiritual world, and calling on them to " look not at the things
which are seen but at the things which are not seen." He
"negotiates between God and man."
The preacher may have created prejudice against theology by
using in the pulpit the method of the school, substituting logical
analysis for the synthetic and concrete presentation of the living
God and the realities of the spiritual world. He may have ad
dressed himself to the logical understanding too exclusively, and
discussed doctrines as if they had no bearing on the life and
work, the sorrows and joys, the hopes and fears, of men. He may
have made the sermon an end, not a means. In his polemics he
sometimes gives undue prominence and reiteration to his peculiar
partisan doctrine, and to assaults on opposing partisans.
But all this is no argument against the value and necessity of
theology. To abolish theological doctrine because it is sometimes
preached infelicitously, or because it is sometimes held in an acri
monious spirit of intolerance and bigotry, or because it is at some
points defective or erroneous, would be, as Professor Huxley once
said of a similar unreasonableness on another subject, like " burn
ing the ship to get rid ofthe cockroaches."1
, i Dr. William E. Channing wrote : " Religious books are pre-eminently
dull. If we wished to impoverish a man's intellect we could devise few
means more effectual than to confine him to what is called a course of theo
logical reading." This is certainly an astonishing utterance. When we
consider the theological literature of Christianity from Justin Martyr to
Martin Luther, and from Martin Luther to Dr. Channing himself, and espe
cially the richness of the theological literature in the English language and
the literary excellence of not a little of it, we must suspect that it was the

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 33
2. Nor is it true that theology ought not to be preached in the
pulpit, but should be taught only in the schools. The difference
between the two is simply as to the mode of presentation, not as
to the essence of the doctrine presented The relation of the
theology of the school to- that of the pulpit has its analogy in
painting and sculpture. The artist must study anatomy. But the
details of the '¦ analysis " of the human body under the scalpel of
the dissecting-room do not appear in the " synthesis " of the por
trait or the statue. Yet they are there and give character to the
work of art ; as Mr. Ruskin says, " they are the ultimate elements
of every species of expression and order of loveliness." 1 Physical
science cannot be taught in a popular lecture in the method in
which it is taught in a scientific school. A treatise on chemistry
with its symbols and numbers cannot be read intelligently without
special instruction. The scholastic description of the astronomical
universe by Laplace in the " Mecanique Celeste " is contained in
five quarto volumes of mathematics, which only superior mathemati
cians can read. Yet a popular lecture which is scientifically cor
rect must accord with the conclusions of the profoundest science-
And the truth taught does not cease to be science because treated
in a popular method. When Mr. Huxley lectured " On a Piece of
Chalk," he was teaching the people science, though not in the
method of the schools. Ludwig Noir£ says that a single line of
Goethe's "Faust" is worth more than the abstract statement that this
drama presents man imprisoned in the earthly and the finite and
his sighing and striving for the infinite. But this is simply saying
that the inspiration of genius in a great drama is more impressive
than a logical analysis stating its design, plan, and significance-
So the religious enthusiasm of the preacher witnessing for God
and declaring God's revelation of himself in Christ and the Holy
Spirit by which he himself spiritually lives and works, is more im
pressive than the scholastic and analytic statement of the same
truth. Analysis takes to pieces. Synthesis brings all the parts
into their living unity. Yet the former is essential to the truth
and power of the latter.
Theology is analogous to. these. In the schools must be the
exegesis and criticism of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, his-
fault of the critic himself. The lean kine of Egypt devoured the fat ones,
and yet remained lean and ill-favored as before.
1 Modern Painters; Preface to Second Ed.
vol. 1. — 3

34 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
torical investigation, logical comparison and inference, all the
processes of careful analysis and scrutiny. The theology here is
the same truth of God which glows and warms and vivifies in the
pulpit. But it is, as Schleiermacher called it, " cooled lava." It
presents in analysis the elements of expressiveness and power which
eloquence sets forth in synthesis. The details stand out to view
in the analysis. They are merged in the unity of life and power
in the synthesis.
Therefore, instead of excluding theology from the pulpit, we
must recognize it as essential to the true and effective preach
ing of the gospel.
3. By the study of theology the preacher ascertains the proper
material for preaching, and learns to present it in its true sig
nificance, in its right proportion, in its true relations and harmony
with other doctrines, and with its legitimate practical application
and power. The material of preaching is simply the gospel of
Christ itself, apprehended as the true revelation of God, definitely
in its particulars, systematically in its unity and harmony as a
whole, rationally as commending itself to the approval of reason.
If any one proposes to be a preacher of the gospel, it is prepos
terous for him to attempt it without getting a definite and com
prehensive knowledge of what he means to preach. And in his
study of doctrinal theology the question which he is to answer is
precisely this : As a preacher of the gospel, what do I propose
to preach ? As a preacher of Christ, what am I to teach the peo
ple respecting him, and God's redemption from sin through him,
and his kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy
Ghost? Doctrinal theology is necessary to guide the preacher in dis
tinguishing the doctrines which he is to teach, in preaching God
in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, from error. '
It assists in defining the sphere of Christian preaching, in dis
tinguishing what is pertinent to the Christian pulpit from what
should be excluded from it. There is a common distinction
between the sacred and the secular or profane. But the Scrip
ture says : " Whether ye eat or drink or whatever ye do, do all
for the glory of God." Every human act and interest is related
to God. No truth of thought or interest of practical life is secular
or profane in itself. It becomes so only when considered with
no reference to its relations to the spiritual and the divine. In

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 35
this view every truth and every practical interest of man is within
the sphere of the preaching of the gospel. A Christian man's
whole life is religion, or the service of God in Christ ; and his
religion, or service of God, is his whole life. If Paul would know
nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified, it follows that he
would know everything in its relation to Christ. But if the
Christian preaching of reconciliation is concerned with all truth
and all practical interests of life, it is concerned with them only
as they belong to the religious life and the service of God, only
as they are related to God, to his redemption in Christ and to
the interests of his kingdom. The more thorough the Christian
preacher's intellectual mastery of the contents of God's revelation
of himself, and of the significance, reach, and power of Christian
faith and love, the more clear-sighted will be his discernment
of what is the preaching of the gospel in its applications to the
thinking and practical interests of human life.
Doctrinal theology is also important in giving copiousness,
richness and spiritual power to preaching, both as to its subjects
and their treatment. A decay of interest in theology reveals
itself in a predominance in the pulpit of subjects remotely con
nected with the gospel and of little spiritual significance. Tho-
luck wrote to Dr. Pusey : " Our ministers have rid their sermons
of doctrine and are preaching on the necessity of taking regular
exercise." The following are some of the subjects of sermons
which I have recently seen advertised in newspapers to be
preached in the pulpit on the succeeding Sunday : " Beelzebub
driving his hogs to be drowned ; " " Norwalk Island Light
house ; " "The Midnight Sun;" "Up a Tree;" "Deformed
Feet ; " " An Apostle's Lost Baggage ; " " The Strange Con
tents of a lost Trunk;" "The Oyster- preacher and the Crab-
watchman ; " " Future Felicity Foretasted." In the decay of
interest in theology, and of theological study, ministers run dry in
their preaching and resort to subjects remote from the spiritual
truth, or fantastically connected with it, in order to galvanize into
action a ghastly semblance of spiritual life.1 One who devoutly
and earnestly studies what is revealed by God in Christ in all
1 In Evelyn's Diary is this entry : " Feb. 24, 1665. Dr. Fell, canon of
Christ's church, preached before the king on Rom. xv. 2 ; a very formal
discourse, and in blank verse, according to his manner ; however he is a
good man."

36 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
his redemptive action in the course of history and in his bringing
in his kingdom, when he comes to appreciate the wonderful
superiority of Christianity to every other religion, the sublimity
of its truths, the wide scope of their application to human life
and progress, and their life-giving power, will never be at a loss
for a subject, and will prize every opportunity to set forth some
thing of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which are hid
in Christ.
Doctrinal theology is necessary to insure to the preacher con
sistency with himself, so that he shall not contradict in one
sermon what he has preached in another, and so find himself
often obliged to explain or explain away his utterances. It
insures a unity, continuity and cumulative power in the preaching
from year to year.
It is necessary also to insure its due proportion of attention
to every Christian truth, motive and duty. Considering the
immense amount which a minister in his preaching must produce,
it is not strange if he falls into a rut and his preaching
becomes the repetition of a few stock ideas. I knew a pastor of
whom one of his parishioners told me that during his whole pas
torate of several years he had on every Sunday in one or the
other of his two sermons distinctly preached the doctrine of pre
destination. Mr. Brook, in his " Lives of the Puritans," records
of Rev. Wm. Perkins (born 1558) : " He used to apply the terrors
of the law so directly to the consciences of his hearers that their
hearts would often sink under the conviction ; and he used to
pronounce the word damn with so peculiar an emphasis that it
left a doleful echo in their hearts a long time after." It indi
cates something unwholesome in a ministry when it is remem
bered only by the urgency with which a single doctrine was
preached. Mr. Perkins's ministry, however, seems to have been
more comprehensive than the sentence quoted would indicate;
for his biographer afterwards says : " His sermons were all law
and all gospel ; he was a rare instance of Boanerges and Barna
bas combined." 1
The study of the Bible as a collection of sentences or isolated
texts is an examination of it as it were with a microscope which
exaggerates the little and the particular and excludes from the
1 Vol. ii. p. 130.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 37
field of vision the great and the whole ; and the little and trivial
occupies the mind as much as the grandest spiritual realities.
To avoid ruts and hobbies, and the magnifying of the little to
equality with the great, there is necessity for doctrinal theology
resulting from a continued and comprehensive study of the Bible
and of all which from all sources may be known of God.
Doctrinal theology is necessary to the preacher in order that
his preaching may correspond with the unity and wholeness of
Christianity in its scope and range as a power of renovation and
life. Because Christian doctrine constitutes a system, every part
is in relation to every other part and to the whole. Hence every
doctrine, every precept, warning, promise, is driven home in its
application by the weight of the whole system. Thus the
preacher is no longer a dispenser of isolated texts, but both in
spirit and thought is a preacher of God in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself, whatever be the particular topic of discourse.
He is not a preacher merely of rules and duties, but of principles
and of God's love to man and man's love to God and man. He
is not an artisan working on details by rule, but an artist creating
ideals and making them real to the thought.
4. Doctrinal theology is necessary to the preacher to inspire
and sustain moral earnestness and to insure eloquent and effective
speech. Clear and full thought, strong conviction, a fresh, living,
and growing faith, belief which has triumphed over doubt, are
elements of moral earnestness and power and essential to all
eloquence. Haziness, indefiniteness, and doubt, achieve nothing,
have no power to convince, persuade, or inspire. True, clear,
vigorous thought, strong conviction of truth arid right, are essen
tial to eloquence. Eloquence is indeed of the heart. But if
speech effervesces in mere flowers of rhetoric, or froths over into
mere sentimentalism, sensationalism, and rant, there is no elo
quence. There must be clear thought, strong conviction of
momentous truth and imperative duty in the soul, if the soul is
to burst forth with the fire and force of eloquence.
Theology, therefore, sustains the test of practical utility. We
agree with Milton, —
" That not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle ; but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the tru? wisdpin."

38 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
But certainly nothing lies nearer to us in practical bearing on all
the interests of the daily life of man than the true knowledge of
God as he has revealed himself to men. The test of the reality
ofthe revelation of God recorded in the Bible is not so much the
literary or the higher criticism as it is the sufficiency of the
revelation to awaken and satisfy man's spiritual needs, to quicken,
inspire and direct his spiritual development and the development
of God's kingdom of righteousness and good-will, and to be the
moral and spiritual guiding light of humanity through all its pro
gress in science and civilization. And theology is simply our
best* ascertained knowledge of God in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself, as revealed in all lines of his revelation of
himself. We proceed, therefore, reverently and earnestly, ever seeking
and trusting the guidance of the Spirit of God, to ascertain and
define what we can know of God from all his varied lines of the
revelation of himself, and pre-eminently from his revelation of
himself in Christ as recorded in the Bible.
VI. Man's knowledge of God is progressive. This is true of
the theological knowledge both of the individual and of Christian
people collectively through the successive ages. This fact of the
progressiveness of theology should be always borne in mind in
ascertaining, defining, and proclaiming theological doctrine.
In the vital growth of the kingdom of God man's knowledge of
him is increased, errors are corrected, infelicitous forms of state
ment are changed, disproportionate emphasis on truths and aspects
of truth is adjusted, new conditions of society disclose new sig
nificance and new adaptations and practical applications of truth,
difficulties are resolved, perplexing questions are answered or
outgrown, or definitely set aside as transcending the present limits
of our knowledge. Since God reveals himself continuously in the
universe, every advance in the knowledge of the universe, whether
in the physical or the intellectual and moral sphere, may open to
us additional knowledge of God. The Christian religion must
take up the most advanced knowledge and the highest thought of
every age, and enlighten and vitalize its highest civilization.
Christian theology, therefore, must not only be in harmony with
the most advanced knowledge and the true progress of man, but
must be able to interpret the significance of that advancement, to

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 39
disclose its deepest springs and its true motive-forces, and to
enlighten and guide it toward the realization of the highest ends.
Its office is always prophetic, to witness for God, to declare his
law and his love, and to make men conscious of their real
relations and obligations to him. Therefore every age must have
its own exposition of theology, as it must have its own exposition
of astronomy, chemistry, political economy, civil polity, or soci
ology. Every age, while holding fast all the treasures of God's
grace inherited from the past, should contribute something to
correct the misapprehensions, relieve the perplexities, and enlarge
the knowledge of sincere . inquirers after truth, and to convince
men in all the rush of life in modern civilization that God in
Christ reconciling the world to himself is still the name above
every name to whom every knee should bow ; and that the essential
and fundamental conditions of human well-being are the recognition
by men of their dependence on God, their reconciliation to him
in the loving trust which opens the heart to seek and receive his
grace, and their harmony with him in obeying his law of universal
love and working with him in the service of men to save them
from sin, ignorance, and suffering, and to advance the kingdom
of God on earth. In a time when knowledge in every other de
partment is making so brilliant progress it would be a reproach
to the Christian religion if Christian theology, which sets forth the
knowledge of God in his relation to man and of man in relation
to God which the Christian religion implies, should not avail
itself of the advancing knowledge and should contribute nothing
to the clearness, correctness, and comprehensiveness of our know
ledge of God, and of its true application to the life of the individual
and of society.
VII. In the discussion of the successive topics I shall consider
the questions of our day so far as they bear on each topic, and to
the best of my knowledge and ability shall avail myself of all new
and real light bearing on each topic which recent investigation
and thought have evoked in any sphere of knowledge and its
application to life.
We recognize errors into which theologians have fallen, and the
wrong spirit and methods with which they have sometimes prose
cuted their investigations. But errors are incidental to the
necessary progressiveness of human development and of human

40 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
knowledge in every line of inquiry. Availing ourselves of the
true and stable acquisitions of the past, and correcting its errors
so far as we discover them, we -contribute what we can to the
true knowledge of God. Man is finite, and for that reason his
development and his knowledge must be progressive. We are
to be patient under our own doubts and unanswered questions.
As J. C. Scaliger said, " It is a part of human wisdom to be
willing to be ignorant of some things with equanimity." 1
We must be patient also with the doubts and mistakes of others
who are candid seekers after God. Doubts and mistakes are
incidental to a finite mind's progress in knowledge. We must
not rashly assail existing beliefs. An error is sometimes so inter
twined with Christian belief in the mind of a true Christian that
a rude assault on the error may weaken or shatter an important
belief which has become incidentally associated with it. We
must not take away a lame man's crutch before his lameness is
sufficiently cured for him to walk without it. Otherwise he may
fall and be worse crippled than before. We must not resort lo
a surgical operation till the patient has sufficient vitality to bear
the shock ; nor operate by a rash and unskilled hand, which in
removing the excrescence may cut an artery and destroy the life.
It is wiser to cherish the truth already believed, and to develop
the spiritual life, till the invigorated vitality of itself rejects the
error, or at least makes it possible to expose it with reasonable
hope that it will be abandoned. We undermine error by
educating to a larger and clearer knowledge of the truth, and
stimulating to a higher and nobler life, rather than by direct
assault on the error. As Ullmann says, " Not fixedness and revo
lution, but evolution and reform, is the motto for our time."
Progress is not usually in straight lines. It is the result of con
flicting influences ; the movement seems sometimes in one direc
tion, and then in the opposite direction. But the line of movement
is a spiral. With whatever seeming reversal of the direction, the
movement is always upward. Bengel says, " It is easy for those
who are content to live on like the rest of the world to be
orthodox. They believe what' was believed before them, and
never trouble themselves to test it. But when a soul is anxious
about the truth, and would deal with it as with a precious jewel,
things are not quite so easy. How wrong it is, then, to rush on
1 De Subtilitate, Ex. 344, sect. 4.

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 4 1
such sensitive souls, to cross-question, gag, and stun them, when
we might on the contrary give them liberty of speech, that they
may gain confidence and suffer themselves to be led aright."
Even God, in his historical work of redeeming men from sin and
developing his kingdom, proceeds progressively, revealing himself
through inspired men, themselves in a process of development,
and to men up to the level of their capacity, and so educating
and developing them to the capacity for receiving higher revela
tions. With infinite patience and tenderness through the cen
turies he respects the limitations of men in their finiteness, and
bears with them in their slow progress in attaining and applying
the true knowledge of him. Calvin says of the scriptural refer
ences to God's hand, his eye, his ear, and other anthropomorphic
representations of him, " Who of even the least intellectual acumen
does not know that in these forms of expression God uses a sort
of baby- talk," adapted to imperfectly developed men, "as nurses
are wont to talk to little children." 1
Theology should be studied and taught in a loving and reverent
spirit, recognizing Christian truth and life wherever they have
existed, and amid whatever errors. In studying the past we may
learn wisdom from its mistakes in doctrine and practice. And
when in the past we find defects and mistakes we need not speak
of them flippantly and contemptuously, as many do ; but lovingly
and reverently, as Noah's sons went backwards to cover their
father in his drunkenness, that they might not see his shame.
Thought on theological questions, on God and his relation to
the universe and to man, and on the universe and man in their
relation to God, has never been more widely prevalent nor more
intensely earnest than in our own time. It has pertained pre
eminently to the truth of theism and the reality, nature, and con
tents of the Christian revelation, and to the application of Christian
truth to the development of right character and the right con
duct of life in the individual, and to the progressive realization
of the Christian ideal of human society, that is, the progressive
transformation of human society into the kingdom of God
on earth. Whatever results of the investigations of modern
thought in every line of human knowledge have been conclusively
1 " Quis enim vel parum ingeniosus non intelligit Deum ita nobiscum,
ceu nutrices solent cum infantibus, quodammodo balbutire ? " — Institut.,
Liber I., cap. xiii., 1.

42 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
established must be recognized in the study and teaching of
theological doctrine. My own conviction is that this remarkable
movement of thought is tending to results favorable both to the
confirmation of the truth of theism and of Christianity and to a
clearer and more comprehensive knowledge of their significance
and their practical application and power.
We therefore enter on the study of theological doctrine with
humility and reverence, but also with courage and hope. We have
the record of God's revelation of himself in the Bible. "God
who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined
in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. iv. 6). The Spirit
of God abides with us, as Christ promised, " to take of mine and
show it unto you ; he will guide you into all the truth " (John
xvi. 13, 14). His promise is to us, as it was to Peter, "What
thou knowest not now thou shalt understand hereafter " . (John
xiii. 7). Our path is to be "as the shining light which shineth
more and more unto the perfect day" (Prov. iv. 18). And we
hope to walk this ever-brightening path till we so come into the
presence of the Lord and into union with him that " his servants
shall do him service ; and they shall see his face ; and his name
shall be on their foreheads. And there shall be night no more ;
and they shall need no light of lamp, neither light of the sun ; for
the Lord God shall give them light. The glory of God lightens
it, and the Lamb is the light thereof" (Rev. xxii. 3-5 ; xxi. 23).
If God has revealed himself, man would renounce his own
reason if he did not bestir himself to ascertain what God is in his
relation to the universe as thus revealed and what the universe is
in its relation to G od, the harmony of what is revealed with the
principles of reason and with all knowledge, and its adaptation
to the practical needs of man. All knowledge is sacred as
immediately or remotely connected with the knowledge of God.
Had we minds comprehensive enough, we could trace all know
ledge up to theology and theology outward to all knowledge.
We could show the relations and harmony of theology with all
facts of science as being all one harmonious revelation of God,
the different pipes of one organ through which are breathing the
different parts of one eternal harmony. What is revealed to
faith is also to be included in the system of reason. Men may
say what they will of philosophizing about the Christian revela-

THE INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION 43
tion ; but it is a necessity of the human mind to philosophize.
Nothing less than the extinction of rationality can prevent it.
It is the work of reason bestirring itself to build within its own
domain a sanctuary for the revelation that has descended to it
from heaven ; building the great hewn stones, the cedar wood, the
gold and silver and fine twined linen of its own gathering and
workmanship, into a temple for this heaven-born truth. That
work will yet be done. Every stone and beam, every plate of
gold and every gem, every hanging and hook and flower of
reason's treasures, shall be fitly adjusted around the Holy of
Holies of God's revelation, its defence and ornament. Not the
profound truths of philosophy alone, but the facts and laws and
systems of all science shall be built into the temple, as columns
that support or ornaments that beautify it ; the inventions of art
shall be laid as the tongs and flesh-hooks on its altar, and reason
shall minister reverently as its high priest.

CHAPTER II
GOD THE ABSOLUTE SPIRIT : MISCONCEFTIONS OF HIS REVELATION
OF HIMSELF AS SUCH
The designation of God as the Absolute Spirit indicates the
two essential aspects of the one indivisible and only God. One
of these aspects is his transcendence of man and the universe as
the Absolute Being, unconditioned and unlimited by any power
or condition independent of himself. The other is that he is
rational Spirit energizing in the universe. Therefore man is in
the likeness of God as rational spirit and is capable of knowing
him so far as he has revealed himself. God is rational Spirit in
the form of the absolute. Man is rational spirit in the form of
the finite. In the chapters in the First Part of this volume we
aim to ascertain what God is in these two aspects of his being so
far as he has revealed himself. This must be the beginning of
all efforts to attain the knowledge of theological truth ; because
the idea which one forms of God determines his whole theologi
cal thinking, his conception of man and the universe in their
relation to God, and the type of his religious life.
In this chapter I propose to correct certain misconceptions as
to God's revelation of himself. It has been a common impres
sion that the supernatural and divine is something foreign from
the universe and incompatible with its order and law ; that it can
reveal itself among men only by abrupt irruption into the fixed
course of the universe, interrupting its continuity, uniformity and
law. Hence has arisen the conception of an impassable chasm
between science and revelation, issuing in the denial of all revela
tion of God as incompatible with science and the order of nature.
Christian believers themselves have been conscious of difficulty in
believing in a revelation involving the miraculous and the super
natural. This disbelief, skepticism, and doubt arise, in part at
least, from various misconceptions. These it is important to
correct at the outset.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 45
I. Revelation, Belief, Reason. — The knowledge of God
originates in spontaneous belief. The belief presupposes God's
action revealing himself to rational persons. It is verified and
developed into rational knowledge by intellectual investigation
of the various lines of God's revelation of himself, and of what
he is as thus revealed in his relation to the universe, and
especially to man, and of what the universe and man are in their
relation to God.
1. The knowledge of God originates in spontaneous belief. It
is a common misconception that man finds God only at the end
of his intellectual processes in investigating the so-called proofs
of God's existence. Hence it is objected that we attain only a
speculative and subjective idea of a God, without objective reality,
not in contact with man in his actual life, not a power active in
man's development. The fact is just the contrary. God is so
present and active in the life and history of man that the idea of
God and the belief in his existence arise, not at the end of these
intellectual processes, but spontaneously before these processes
begin, and are the occasion of man's beginning them. Man is so
constituted and environed that the knowledge of God and com
munion with him are essential to his right knowledge of himself
and of his environment, and to his normal development. There
fore, when he wakes to consciousness of the outward world and of
himself he finds himself in the presence of God. The idea of a
Divinity and the belief that the Divinity exists arise spontaneously
in his consciousness. This spontaneous belief is often called
faith. But because in the Bible and in speaking of the religious
life faith denotes trust in God, which of course presupposes belief
that God exists, it is better to use the word belief, and so avoid a
common ambiguity. This spontaneous belief is the occasion of
the waking of the intellect to ascertain whether there is reason
able evidence that a Divinity exists, and what can be known of
him. This intellectual investigation verifies the belief in a Divin
ity, corrects errors, and enlarges the knowledge of him. This is
true in all religions. In the childhood of the race primitive men
may have made little effort to verify the belief in a Divinity or to
define what the Divinity is. So far as they have done so, they
may have used imagination rather than the reasoning power and
have reached inadequate conclusions. Yet the belief in a God is
spontaneous in all religions ; and it is in important particulars

46 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
verified, and is also clarified, corrected, and developed, by the
larger knowledge and clearer thinking of men as they have
advanced in knowledge and civilization. Thus man's knowledge
of God begins in spontaneous unelaborated belief; and this belief
is verified and man's knowledge of God corrected and enlarged
by thought and investigation under the guidance of the principles
and laws of reason. This is true of man's belief in God and his
knowledge' of him as the absolute Spirit, in both these aspects of
his being.
This is true of man's belief in God and knowledge of him as
the absolute Being. In the religions of the world the Divinity is
always spontaneously felt to be a power transcending man and
the universe, a mysterious Being contemplated with awe. A
savage does not attain a philosophical conception of the absolute
and name it. But he feels its transcendence and is awed by it.
As man advances in development and civilization, this spontane
ous consciousness of an absolute and transcendent Being con
tinues in all religions. For example, Lao-tse, founder of the
second religion in China, says :
" There is an infinite being, that existed before heaven or earth.
How calm it is, how free I
It lives alone, it changes not.
It moves everywhere, but it never suffers.
We may look on it as a mother of the universe.
I, I know not its name." 1
Rev. George Owen, of Pekin, China, writes in the " Chronicle of
the London Missionary Society " : " The old Chinese classics show
a wonderful knowledge of God. There are passages in those
classics about God worthy to stand side by side with kindred
passages in the Old Testament. The fathers and founders of
the Chinese races appear to have been monotheists. They
believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God, the
moral governor of the world and the impartial judge of man."
F. Max Miiller has shown that the one God, under the same
name, Dyaus, was recognized in India, Greece, Italy, and Ger
many.2 The Babylonian legends represent that in the creation
1 Quoted by Charles H. S. Davis, " The Egyptian Book of the Dead,"
Introduction, p. 6.
2 Science of Religion, Lect. III.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 47
the gods were created first. They were regarded as gods presid
ing over and revealed in the various powers and greater objects
of nature. In recognizing them as created, these legends neces
sarily imply an absolute power transcending all these nature-gods
and bringing them into being. Something like this is more or
less clearly implied in the worship of nature-gods in all the
polytheistic religions.
The same principle holds true of man's knowledge of God, in the
second aspect of his being, as Spirit ; the idea of God as Spirit and
the belief in his existence as such precede the intellectual process
of verification and definition. In all religions man spontaneously
believes that the divinity whom he worships is an intelligent
personal Spirit, that he is himself dependent on the divinity,
can come into communication with him in worship, can gain his
favor by service rendered to him and incur punishment for dis
pleasing him ; and with rare, if any, exceptions, even in the lower
stages of development, he associates his religion with morality
and believes that the God whom he worships punishes wrong
doers and favors those who do right. In the lower stages of
development his conception of the Divinity as Spirit may be
imperfect, yet it is always the conception of the god as an
intelligent personal being, whatever the form in which he con
ceives him when he comes to him in worship. Thus he finds
the divinity as personal Spirit in his spontaneous religious
beliefs, before he enters on the intellectual processes of reflective
thought in which he seeks reasonable grounds justifying his belief
and ascertains more fully what the divinity is and what are his
relations to man and the universe. This is true of man in his
highest development and civilization as really as in the lower
stages of his development.
2. The spontaneous belief in God presupposes God's action
revealing himself to men.
The knowledge of God is not attained by pure speculative
thinking, but presupposes God's own action revealing himself to
men. This dependence of our knowledge of God, the absolute
Spirit, on his action revealing himself, is analogous to physical
science and to all knowledge. Man is waked to consciousness of
the outward world and of himself only by the action of the out
ward world upon him. He can know the outward world only as it
reveals itself to him by acting on him through his sensorium and

48 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
as he extends his knowledge of it, beyond what has been thus
revealed to him under his observation, by reasoning on the data
thus given. So, in close analogy with the method of physical
science, we seek to ascertain what God is by tracing out the
revelation which he has made of himself in various lines and in
reasoning on the facts thus ascertained.
God's action revealing himself precedes man's spontaneous
belief and his ratiocinated knowledge of him. This is analogous
to man's knowledge of the physical world. The outward world
first acts on him through his sensorium ; then he reacts on it and
perceives it. Thus man has knowledge of his physical environ
ment as it reveals itself to him, and of himself as thus environed.
So God acts in the various lines in which he reveals himself as
rational Spirit to man, and the spirit of man reacts and perceives
God. Thus man knows God as his spiritual environment, and
himself as environed by God. No finite mind can acquire real
knowledge of any outward object by mere subjective thinking.
The perceiving and thinking must be preceded by some action of
the object revealing itself. God alone has absolute knowledge
independent of any environment.
3. The spontaneous belief in God is defined, verified, and
developed by intellectual investigation in the light of reason of
the facts and realities in which we find God revealed in the
various lines of his revelation of himself, ascertaining their sig
nificance, relations, and unity, and their harmony with the truths,
laws, and ideals of reason.
First, rational investigation confirms the spontaneous belief in
God as the absolute Being. When, haunted by the mystery of
the transcendent absolute Being, man brings it into the light of
reason, he finds it demanded by reason not less than by religion.
When we know that the universe exists, it is a necessary principle
of reason that some absolute Being exists unconditioned by any
power or reality independent of itself, the Being that the universe
de'pends on for its existence and that is manifested or revealed
in the creation and evolution of the universe. Something can
not be originated from nothing. An absolute beginning of being,
or power, out of nothing is impossible.
This accords with the history of human thought. The exist
ence of an absolute Being is implied, if not definitely appre
hended, in spontaneous belief in the religions of all races. It is

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 4$
recognized as known in a necessary principle of reason in the
philosophy of Greece and Rome, as well as in oriental Brahman-
ism and Buddhism. At the present day materialists, pantheists,
and Spencerian agnostics agree with the theist in affirming that
some absolute Being must exist. It is denied only by extreme
positivists, who equally deny that man can have knowledge of any
real being and teach that all human knowledge is only of sub
jective appearances or phenomena ; that is, that all man's alleged
knowledge is only of illusions. As man advances in development
and civilization, the belief that the absolute Being exists is found
to be, not only the spontaneous and unelaborated belief in all
religions, but also to be scientifically and philosophically true.
It is a necessary, self-evident principle of reason that some abso
lute or unconditioned Being exists. It is equally a necessary
principle of reason that only one absolute Being can exist. The
supposition that there may be two is absurd. If contempora
neous, each would condition and limit the other ; if existing one
after the other, each would be limited and conditioned in time
as well as by the other. Thus neither could be the absolute
Being, but each would be finite and conditioned.
When the existence of the absolute Being is acknowledged, the
question arises whether the universe itself may not be the abso
lute Being. The answer is given in the so-called Cosmological
argument. This is simply the evidence that the universe is con
ditioned and limited in space and time, is composed of parts, is
dependent and ever changing, and therefore cannot be the abso
lute Being. For this conclusion the evidence is decisive.1 The
objection to the argument as invalid rests on the mistake that it
is designed to prove the existence of an absolute Being merely
by reasoning from effect to cause, which can never carry us
beyond the series of finite causes and effects. That the abso
lute Being exists is a self-evident principle of reason.
Here it is objected that, if so, it gives only a necessary sub
jective idea of reason, but not an objectively real absolute Being.
The reply is that all necessary principles of reason present them
selves in consciousness only on occasion of knowing some being
in experience. The law of continuity that every beginning or
change has a cause, and the law of uniformity that the same
combination of causes will always produce the same effect, on
1 See " The Self-Revelation of God," chap. xi.
vol. i. — 4

SO GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
which all physical science rests, are themselves self-evident, un
provable principles of reason as really as is the belief in the
existence of the absolute Being. But we become conscious of
them as true only on observing some beginning or change in
being. Thus in their very essence they carry the knowledge of
being in its objective reality. The same is true of the principle
that some absolute Being must exist. It arises on occasion of
our knowledge of being in its objective reality and carries that
knowledge in it as really as do the laws of continuity and uni
formity. If this gives only a subjective idea without objective
reality, the same must be true of the laws of continuity and uni
formity and of all the necessary principles of reason which regu
late all human thinking and on which all science rests ; and the
assumed knowledge, in observation and experience, of being in
its objective reality, on occasion of which these principles assert
themselves in consciousness, would be equally unreal, all human
knowledge would be empty of objective content, and the whole
universe only a subjective illusion like the Hindu Maia. The
knowledge of the absolute Being as objectively real is essential
to any rational recognition of the reality of human knowledge
and of the actual existence of ourselves and of the world in which
we live. The objection is valid only against speculations on the
absolute abstracted from being, an adjective without a noun.
Such an absolute is a mere zero indicating the vanishing point
of human thought. This has often been the error of seemingly
profound speculations on the absolute.
The conclusion is inevitable that some absolute Being exists;
and that this absolute Being is not the universe itself, but tran
scends the universe and manifests itself in it. As Spencer says,
it is the Power that manifests itself in the universe and wells up
in human consciousness.1
Secondly, in the process of rational investigation we also find
reasonable grounds for our spontaneous belief in God as a rational
Spirit, revealed in the constitution, order, and evolution of the
universe. The evidence of this has been called the Physico-theological
argument.2 We have found that the universe is symbolic of
1 See "The Philosophical Basis of Theism," chap, xii.; "The Self-
Revelation of God," chap. viii. ix. x.
2 The Self-Revelation of God, chap. xii.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 5 1
rational truth, ordered under rational law, progressive toward the
realization of rational ideals, subservient to rational uses, and ex
isting in the unity and continuity of a reasonable and scientific
system. These evidences of the action of rational Spirit are
found in innumerable particulars. Evolution shows that they are
revealed also in the physical universe as a whole, progressively
through successive epochs realizing a rational ideal in accordance
with rational law.
It must be added that all science rests on the postulate that the
universe is grounded in reason, that it is constituted and has been
evolved in accordance with principles of reason the same in kind
with human reason. All science assumes that the law of con
tinuity that every beginning or change must have a cause, the law
of uniformity that the same combination of causal agencies must
always produce the same effect, the principles of mathematics,
and other universal principles of human reason, are true through
out all space and all time. If not, astronomy, chemistry, physics,
and all other sciences break down and give no real knowledge.
Science not only postulates absolute Reason as the ground of the
universe, but it reasons on observed facts in accordance with these
principles, assuming that they are true everywhere and always;
then it finds by further observation that its conclusions from rea
soning according to these principles are correct. Thus it both
assumes as a postulate and finds by observation that the universe is
everywhere constituted and evolved in accordance with the prin
ciples of reason the same in kind with human reason. Accord
ingly it is both the necessary postulate of all science and the actual
discovery of all science, so far as it has attained knowledge of the
universe, that the universe is grounded in absolute Reason, that
reveals itself as such throughout the universe so far as science has
explored it, and is in its fundamental principles and constituent
elements the same in kind with human reason. Reason thus re
vealing itself in the constitution and evolution of the universe is
God. The whole fabric of human knowledge and of all science
rests on the postulate that God, the absolute Spirit, exists and is
revealing himself in the universe.
Science is continuously finding that the absolute Being reveals
himself in the physical universe as acting always in the light of
reason and in accordance with reason whose fundamental prin
ciples, laws, and ideals are the same with those which are the

52 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
constituent elements of human reason. Therefore science finds
that the absolute Being reveals himself in the physical universe as
absolute rational Spirit. Spencer affirms emphatically that the
absolute Being is the Power that reveals itself in the universe.
It is equally evident that it is the Reason that everywhere reveals
itself in the universe. And a rational power is a personal free
agent or Spirit. The same is the conclusion of those eminent
scientists, Professors Stewart and Tait : " Consider the position
into which science has brought us. We are led by scientific logic
to an Unseen, and by scientific analogy to the spirituality of the
Unseen. In fine, our conclusion is, that the visible universe has
been developed by an intelligence resident in the Unseen." J If
not, then nothing remains whereby to account for the universe
but matter and its forces. The absurdity of the supposition of
materialism is humorously set forth in an address by Martineau :
" Starting as a beggar with scarce a rag to cover its bones, it
turns up a prince when large undertakings are wanted, and within
an inch of a plenipotentiary. . . . Such extremely clever matter —
matter that is up to anything, even to writing " Hamlet," and find
ing out its own evolution and substituting a molecular plebiscite for
a divine monarchy of the world — may fairly be regarded as a lit
tle too modest in its disclaimer of attributes of mind." Herbert
Spencer himself intimates that the Unknowable Absolute must
be named Spirit, if named at all.
The absolute Being also reveals himself as absolute Spirit in
the constitution of man.
Man knows himself as personal spirit, self-determining and
self-exerting in the light of reason. In him we find a being of
a higher order than any physical agent and differing in kind or
quality from every such agent. Though as to his body he is con
nected with the physical system, yet by his spiritual powers and
susceptibilities he is above it. Thus he is a super-physical or
super-natural being. John Fiske says that, as a result of scien
tific thinking in accordance with the theory of evolution, " It is
not too much to say that the difference between man and all
other living creatures, in respect to tractableness, progressiveness,
and- individuality of character, surpasses all other differences of
kind that are known to exist in the universe. ... I believe it has
been fully shown that, so far from degrading humanity or putting
1 The Unseen Universe, p. 221, 6th Ed.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 53
it on a level with the animal world in general, the doctrine of evo
lution shows us for the first time how the creation and perfecting
of Man is the goal toward which Nature's work has been tend
ing from the first. We can now see clearly that our new know
ledge enlarges tenfold the significance of human life and makes it
seem more than ever the chief object of Divine care, the con
summate fruition of that creative energy which is manifested
throughout the knowable universe ... 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." 1 The existence of beings of this highest order implies
that the absolute Being is rational Spirit. Otherwise man would
be a being of a higher order than the absolute Being ; and the
latter as an inferior being would not be an adequate cause of the
existence of man. Thus man knows that, however the absolute
Being may transcend him, that Being must nevertheless be rational,
self-determining, self-exertive, self-conscious Spirit, like man him
self. They differ, not in essence, but only in the fact that man is
spirit in the form of the finite, God is Spirit in the form of the
absolute. It follows that no finite being of a higher order than a
rational free spirit can ever appear in the universe, because spirit,
as spirit, is in the likeness of God himself.
Accordingly, in the normal development of his own being, man
finds himself face to face with the absolute Spirit, presented as it
were in the background of his own consciousness. In knowing
himself as reason, he finds the reason that is eternal and universal
revealing itself in the exercise of his own reason ; and revealing
itself as in its constituent elements like his own. He sees that
the necessary principles, laws and ideals of human reason are
valid only as they postulate the same principles, laws, and ideals
as eternal and of universal validity in the absolute Reason, and so
as the principles, laws, and ideals in accordance with which the
whole universe is constituted, ordered and evolved.
In knowing himself as free will, within the limits of his own
finiteness self-determining and self-exerting, man becomes aware
of a law of supreme and universal authority which he is under
obligation to obey, and only in conformity with which he can
realize his highest perfection and well-being. And this law pre-
1 The Destiny of Man, pp. 31, 107.

54 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
sents itself as of supreme and universal authority. If it is not so,
it is not law, and all consciousness of moral obligation and all
aspirations to realize ideals of moral and spiritual perfection are
illusions. Here again in every exercise of free self-determination,
the absolute Spirit reveals himself in the consciousness of man.
In the sphere of feeling, also, man is conscious of himself as
weak and finite, as dependent on a higher power, and of aspira
tions which no earthly good can satisfy, which beat against the
bars of the finite, which would soar up to the immortal and the
divine. So the Psalmist exclaims, " My soul longeth, yea, even
fainteth, for the courts of the Lord ; my heart and my flesh cry
out for the living God" (xxxiv. 2). Here also the absolute
Spirit reveals himself in the constitution and consciousness of
man. Thus on every side man's spirit opens out to God ; in every
exercise of reason and free will and in all the spiritual and moral
susceptibilities, the absolute Spirit reveals himself in the conscious
ness of man. It is a real and tremendous alternative which is
here before us. If the absolute Being is not the absolute eternal
Spirit, if man is not like him in the essential elements of spirit, if
therefore the absolute Being cannot reveal himself in the con
sciousness of man, and man cannot know him and cling to him,
then human reason sinks into unreason, human science becomes
the empty fabric of illusion, human will, shut out from the light
of reason, loses its freedom, moral obligation has no significance,
aspirations to moral and spiritual perfection are illusions; and
man, instead of being in the likeness of God, sinks to the likeness
of the brute, and the whole universe is submerged in the morass
of materialism and sensuality.
The absolute Being reveals himself as the absolute Spirit, fur
ther, in the history of man. In the very constitution of man, as
we have seen, the absolute reveals himself as absolute Spirit.
Now we find that, as a matter of fact, he has done so in the
history of man. Through all human history no agency has been
more universal, continuous and powerful in its influence than
religion with its spontaneous beliefs. Man in his development
always finds himself in the presence of a transcendent and mys
terious Power. That Power he pictures to himself as intelligent,
a Power on which he is dependent, to whom he can make known
his wants and render acceptable service. Man in his normal

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 55
development finds himself face to face with God. The best
recent authorities in anthropology teach that no race of men has
ever been known destitute of religion and belief in some divinity.
F. Max Miiller says : " The intention of religion, wherever we
meet it, is always holy. However imperfect, however childish a
religion may be, it always places the human soul in the presence
of God. And however childish and imperfect the conception
of God, may be, it always expresses the highest ideal of perfec
tion which the human soul for the time being can reach and
grasp." And underlying even polytheism there is often found
belief in one supreme God. " To the general public or vast
mass of the population (of Egypt) the religion was a polytheism
of a multitudinous and in many respects of a gross character.
To the intelligent, the learned, the initiated, it was a system
combining strict monotheism with a speculative philosophy on the
two great subjects of the nature of God and the destiny of man,
which sought to exhaust those deep and unfathomable mysteries." 1
This action of God throughout human history revealing him
self to men, reached its highest form in the coming of God in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself, and is continued
through all subsequent ages in the Holy Spirit, poured out on
all flesh.
The absolute Being, revealed as God the absolute Spirit in
the physical universe and in the constitution and history of man,
reveals himself as such still further in the redemption of men
from sin and the development of his kingdom of universal love,
culminating in the God in Christ reconciling the world unto
himself and perpetuated in the Holy Spirit, as recorded in the
Bible. At this stage of our study of theology, it is unnecessary
to examine in detail the biblical teaching on this point. All who
have read the Bible, whether they believe or do not believe that
it contains the revelation of God, know that it teaches that God
is the absolute Spirit.
God reveals himself as absolute Spirit to individuals in their
personal experience or consciousness. Man is not left to acquire
knowledge of God merely by studying his objective revelation of
himself in the universe and in the constitution and history of
man, nor even in his action in human history redeeming men
from sin and developing his kingdom as recorded in the Bible.
1 C. H. S. Davis, "The Egyptian Book of the Dead," Introduction, p. 40.

56 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Man comes personally into touch with God. In man's normal
development from his primitive simplicity he comes, as we have
seen, into the presence of the mystery of the absolute Being.
All religions, even the rudest, in their very essence imply the
belief that man comes into actual communication with the
Divinity, offering him acceptable worship and service and praying
to him for his favor and help. This contact of God with man is
pre-eminently revealed in Christ. In him God comes into human
ity, and from him the Holy Spirit is sent into the world as the
representative of the God in Christ, taking the things of Christ
and showing them unto men, continuing through all ages Christ's
work of redemption in its application to individuals, and so
developing the kingdom of God. The scriptural representation
is that the Spirit stands at the door of every person's heart and
knocks. When any one consents to open the door, the Spirit of
God enters and dwells in him, illuminating and quickening him
in the new spiritual life of universal love. Thus the person has
"fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ" (i
John, i. 3.) In his own experience he knows him whom he has
trusted, the riches of his grace, his faithfulness to his promises,
his sufficiency to help in every time of need. Thus, according to
Paul's representation of the Christian, he is strengthened with
might by God's spirit in the inner man ; Christ dwells in his
heart by faith ; being rooted and grounded in love he is able to
comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and
depth and height and to know the love of Christ which passeth
knowledge, and is filled unto all the fulness of God (Eph. iii.
16-19). There is, therefore, a profound truth in the saying that
religion is a matter of experience. The Christian walks with
God and is in intimacy with him day by day. Thus he becomes
like an ancient prophet, a witness for God, testifying what God
has done for his soul (Ps. Ixvi. 16). In this sense the prophecy
is fulfilled that under the dispensation of the Spirit all Christians
will prophesy (Acts ii. 17). Man is conscious of his physical
environment in its action on him through his sensorium. He is
conscious of God, his spiritual environment, in his action on him
through his spiritual susceptibilities.1
We now see that the whole universe in its evolution is the con
tinuous revelation of the ever-present and ever-energizing God. In
1 See " The Self-Revelation of God," pp. 231-552.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 57
the scientific investigation of it, as Kepler said, We read God's
thoughts after him. As we trace its evolution in the past we find
it the record of God's action revealing himself. It is hardly too
strong a figure to say with Mr. Reynolds, " The universe is the
autobiography of an infinite Spirit."1 But it is not the autobiog
raphy of a life that is ended. It is the record of God's action
revealing himself in the past and continuous now and forever in
the progressive realization of the divine and archetypal ideal of
all wisdom, righteousness and good-will possible in a finite uni
verse including a moral system of finite rational free agents.
4. In spontaneous belief, verified and defined in rational
investigation of what God has revealed himself to be in the
various lines of his self-revelation, man attains a real knowledge
of God, which is progressively clarified and enlarged. Thus, as
Paul requires, we may be ever " increasing in the knowledge of
God" (Col. i. 10).
Some writers contend that it is impossible to prove that God
exists, because to infer God's existence from anything would
imply that God's existence depends on that from which it is
inferred ; that the existence of God thus inferred must be " the
necessary and conditioned result of truths, the validity of which
— since they are to be accepted as grounds of proof — must be
earlier and more fundamental than the reality that is proved by
them." 2 Hence it is said that, if we prove that God exists, he
is merely a creation of our minds. This confounds a logical pro
cess with a process of efficient causation ; it identifies a logical
dependence of thought with the causal dependence of an effect on
the force of an efficient cause. It would imply that, when I infer
from seeing a stone moving through the air that some agent has set
the stone in motion, the motion of the stone must be earlier and
more fundamental than the agent that set it in motion.
The objection probably arises from supposing that the evidence
that God exists is merely the person's subjective thinking. There
can be no occasion for the objection when we recognize the fact
that the process of reasoning presupposes spontaneous belief in
God, arising from his revelation of himself; as the process of
reasoning in physical science presupposes spontaneous belief in
1 The Supernatural in Nature, p. 40.
2 See Lotze, " Microcosmus," Transl. vol. ii. p. 663 ; Pfleiderer, " Relig-
ions-philosophie," pp. 58, 59.

58 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the outward world, arising from the revelation of the outward
world and of our own existence as presented in consciousness.
This belief does not rest on mere feeling, as Jacobi seems to im
ply ; for that, as Pfleiderer argues, would issue in resolving all
knowledge into subjective idealism. On the contrary, it rests
also on the additional and momentous fact that man is endowed
with reason, which implies in its very essence as reason that its
insight is in the light of principles, laws, and ideals which, if true
at all, must be principles, laws, and ideals eternal in Reason
absolute, unconditioned, and immutable. The going back to
something " earlier and more fundamental " than our particular
process of thought is going back to Reason itself as fundamental
and eternal, in accordance with whose eternal and universal
principles, laws, and ideals all science assumes that the universe
must be constituted," and then finds by observation that it is thus
constituted and evolved. This eternal Reason is God. If man
cannot thus attain real knowledge of God, then all human knowl
edge would be impossible ; for the universe would not be
grounded in reason, and would not be scientifically constituted
and evolved.
Man's spontaneous belief in God is a real knowledge of him as
the absolute Spirit. In discussions as to the harmony of faith
and reason, of revelation and philosophy, it is often assumed that
faith, or spontaneous belief, is not knowledge, that knowledge is
attained only as the object of belief is verified and defined. But
if the spontaneous belief or perception of realities which reveal
themselves is not ::al knowledge, then thought has no data on
which to act, and can never attain the knowledge of reality, but
only a mirage of appearances, with no reality either of an object
appearing or a subject to whom they appear. The reality pre
sented and spontaneously believed to exist is nebulous and unde
fined ; but it is reality to be verified and defined in thought.
Theology, as I have said, presupposes religion and its spontane
ous beliefs. Religion is a universal characteristic of humanity, a
fundamental fact of momentous importance in all human history.
The professed science, that repudiates it and the realities implied
in it as not legitimate objects of scientific investigation and
knowledge, is itself unscientific. And all religions imply some
true, important and abiding beliefs respecting God, the absolute
Spirit. The defects and errors are not so much in the spontane-

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 59
ous belief in God as revealed, as in the inadequate intellectual
apprehension of it. In the progress of thought these errors
are corrected, deficiencies are supplemented, and the knowledge
of God increased. In this the development of theology is analo
gous with that of physical science. The sun, moon, and stars ;
the earth, its minerals, vegetables, and animals ; light, heat, elec
tricity, gravitation, and all the forces of nature, have been reveal
ing themselves by their action to the observation of men from
the beginning of their existence on earth. Men have observed
the phenomena, and spontaneously believed in the reality of the
beings and forces thus revealed. They have lived and done
work in the light of these spontaneous and unelaborated beliefs.
The whole of man's practical life has justified these spontaneous
beliefs as valid. Science presupposes this, and proceeds in its
investigation to examine, define, and account for the realities thus
presented, and, by more careful and exact observation, experi
ment, and rational thought, to correct misapprehensions, supply
defects, and ascertain all that may be known about them. The
same is the process in theology. The objects investigated are the
realities the consciousness of which is expressed in religion, its
spontaneous beliefs, its worship and service. There is no more
antagonism between theology and religion than between science
and the spontaneous beliefs arising from presentative and rational
intuition which always underlie it. Both theology and science
assume the reality of this underlying, unelaborated, and spon
taneous knowledge, which is sometimes called faith. Therefore
Tennyson expresses a true philosophy in his poetical representa
tion : — " Cling then to faith.
She reels not in the storm of warring words ;
She brightens at the clash of Yes and No ;
She sees the best that glimmers through the worst ;
She feels the sun is hid but for a night;
She spies the summer through the winter's bud ;
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls ;
She hears the lark within the formless egg :
She finds the fountain where they wailed ' Mirage. ' "
This clinging to faith is no more essential to theology than to
astronomy, chemistry, or any other physical science. And, like
science, theology arises from the more careful study of the real
ities presented in the spontaneous beliefs implied in religion and

60 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
disclosed in God's various revelations of himself. Thus it cor
rects the misapprehension of facts and careless inferences from
them, supplements deficiencies, and enlarges knowledge.
It may be added that, not only science and theology, but all
human knowledge whatsoever, attained by processes of thought,
proving, reasoning, arguing, rests for its validity on knowledge
given in presentative and rational intuition. This intuitive
knowledge cannot be proved, because it is self-evident and noth
ing more evident can be adduced in proof of it. It is self-
evident because the person comes into immediate contact with
the outward world, and is at once conscious of it as acting on >
him through his sensorium and revealing itself to him, and con
scious of himself as acted on by it, perceiving it, and in thought
apprehending it in the light- of universal principles constituent in
human reason. This dependence of all reasoning on primitive
self-evident knowledge is what Tennyson has in mind when he
says : — " Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee
Am not thyself in converse with thyself ;
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven."
It is not literally true, indeed, that nothing which is worth proving
can be proved. The law of gravitation and multitudes of facts of
fundamental importance transcend the range of human observation,
and are proved by reasoning. He undoubtedly has in mind the
truth, though expressing it with poetic license, that nothing can
be known as true by reasoning without postulating reality known
in immediate self-evident knowledge. This, however, is not a
valid objection to the reality of human knowledge. Certainly it
is no more an objection to theology than to physical science and
to all human knowledge. In fact it is theology alone that gives a
reasonable basis for the reality of human knowledge ; a reality
which all men practically admit and act upon. For the scientist
in all his investigations assumes that the principles of reason
which regulate his thinking are true throughout the universe ; and
that in accordance with them the whole universe is constituted,
ordered, and evolved. And in all his discoveries he finds it to be
a fact that the universe is constituted and ordered in accordance
with them. Thus all science rests on the postulate that the uni
verse is the creation of God, the absolute Spirit ; that the prin-

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 6l
ciples of reason, which regulate human thought and are laws to
human action, are principles and laws eternal and universal in the
absolute Reason, and that, in accordance with them, God, as the
absolute Reason, has constituted and evolved the universe ; and,
investigating the facts, it finds its postulate verified. Therefore
the universe is the expression of the archetypal thought of God,
progressively realizing in it the highest ideals of perfection and
well-being possible in the forms of the finite ; and man, endowed
with reason in the likeness of the universal Reason in God, is able
to read God's thoughts after him as they are progressively ex
pressed in the universe, and thus to have real knowledge both of
the universe and of God. It follows also that, as the physical
universe is man's physical environment and reveals itself by act
ing on him, so God is man's spiritual environment, and reveals
himself by acting on him both in the experience of the individual
and in the constitution and the history of man. And God reveals
himself in human history, both in religion meeting the needs of
man's moral and spiritual powers and susceptibilities and in
man's intellectual development and the progress of his scientific
knowledge of the universe and his command of its resources.
For every discovery in science and invention in industrial art is
an enlargement of our knowledge of God's revelation of himself
in the universe.
It is also true that human reason, verifying and defining the
realities presented in spontaneous beliefs, gives real knowledge
of God and is essential to the true apprehension of the data
given in those beliefs. In discussions as to faith and reason in
theology those who emphasize the spontaneous belief are wont
to depreciate reason. This is a one-sidedness not less fatal than
the depreciation of the spontaneous beliefs. Mr. Kidd, in " Social
Evolution," teaches that religion rests on the ultra-rational 01
supra-rational ; human reason teaches that a man must act for his
own interest, therefore he must be altogether indifferent to the
interest of future generations, which can have no bearing on his
own welfare ; the law of love and the requirement and sanction
of religion come from a source entirely beyond human reason and
in conflict with it.1 In a recent article in the " Nineteenth Century "
reaffirming his position against his critics he says, " All religion is
essentially ultra-rational. No form of belief is capable of func-
1 Pp. 62,63, '66, 167, 168, 191, 209, 239, 240, 241, 247, 293, 294.

62 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
tioning as a religion in the evolution of society which does not
provide sanctions for conduct outside of and superior to reason.''
In the " National Review " Mr. Kidd says of Balfour's " Founda
tions of Belief": " The principal contribution which the book
makes to knowledge consists in bringing into view from the side of
philosophy the great truth which we are approaching from the
side of science, namely, that there is no philosophical creed, as
there is no religious creed, which can be harmonized under the
supremacy of reason."
Thus in the very effort to defend religion he makes a most
deadly assault on it, denying that it is in accord with reason.
The revelation of God and true religion resting on it do not
contradict nor tend to belittle human reason. On the contrary
they recognize it in its highest exaltation. God is the absolute
and universal reason. Man as rational is in the likeness of God.
However limited his knowledge may be, the principles, laws, and
ideals of reason, of which he is conscious as regulative of huthan
thought, character and action, are the same in kind with the
principles, laws, and ideals of God, the absolute Reason, in accord
ance with which he has constituted and is evolving the universe.
In human reason shines the light of the eternal Reason, that
lighteth every man. The law of self-renouncing love is accord
ant with human reason. When a rational being knows himself as
one person related to God in a rational and moral system, he
sees in the light of reason that he has no right to appropriate the
universe and all in it as tributary to himself as supreme owner of
it, but must respect the rights of others equally with his own and
seek his own well-being with equal regard to the well-being of all
and in subordination to God, the absolute and supreme Being,
who has created the universe and is evolving it in universal good
will in accordance with the principles and laws of reason and for
the realization of its archetypal ideals of all perfection and well-
being possible in a finite universe. Accordingly, in all nations
sufficiently advanced to have a literature, the law of love is more
or less distinctly recognized.1 We may well agree with Froebel,
"The destiny as well as the vocation of man as an intelligent
and rational being is to bring his constitution, that is, the divine
in him, to complete consciousness, to vivid recognition, to clear
insight, and with free self-determination to bring the action of
1 See " Philosophical Basis of Theism," pp. 208-224.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 63
his life into accordance with the divine in him ; to allow it to act,
to manifest itself. . . . The feelings " (manifesting the divine in
man) " are presages of the future life ; they are the hieroglyphics
of the still slumbering inner life ; when rightly estimated and
understood, they are angels which lead men in and through
life, therefore they should not be lost for man, they should not be
allowed to pass away into empty vapor and mist."
5. The revelation of God in the coming of Christ and in the
continuance of his redeeming energy in the Holy Spirit is reason
able and even antecedently probable as the continuance of his
revelation of himself which he had been making in all the ages
preceding and the development of that revelation into its highest
form ; it also commends itself to reason as in itself most worthy
of God, and in all its history in the centuries after Christ it has
commended itself to reason by its power in the world as most
beneficent, worthy and divine. As Jowett says, "The glory of
Christianity is not to be as unlike other religions as possible ; but
to be their perfection and fulfilment." And Renan says, " The
world will ever be religious, and Christianity, in a large sense, is
religion's last word."1
God in all his action creating and evolving the universe is,
as it were, coming down from his absoluteness into the finite.
The Highest is thus continuously coming down to the lowest to
develop it and lift it up. His coming in Christ in " the form of
a servant," to redeem men from sin and develop them into the
likeness of God in love and to the realization of the highest
possibilities of their being, is the continuance of the descending,
forthputting, and condescending which characterize all his action
from the beginning of the creation.
Objection to God's revelation of himself has arisen in part
from the misconception that the Bible is the only revelation of
God. To some minds the word "revelation" means simply the
Bible, as the only revelation of God. Then the revelation would
be something sporadic, exceptional, and abnormal, breaking in
from without and interrupting the fixed course of nature and the
laws of the universe, without anything in the evolution of the
universe or in the history of man analogous to it or giving inti
mation of its coming. But when we know that God has revealed
1 " The Future of Religion," in " Studies in Religious History and
Criticism," Frothingham's translation, p. 384.

64 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
himself, not only in the creation of the universe, but also by his
immanent action in it, so that he presents himself in the con
sciousness of all races of men, the objection loses all its force.
Then the revelation in Christ perpetuated in the Holy Spirit
becomes one line of God's continuous self-revelation, in which
the revelation reaches its highest form. Then, instead of being
improbable, incompatible with the whole course of nature, and
without analogy or previous intimation in the history of man, it
becomes antecedently probable. For if God has been always
immanently active in the universe and his revelation of himself
has been found in fact to have been ever progressive in the
evolution of the universe to successively higher and higher forms
of being, it is reasonable to suppose that he will carry it on to
the highest form possible in a finite system consistently with his
action in perfect wisdom and love. And certainly no higher
form of his revelation can be conceived than that of God in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor. v. 19). Then
the incarnation in Christ becomes the central fact in the history
of this world, for which all that preceded had been preparatory
and from which the highest moral and spiritual issues in the
realization of his ideal have flowed. God in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself becomes the fundamental fact in the
development of the world and of man, progressively realizing the
grand ideal of the kingdom of God, and the only key to the true
philosophy of human history.
We have seen that man's knowledge of God presupposes
God's action revealing himself to man, as man's knowledge of the
outward world and all physical science presupposes and rests
¦ upon the revelation which the outward world makes of itself by
its action on him and under his observation. Therefore, even in
the intellectual act of knowing God man is in a true sense in con
tact with him, the touch of God is on him. This does not
imply that the man is morally in harmony with God or in spiritual
union with him. God's revelation of himself to the mind of
man may be received in loving trust and willing service, or in
resistance and enmity. The touch of God revealing himself to a
man reveals the man in his true attitude toward God. It is like
the touch of Ithuriel's spear causing Satan to reveal himself in
his true form when, —

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 65
" Squat like a toad close at the ear of Eve ;
 for no falsehood can endure
Touch of celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness."
And so Paul says : " They are without excuse ; because when they
knew God, they glorified him not as God." But it implies that
the sources of our knowledge of God are all in God's revelation
of himself in its various forms.
We have seen that the whole universe is the revelation of God.
Therefore all knowledge of the universe attained by science in
every department is a source of knowledge of God as revealed
in the universe. Every discovery of science enlarges our knowl
edge of the universe, and thus of the revelation of God. Every
industrial invention enlarges our knowledge of the powers of
nature and of resources and agencies provided by God for man's
education and development. Our knowledge of God's revelation
of himself is enlarged by all the results of psychological investiga
tions as to the constitution of man in intellect, susceptibilities, and
free will, of anthropological researches as to the origin, the primi
tive condition and the development of man, of all the study of
human history and of the ethnic religions. The sources of our
knowledge of God are in the physical universe as it becomes
known to us, from things invisible in their minuteness and re
vealed only by the microscope, to planets and suns invisible in
their distance and revealed only by the telescope ; from the ulti
mate elements discovered by chemistry to systems whose units are
worlds, and to all the forces and laws revealed in astronomy and
physics ; and these sources are also in the moral and spiritual
system, in all that is known of man from his undeveloped condi
tion in savagery to his highest civilization, from the feeble to the
greatest geniuses, and from the sinful to the noblest characters
developed in love like that of Christ. The whole universe and
all its beings, powers, and laws, as known in all the sciences, are
sources of our knowledge of God.
On the other hand, we have seen that God, as absolute Reason,
is the necessary presupposition of all science and of the possi
bility and reality of human knowledge ; that we can find the unity
of the universe and of all the sciences which express our know
ledge of it only in the recognition of God. Therefore we may say
with true significance, that all the sciences of nature and of man
vol. 1. — 5

66 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
are theological ; that is, they open to us revelations of God ; and
that theology, in its comprehensive meaning, is the science of
sciences, the one science to which all others are tributary, in the
light of which alone they are known to be true science, and by
which alone they can all be brought into unity.
But while setting forth the comprehensiveness of theology, we
must never forget that the highest revelation of God is the reve
lation of the God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, as
recorded in the Bible. It is this to which all other revelations
are tributary, and which gives unity to all God's revelations, and
to the theology or knowledge of God derived from them. Thus
Christ is the Lord of life, " far above all rule, and authority, and
power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only
in this world, but also in that which is to come " (Eph. i. 21) ;
he is also above all, the Head, in the sphere of knowledge. In
him came into humanity the eternal Logos, " the true light, even
the light which lighteth every man." And here from another
point of view we see the unity of all science in Christian theology.
Human life in all its conditions and all its activities is related
to God. The Christian religion is designed to penetrate human
life in all its ramifications, and vitalize it with Christian love, as
the blood pervades and vitalizes the human body in every part, so
that the point of a cambric needle cannot puncture the skin any
where without finding it. Hence a Christian is to be religious in
every pursuit and every action as really as in worship. Every
action and pursuit is lifted up into a service of God, and so
ennobled by contact with the divine. Paul says : " Whether ye eat
or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God" (1
Cor. x. 31). And now we see that all knowledge is related to
God and ennobled as the knowledge of God. Thus both in prac
tical life and in the sphere of knowledge the old and sharply-
defined distinction between the religious and the secular, the
theological and the scientific, passes away.
From this point of view some of the most effective objections
against the Christian revelation lose all their force.
An objection is that the ideas of God and the supernatural are
unscientific, because they are beyond the sphere of law. But in
fact it is only through the recognition of God that all beings and
worlds throughout all space can be known to be stable in unity and
harmony under the same laws, and that the evolution of the uni-

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 67
verse in all time, from the lowest nebulous matter to men and
angels and to the full development of the kingdom of God in the
life eternal, can be known to be in the unity and harmony of a
continuous development, and so accordant with the great scien
tific laws of continuity and uniformity. God and the supernatural,
instead of being beyond the sphere of law, are the eternal seat
and source of all law, and all the action of God is in harmony with
law. And for this reason the universe is everywhere under law.
Another objection is that the supposed knowledge of God and
the supernatural is unscientific because it does not come into con
tinuity with our previous knowledge, but breaks away from it and
has no legitimate union with it. But this is not true. Man is
himself spiritual, therefore supernatural, and thus in knowing
himself he has knowledge of the supernatural. As such he is in
the likeness of God, and so his knowledge of God is the legiti
mate outgrowth of man's existing knowledge. It has been de
clared that belief in a miracle is " the abdication of science."
But even miracles are only higher manifestations of the power of
free will over nature ; and prophecy is only a higher manifestation
of the communion of God with men which all men may experience,
and which all Christians do experience. ¦ And the revelation of
God in Christ redeeming men from sin and establishing his king
dom is only a special line of God's revelation of himself in the
physical universe and in the constitution and history of man, and
so implies no break in the continuity of the evolution of the uni
verse and of man's knowledge of it.
Another objection is that belief in God's revelation of himself
in Christ rests only on a slender thread of historical evidence in
doubtful tradition, and in records written many ages ago and of
disputed genuineness and authority. But when the Christian
begins to investigate the grounds of his belief, he finds that it
rests on no such narrow and unstable basis. All the lines of
God's revelation of himself in the universe combine to make the
ground of his belief broad and deep as the universe, continuous
as human history and the evolution of the world, high as the
divine and low as the human in the God in Christ, vital and ever-
present as our own deepest spiritual experience and our highest
consciousness of life, and certain as human science and philosophy,
which derive all their certainty from the presupposition of the
existence of God.

68 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Professor Tyndall says, " Besides the phenomena which address
the senses, there are laws, principles, and processes which do not
address the senses at all, but which can be spiritually discerned."
Mr. Kidd says, in the article in the " Nineteenth Century " already
alluded to, " In religion is found the characteristic feature of
human evolution, the essential motive force from which all cosmic
progress in society proceeds. . . . The history of Western civili
zation is in fact simply the natural history of religion." M. Bru-
netiere, a member of the French Academy and Director of the
" Revue des Deux Mondes," is the author of an article in a recent
number of the Review, in which he adduces facts showing a
progress of scientists toward a more hearty recognition of religion
as a reality which science cannot annul and must recognize, and
a growing perception that the apparent antagonism between science
and religion is founded on misconception on both sides, and not
on the essential elements of science and religion. He maintains
the belief that this will be the attitude of scientists toward religion
in the coming century. This is a reasonable expectation. When
theologians and scientists attain broader and more profound views
of God in his relations to the universe, and of the universe in its
relations to God, we may reasonably hope that the conflict be
tween science and Christian theism will cease ; that theologians
will see that the discoveries of science enlarge our knowledge of
God, and scientists will see that the recognition of God, the
eternal and universal Reason revealed in the universe, is the very
foundation of all scientific knowledge of the universe. Copernicus,
Kepler. Newton, Lord Bacon, and many other scientists of former
times devoutly recognize God at the beginning and the end of
their scientific treatises, and incidentally as they record the pro
cesses and results of their investigations. Their devout recog
nitions of God were reasonable. We may hope that at no very
distant time scientists and theologians will rejoice together in
seeing the glory of God revealed in every new discovery in science
and in every advance in the progressive development of man.
6. In the foregoing line of thought the antinomy of faith and
reason, of revelation and true philosophy is dissolved and their
harmony is made apparent. It is also made apparent that the
antinomy, if not dissolved, issues inevitably in universal skepti
cism. If religion and the belief in a Divinity cannot be harmo
nized with reason, man as a rational being must reject them.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 69
But this rejection involves the rejection of all that distinguishes
man as rational. Philosophy, by which man seeks to ascertain
the reasonableness of his beliefs and the conformity of the uni
verse in its constitution and evolution with rational law, becomes
impossible, because the principles on which it depends are not
principles of universal and immutable reason, but mere subjective
beliefs of individuals. By the supposition no absolute and uni
versal reason exists. It must follow that there can be no
supreme and unchangeable moral law, no essential distinction
between right and wrong, no rational basis for the universal and
supreme law of love. With speculative philosophy and ethics
aesthetics is also swept away ; there can be no unchanging and
universal ideals of the perfect which are standards of aesthetic
judgment, and the beautiful is resolved into that which for the
moment is agreeable to any individual. There is also no immut
able distinction between good and evil determined by the princi
ples, laws, and ideals of reason as worthy of the pursuit and enjoy
ment of a rational being, and so having true and unchanging worth.
Religion also is an illusion ; man constituted so that in his normal
development he finds himself believing in a God, is therein con
stituted for superstition and delusion. Here man claims that
he will be scientific and confine himself to the empirical obser
vation of facts; but he finds even this to be an illusion. No
rational basis for the reality of his knowledge of the outward
world and of himself remains. He finds himself obliged to define
himself as a mere series of sensations and the outward world as
a mere permanent possibility of sensation ; the trees, the hills, all
outward objects that he sees exist only in the eye of him who
sees them. All reasonable basis for the reality of any human
knowledge disappears.
" The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,"
not, will dissolve, but are now " the baseless fabric of a vision."
II. Nature and the Supernatural. — The impression that
the supernatural is foreign from the universe and incompatible
with its order and law arises in part from a misconception of the
distinction between Nature and the Supernatural. This may
have arisen from the fact that the word nature is used with differ-

70 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
ent meanings. This is a source of confused and erroneous
thought in discussing the supernatural.
Nature in one of its meanings denotes the essential character
istics of a being. We speak of the nature of a stone or tree, of
a dog, of a man, of God, of a circle. In this sense every being
has its peculiar nature. There are as many different natures as
there are kinds of beings. If we say a being of a higher nature
is supernatural as compared with one of a lower nature, then
every kind of being except the very lowest is supernatural and at
the same time natural. Thus the word supernatural would be
meaningless. Nature is also used to denote the world in which we live and
which is familiar to us, including rational man and irrational
beings and the whole physical system. The supernatural would
then denote God and any supposed angels, or the spirits of men
existing after death, or any supposed rational inhabitants of other
worlds. Theologians have very commonly used the word in this
sense. This certainly is not a reasonable and helpful, but a con
fusing distinction ; for it recognizes some finite rational beings as
supernatural, on the same side of the line with God, and others
as shut up in nature. It slumps all human persons into one mass
with the impersonal, irrational and material. Man is merged in
nature and has no power to rise above it in rational and spiritual
self-determination. God is supernatural ; man is not. God is
on the other side of the line entirely beyond man. Man cannot
pass beyond the line to know the supernatural or to obtain any
basis in experience for a positive knowledge of God. God thus
separated from man, not in degree only, but also in kind or
essence, cannot reveal himself to him, and man cannot know God
through any revelation of himself which he may make. God's
revealing himself in the universe would necessarily be regarded as
an abrupt irruption into it, interrupting the regular order of
nature and in itself contradictory to science, unreasonable and
incredible. This definition of the distinction between nature and
the supernatural excludes God and the supernatural from the reg
ular on-going of the universe under law, and also excludes law
from the action of God and the supernatural. Mr. Drummond
seems to express a similar conception of the distinction, though
it is not in harmony with other statements in his own writings ¦:
" Of men generally it cannot be said that they are in living con-

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 71
tact with that part of their environment which is called the spirit
ual world. In introducing this new term, the spiritual world,
observe we are interpolating a new factor. . . . We call them
spiritual because they are beyond us or beyond a part of us.
What we have correspondence with, that we call natural ; what
we have little or no correspondence with, that we call spiritual." 1
Nature is used in a third meaning to denote the physical
universe, including all irrational and impersonal beings. The
supernatural would then denote God and all finite rational or
spiritual persons. The distinction as thus defined is accordant
with the popular, as well as with the literary and philosophical,
usage of language ; this is evident in the common contrast of
Nature and Spirit. I regard it as indicating the true line of
demarcation between the Natural and the Supernatural. We
cannot change the usage of language and its diverse applications
of the same word. But we can define the real distinction as that
between the spiritual, rational and personal, and the physical,
irrational and impersonal. Then the question whether we shall
designate the two classes by the names supernatural and natural
becomes a mere question as to the use of words.
If we accept this as the true line of demarcation between
nature and the supernatural, then man himself is a supernatural
being, on the same side ofthe line with God and in the likeness of
God as rational Spirit. Therefore God can reveal himself to man
by his action in the physical universe, in the constitution and
history of man, and in his redemption of men from sin and the
development of his kingdom, culminating in Christ and the out
pouring of the Spirit, and man can receive the revelation and
know God as thus revealed. Man can come into communion
with God. Thus man comes to know God as the absolute Spirit,
in whom reason is eternal and who has constituted the universe
and is evolving it in accordance with rational principles and laws
and for the realization of rational ideals and ends, the same in
kind with those which in human reason are regulative of thought
and action. Then the supernatural action of God in the universe
and upon and among men revealing himself is not unreasonable
nor anywise incompatible with the continuity and uniformity of
nature, for its continuity and uniformity are themselves simply the
1 Natural Law in the Spiritual World, pp. 156, 167.

72 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
manifestation or revelation of the principles and laws eternal in
the divine reason in accordance with which God has constituted
the universe and is evolving it in the progressive realization of
the archetypal ideal of his perfect reason. Even when the super
natural manifests itself in what we call a miracle, it is still the
action upon nature of rational spirit above it and in accordance
with rational principles and laws, and with the constitution and
order of the universe in accordance with those principles and laws.
Man knows himself as a rational, self-determining power, super
natural, from above nature acting on it and causing effects in the
physical system which nature left to itself could never have
caused. This action of a supernatural or spiritual power on
nature is of the essence of a miracle. It is not a violation of
any law of nature, but simply the result of the action on nature
of a supernatural or spiritual power in accordance with the laws
of nature. We, however, give the name miracle, not to the
effects of human power acting on nature from above it, but only
to the effects wrought by the action of God, or by a person en
dowed for the occasion by God with power superhuman as well
as supernatural. But the action of such a power producing
effects which nature left to itself would not have caused is always
as completely accordant with the laws of nature as is human
action in using light, heat, gravitation, the elasticity of steam, the
pressure of the air, electricity, and other powers of nature, to do
work for man.
Therefore the true line of distinction between the supernatural
and the natural is that between rational personal spirit and irra
tional impersonal being. Then the supernatural is not something
abnormal and incredible breaking into the order of the universe,
but is that in which man himself participates. And the divine
is spirit in the likeness of man, capable of being known by man ;
and communion and union with that divine Spirit is indispensable
to the realization of man's own normal development.
III. The Fundamental Reality. — The impression that
God's revelation of himself is abnormal and incredible is founded
in part on the misconception that matter and its forces are the
substantial reality; that spirit is ghostly, shadowy, phantasmic,
and unreal. From the positions now established it is evident

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 73
that the reality of the universe is primarily and fundamentally in
spirit or the supernatural, not in nature or the natural, in the
true meaning of the words. Only in recognition of God the
absolute Spirit can man discover the secret of the universe,
apprehend the power that sustains and acts in it, the scientific
laws and order of its evolution, and the reasonable ends for which
it exists and is evolved. Only so can man know it factually as
scientifically constituted and evolved, or rationally as explicable
in harmony with reason, or morally and practically as existing
for reasonable ends, or aesthetically as revealing the ideal and the
beautiful. The reality of the universe is primarily and fundamentally in
spirit, not in matter and its forces ; in the supernatural, not in
nature qr the physical. God is a Spirit. The energy that acts in the
universe, sustaining and evolving it, is put forth into it from God
the eternal Spirit. In striking accord with this is the representa
tion in Genesis (i. 2). The universe as first created is repre
sented as formless, motionless and homogeneous, "waste and
void ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep " ; then " the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The repre
sentation is that the beginning of motion in the formless homo
geneous waste was from the action of the Spirit of God, not from
the formless waste itself. If it be translated, " The breath of the
Lord moved upon the waters," the meaning would be essentially
the same. The power that originated motion in the homogeneous
and formless waste and that energizes in it through all its evolu
tion, is put into it from God, the eternal Spirit. So it has been
from the beginning and will be forevermore. In fact man's own
knowledge of power, force, or energy, as distinguished from mere
motion, begins in his consciousness of himself as in free will exert
ing and directing his own energy, and his simultaneous con
sciousness of the outward objects opposing the energy which he
exerts, or in some way acting upon him. In accordance with
this it is reasonable to suppose that all force or power originates
in God, the eternal Spirit.
This sets aside a common impression that matter with its
forces is the substantial reality ; that spirit is ghostly, shadowy,
phantasmal, and unreal. The very contrary is true. The spiritual
or supernatural is the fundamental reality. The spiritual or
supernatural is not the manifestation of matter and its forces ;

74 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
but matter and its forces are manifestations or revelations of the
spiritual or supernatural.
When Darwin and Wallace promulgated the theory of evolution,
many feared that it with its necessary inferences, if proved true,
would make belief in God impossible and triumphantly establish
materialism. Some in consternation have tried to make con
cessions, as if asking to retain belief in God only for their
religious hours, without presuming to intrude it into the sphere
of science ; as if venturing to hope only to canton off a little
Goshen in some corner of human life where the divine light may
shine, while leaving all beyond in the Egyptian darkness of
materialism. This is only raising the cry, Sauve qui peut, in the
consciousness of defeat. But when the atheist affirms that God
and the supernatural are nowhere, the true and only effective
reply is, not that God and the supernatural may possibly be
somewhere, but that God and the supernatural are everywhere ;
that they are the fundamental reality of the universe, the basis of
aHyr,ealjty in it and of the possibility of scientific knowledge of it,
and in fact of any human knowledge ; that they are present and
essential in the whole process of evolution ; and that the universe
in its continuous evolution is the continuous revelation of God.
The doctrine of evolution itself requires the recognition of God
as the absolute Spirit transcending the universe, and presents
new and decisive evidence that he is immanently active in it.
Skepticism cannot be met effectually by minimizing the super
natural, apologetically trying to show that there may be at least a
little of it in the universe ; but only by maintaining the truth
that it is the fundamental reality of the universe. The universe
as a whole and in all its parts is dependent on God for its
existence, its powers, its laws and order, its evolution, and its
ultimate design.
In this line of thought we are brought back to the truth that
the absolute Being is the absolute Spirit, and that spirit i<s the
fundamental reality and the central and pervading energy in the
universe. Science teaches the fact that the highest ordeT of
being that has come into existence in the protracted evolution
of the universe is man. Though through his body he is im
planted in the physical, he is endowed with reason, with free will
self-determining and self-exerting, and with susceptibility to rational
and spiritual motives, emotions and interests ; he knows himself to

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 75
be under obligation to rise above the sphere of animal instinct,
sensual appetite and selfish desire to a life enlightened by
reason, regulated in accordance with rational truth and law, and
directed to the realization of rational ends; in a word, to the
life of universal love. These are the essential characteristics of a
personal ego or spirit, as distinguished from all mere animal life.
The absolute Being on whom the universe depends must be a
being of as high an order as man ; that is, he must be a personal
spirit. Otherwise the creature would be of a higher order than
its creator. And no being of a higher order than personal spirit,
that is, than man, who is a personal spirit, can ever exist. For
man, as rational, self-determining spirit, is in the likeness of
God ; and no created being can be of a higher order than God
himself. Thus we see that the fundamental reality ofthe universe
is spirit ; the highest energy acting in it is the self-determining,
self- exerting energy of spirit ; and the highest end which can be
realized in it is the development of rational personal spirits
to their highest perfection and well-being, thus realizing what
Christ calls the kingdom of God. This is ever progressing in
the finite universe, as a living seed shooting up and growing in
the earth and air and all its physical environment, " first the
blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." As J. R.
Lowell says in writing on "The Old English Dramatists," "The
real and abiding facts are those which are recognized as such by
the soul when it is in that upper chamber of our being which is
farthest removed from the senses, and communes with its true
self." And Professor Knight says truly, " The question is not, Is
there a spiritual realm to which material things may ultimately
and in the last analysis belong? It is, Is the whole universe, at
its very core and in its inmost essence, spiritual? " 1 " It is spirit
that is in man, and it is the inbreathing of the Almighty that
giveth him understanding " (Job xxxii. 8). Here is the funda
mental scientific truth that it is spirit that manifests itself in the
universe and is energizing in it to realize progressively the de
velopment and perfection of spiritual personal beings as its high
est end. We see, therefore, the utter futility of all objections
against the revelation of the supernatural, that is, of the spiritual
in the universe as foreign from it, contradictory to the scientific
1 Prof. William Knight, " Aspects of Theism/' p. 1 1 .

76 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
knowledge of it, and incompatible with its continuity, uniform
ity and law.1
John says, " Jesus, knowing that he came forth from God and
goeth unto God" (John xiii. 3). In this consciousness of the
divine in him what does he do? He washed his disciples' feet.
Thus he set forth the reality that the divine in man reveals itself
in service rendered in love even in its lowliest acts. Herein he
discloses the archetype of the ideally perfect man. Every man
comes from God. Every one who lives the life of love in good
will regulated in righteousness returns to God. To such a
person death is only an epoch in his normal development to his
highest perfection and his highest condition in communion and
union with God in the life everlasting. Man is immortal. In
the progress of evolution in the physical system mechanical force
is transcended but not abolished by chemical ; both are transcended
but not abolished by life, vegetable and animal ; all are transcended
but not abolished by rational life coming from the living God, in
whom life is underived and eternal. The ultimate atoms are the
indivisible units in the physical system ; and not one of them
ever ceases to exist. Every physical force is persistent, per
petuated in some form forever. Much more may we expect
rational, self-determining persons, who are the indivisible units
in the moral or spiritual system and are in the likeness of God, to
live forever. In this life God is our spiritual environment, "in
whom we live, and move, and have our being," and the spiritual
1 Thou art ! directing all, thou art !
Direct my understanding then to thee ;
Control my spirit, guide my wandering heart.
Though I am but an atom 'midst immensity,
Still I am something fashioned by thy hand.
I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth ;
On the last verge of mortal being stand,
Close to the realm where angels have their birth,
Just on the boundaries of the spirit-land.
The chain of being is complete in me.
In me is matter's last gradation lost,
And the next step is Spirit, Deity.
I can command the lightning ; and am dust I
A monarch and a slave, a worm, a god I
Whence came I here and how, so marvelously
Constructed and conceived ? Unknown ? This clod
Lives surely through some higher energy ;
For from itself alone it could not be. — Derzhavin.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 77
is the fundamental reality as really as it will be in the life to
come. Death is an epoch in which the spiritual life in the
Christian will be more fully developed and he will come into more
vivid consciousness of God and his spiritual environment as the
fundamental reality. As Paul says, " Now we see darkly, but then
face to face " (1 Cor. xiii. 12). If a person has lived in sin, death
is an epoch terrible indeed. It brings him into vivid conscious
ness of his antagonism to God, to his own spiritual being and
environment, to all that is true, right, perfect, good, and divine,
and to the fundamental reality in the constitution and evolution
of the universe.
Christian faith, therefore, is the recognition of God and the
spiritual as the fundamental reality and acting in trust in it as
such ; as one recognizes the reality of the material world and
spontaneously shapes his action in accordance with the physical
realities. Faith brings home to us, as present with us now, God
and our spiritual environment, the same fundamental reality
which will be more vividly seen in the heavenly glory.
" Far into distant worlds she pries.
And brings eternal glories near."
This accords with the scriptural definition, " Faith is the assur
ance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen "
(Heb. xi. 1). Thus Christian faith is the inspiration to earnest
ness, energy, and heroism in the work of Christian love. It
expects great things ; it attempts great things. Even in the
face of opposition and temporary failure it is not discouraged.
So Whittier in his efforts against slavery writes :
" I have not seen, I may not see, ¦
My hopes for man take form in fact ;
But God will give the victory
In due time ; in that faith I wait."
Moses "endured as seeing him who is invisible " (Heb. xi. 27).
This faith inspired Paul. " We look not at the things which are
seen, but at the things which are not seen ; for the things which
are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eter
nal." And in a Roman dungeon expecting speedy death he
wrote : "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my
departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have fin
ished my course, I have kept the faith" (2 Cor. iv. 18;

78 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
2 Tim. iv. 6-8). His past life was shining on him as faithful
and efficient service in Christian love ; and opening out into a
vista of endless glory.
IV. Transcendence and Immanence. — The impression that
God's revelation of himself is foreign from the universe and in
compatible with its constitution and law, arises in part from a
misconception of God's transcendence of the universe and his
immanence in it.
i. It is the one indivisible God, the absolute Spirit, who at once
transcends the universe and is immanent and active in it. The
words transcendence and immanence do not denote what God is
in his essential being, but only his relation to the finite universe.
Here also we find confusion of thought and diversity of opinion
arising from lack of agreement and precision in the use of words.
A recent writer says that God as Spirit transcends the universe,
but as the absolute Being is immanent in it. Others say that
God as the absolute Being transcends the universe, and as Spirit
he is immanent in it. This same diversity of conception ap
peared in the discussion of God's transcendence and immanence
in the early history of the church, in connection with the Greek
philosophy and Neo-Platonism. God, as then distinguished from
the merely physical universe and above it as Spirit, has been
designated as supercosmic ; distinguished from the whole finite
universe, including finite rational beings, as above and beyond it
as absolute Being, he has been designated as transcendent. In
these speculations the tendency is to lose a firm grasp of the
unity of God. In attempting to distinguish God's transcendence
from his immanence, we must guard against the danger of
imagining a division in God himself, instead of a mere distinction
in his relation to the universe. The effort to conceive of the
Absolute apart from the Spirit, so as to give the full appreciation
due to the transcendent greatness of God, has often issued in
attaining only empty abstractions, indicating only the ultimate
bound or limit of human thought. The Absolute separated from
the living divine Spirit becomes a zero, the Hegelian conclusion,
" being=o." Basilides, for example, taught that God as Absolute
transcends, not only the finite universe, but Being itself; he is
beyond all affirmation ; nothing can be predicated of him. Still
he held that God created the universe ; yet, even so, nothing can

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 79
be predicated of him declaring what he in his essence is : " God,
not being (ovk &v, 0cos), without thought, without perception,
without will, without purpose, without passion, without desire,
willed to make a world. In saying willed, I use the word only
because some word is necessary ; but I mean without volition,
without thought, and without perception ; and in saying world, I
do not mean the extended and divisible world, which afterwards
came into being with its capacity of division, but the seed of the
world." 1 Plotinus represented God as " beyond the One and
higher than the Monad itself," the highest abstraction of the then
current philosophy. Centuries before, Pythagoras and the Pyth
agoreans had resolved the ultimate reality of the universe into the
abstract idea of number. As Aristotle says : " The Pythagoreans
seem to have looked on number as the principle and, so to
speak, the matter of which existences consist. . . . They sup
posed the elements of number to be the elements of existence, and
pronounced the whole heavens to be harmony and number."
Philolaus, one of the most distinguished of the Pythagoreans,
says : " Number is great and perfect and omnipotent, and the
principle and guide of divine and human life."
Thus pushing the distinction between the transcendence and
the immanence into a separation, we not only miss the true
significance of the distinction, but also lose in empty subjective
mental abstractions all knowledge of God himself as an objectively
real and living Spirit. Therefore it must be always borne in mind
that in distinguishing God's transcendence and immanence we are
not defining what he is in the essence of his being, but only his
relation to the universe. It is the one indivisible God, the abso
lute Spirit in each of these relations to the universe ; God the one
absolute Spirit in his transcendence of the universe, and God the
one absolute Spirit in his immanence in it.
2. Even when aiming to hold fast the oneness of God as the
absolute Spirit, theologians sometimes isolate the transcendence
from the immanence, the absolute from the Spirit, or at least give
an undue preponderance to the one or the other.
If the transcendence of God is isolated, or receives dispropor-
tional emphasis, the tendency is to exclude God from the universe.
The conception springs up that God created the universe in the
1 ap. Hippol. 7, 21, p. 358. " The seed of the world " seems to be an
inchoate intimation of evolution.

80 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
six days and finished it ; since then he has left it to go of itself.
From this point of view the universe comes to be regarded as a
mechanism made by an outside artificer. A clock wound up and
set agoing was regarded as a sufficient representation of it. This
is what has been called by unbelievers at the present day the
carpenter theory of the universe. But the universe is not a clock.
The theory that the universe is a mere mechanism and every
power and movement in it explicable by the laws of mechanics,
which had currency from the time of Descartes, has been gradu
ally abandoned by science. In our own day the discovery of
evolution has given it its death-blow. Spencer and the evolution
ists of his school teach explicitly that the type of the universe in its
evolution is not mechanism, but the growth of a living organism.
It is obvious that this mechanical theory of the universe and
its artificer outside of it is a serious objection to the reality of the
revelation of God. If God's transcendence of the universe is
isolated, or occupies the thought predominantly to the exclusion
of his immanence, he is conceived of as being, as it were, shut up
in his transcending absoluteness, and so any revelation of himself
to man in the finite becomes impossible. And if the universe is
a mechanism completed and finished' by an external artificer, then
any additional action of the artificer in the machine would imply
a breakage and an interruption of its regular on-going. In fact, it
was a mechanical theory of this sort which gave the occasion for
the assaults of the Deists of the last century on the reality of the
revelation recorded in the Bible, and the plausibility to their
objections. On the contrary, if the immanence of God is isolatedor given
undue preponderance, the danger is of identifying God with the
universe, and so sinking into the morass of pantheism. This is
probably the tendency which, of the two, it is now more necessary
to guard against.
Here, however, a false alarm may be raised. Pantheism may
be so loosely conceived that the true doctrine of the immanence
of God in the universe may be thought to be pantheism. Thus
one propounding simply this true and important conception of
God's immanence may be cried down as a dangerous innovator,,
and so stigmatized, like a hooking ox, " Foenum habet in cornu ; '
longe fuge." x This oscillation of thought in attempting to adjust
1 Horace, " Satirarum," Lib. I. Sat. iv. 34.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 8 1
the true conception of God's transcendence and his immanence
recurs at different periods in the history of the church. In these
periods of transition some, intending to declare only God's
immanence, have used language which has been unjustly de
nounced as implying pantheism. Others, notably some of the
medieval mystics, have used language which, if fairly interpreted,
implies pantheism.1 This is a danger against which we need to
guard in the present return to a more full recognition of God's
immanence. We must maintain the objective reality of the
physical universe distinct from God ; and of every rational person
or ego in the likeness of God as Spirit, yet distinct from him.
The doctrine of God's immanence in the universe cannot be
pantheism so long as it recognizes the absolute Being as God, the
eternal Spirit, and the universe, physical and spiritual, as having
real existence distinct from God, though dependent on him, and
every being in the universe as individuated in its own constitution,
and acting under the laws of its own being.
In the present reaction from the giving of undue prominence
to the transcendence there is apparent a tendency, not unusual in
such cases, to swing to the opposite extreme. Some, in setting
forth God's immanence, use language which really implies panthe
ism ; often, probably, without intending to teach it, and in uncon
sciousness of the real significance of their words. For example,
we find Christian writers advocating the need of Christian
pantheism. But Christian pantheism is as unthinkable as a
square circle. The recognition of God as the absolute personal
Spirit, distinct by "the whole breadth of being" from man and
the physical universe, is of the essence of Christianity. The
identification of Christianity with pantheism is an absurdity. In
Professor Edward Caird's " Evolution of Religion," and some of
his other writings, it is hardly possible to avoid recognizing
distinct Hegelian pantheism. A similar tendency is discernible
here and there in theological writings in our own country. As a
single example I quote from an article entitled, " Some Criticism of
the Andover Movement." As one of the defects of the move
ment the writer mentions the retaining of the common philo
sophical idea of personality. " To ascribe to one person, say the
reviewers, what belongs to another, is an infringement of personal
rights, at least a confusion of personality. This is true if our
1 See Dr. Hunt, " Pantheism and Christianity."
vol. i. — 6

82 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
idea of personality is still dominated by the thought of separate
embodiments. We ordinarily think of personality as necessarily
exclusive, mine of yours and his and every one's. But in order to
understand man's relation to God and all the higher human mutual
relations, we must recognize that personality is inclusive. The
more truly it is personality, the more does it comprehend all
true persons : ' I in thee and thou in me.' This conception is
needed to explain the participation by man in the life of God,
the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the presence of Christ in the
church, all true friendship and marriage, the mutual life of the
living and the dead." 1 If God's immanence is consciously or
unconsciously confounded with pantheism, no self-revelation of
God can be consistently recognized ; for there would be no God
to reveal himself. And if, without proceeding to this extreme,
God's immanence is isolated from his transcendence or empha
sized in a one-sided way, the tendency must be to an anthropo
morphic conception of God, open to his rebuke, " Thou thoughtest
that I was altogether such an one as thyself" (Psalm 1. 21).
3. God's transcendence and his immanence must be held in
unison as complemental truths, presenting two aspects of God's .
relation to the universe.
Here the question may arise how God, while transcending the
universe, can be immanently active in it ; how we are to compre
hend God's transcendence and his immanence without sliding
into error on either side. The difficulty in answering this ques
tion arises in part from attempting to define God's action too
minutely, to picture in the imagination just how God created the
universe and is sustaining and developing it ; that is, from at
tempting to transcend the limits of the human mind. When
Nicodemus asked, How can these things be? our Lord, anticipat-S
ing a fundamental principle of the Baconian method, taught him
that his first inquiry should be for the facts, and that he should
accept these on sufficient evidence, even though unable to answer
the question, How can these things be? (John iii. 9-12). The
question before us is the question of Nicodemus. At this stage
in our investigations we know the facts that God has created the
universe and that it continuously depends on him for its being
and its evolution. We have also positive knowledge of God
revealed in the universe as the absolute Spirit. But we cannot
1 Andover Review, Feb. 1890, p. 199.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 83
picture in imagination the precise mode of God's action putting
forth his power from the absoluteness of his being to energize in
the finite and create a universe in the forms of space and time.
Mystery necessarily lies all along the line of the transition of the
energy of the absolute Being into the finite, revealing himself in
creating, sustaining, and evolving a universe under the conditions
and limitations of the finite. No finite being ever passed beyond
that line between the finite and the absolute, and from that side
acted in the finite, and thus acquired in experience data from
which to picture just how God puts forth his energy from his
absolute being into the finite, creating and evolving the uni
verse in the forms of space and time and under all the conditions
of finite existence. We therefore accept the fact that the one
absolute Spirit both transcends the universe and is immanently
active in it, though we are not able to picture just how it is so.
Now we may legitimately ask what, within the limits of the
human mind, we can know of this immanent activity of God
in the universe.1
First, we may consider God's immanent activity in the physical
system, or what is called the course of nature. We know from the
results of scientific investigation that some cause other than matter
and its forces is necessary to account for both the existence of the
universe and its order and its evolution. We know also that the
existence of God and his agency in the universe are adequate to
account for both. In answer to the question we may say, nega
tively, that the doctrine of God's immanence does not imply that
every particle of dust driven in the wind, every drop of spray from
the surf dashing on every shore, the motion and action of every
atom and molecule of matter, is caused by a direct and distinct
volition and exertion of God. This would imply that the universe
is only a Hindu Maia, a mere illusion having no real power or
being ; and would thus undermine the reality of all human knowl
edge. It is also a purely anthropomorphic conception, assuming
that God's action must be limited to finite modes and forms like
our own. We are rather to suppose that from him energy is con
tinuously flowing into the physical system, sustaining it in being,
and directing its evolution according to its constitution and laws
and in the progressive realization of his archetypal ideal of all per
fection and well-being possible in a finite universe. This, and this
1 See "The Philosophical Basis of Theism," jpp. 414-428, 510-536.

84 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
alone, meets the demand of the fundamental principle of science
that the sum of force in the universe, potential and energizing, is
never increased or diminished, but is always the same. For we
find the absolute source of all power or force forever energizing in
the universe, but itself remaining absolute and undiminished. It
distributes and individuates its power in the finite, yet remains
itself forever the same without increase or diminution. Receiv
ing does not increase it, putting forth and expanding it does not
diminish it. This is the fundamental principle of the mathematics
of the calculus, which since its discovery has proved so powerful
a principle in scientific investigation. Theism shows that it is a
principle essential in the very constitution qf the universe. The
divine energy —
" Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent."
The immanent action of God in nature seems to be implied in
the common belief of Christians. The church has always held to
God's omnipresence. This it has never held as an inactive and
impersonal presence, but as the presence of the living and ever-
acting God, in his universal providence directing the affairs of the
universe, clothing the lily with beauty, feeding the birds, caring
for every sparrow that falls, and numbering the hairs of the head.
The common belief that God sustains the universe in being implies
his continuous energy in thus sustaining it. At whatever point of
time we think of the universe, we must think of God as, in the
order of thought and fact, antecedent to it as its cause. In a way
mysterious to us he individuates his power in the forms of space
and time and so creates the universe objectively real and distinct
from himself, while it is ever his power that is individuated in it
and sustains it as really as on the day of its creation. Thus the
energy of God, the eternal Spirit, is evermore flowing into the
universe to sustain and evolve it. Science finds in the evolution
of the universe epochs in which the necessity of the action of
that ever-present and transcendent power becomes apparent to
the scientific observer. Such epochs are the beginning of life,
the beginning of sensitivity, and pre-eminently the beginning of
the existence of rational finite persons, spirits in the likeness of
God. This does not imply that God's energy is withdrawn from
the physical universe at other times and comes in only on extra-

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 85
ordinary occasions ; but that on these occasions it becomes more
apparent. Thus these occasions constitute epochs in the evolu
tion. Some crude analogy with God's sustaining and developing
energy may be found in the sun. According to the nebular
hypothesis, the earth with the other planets was thrown off from
the mass of nebulous matter of which what is now the sun
was the centre. Thus it is distinct and separated from the sun,
and all terrestrial beings have their existence and act on one
another with their several mechanical, chemical, or vital forces.
Yet the earth with all things on it or in it is always dependent
on the sun, which holds the planet to itself as its centre of
gravity, and is continuously acting on it by its heat and light
and its chemical and electric forces, sustaining all terrestrial
forces. If the sun should cease thus to act on the earth,
all terrestrial life, motion, and energy would cease. So the
universe, having its own real existence and acting with its
own varied forces is distinct from God. Yet it originated from
him. He created it, individuating something of his divine power
in it ; he is continuously active in it, sustaining it and all in it or
on it in being, quickening its energies and directing them in
accordance with rational law and in the progressive realization of
rational ideals and ends. As in spiritual communion with God we
not only think about him, but come into spiritual contact with the
divine Spirit shedding heavenly light and breathing divine influ
ences upon us, so in looking on the heavens and the earth and on
all the marvelous processes of the physical system we rightly feel
ourselves to be in the presence of God continuously revealing
himself in them.
Secondly, God is continuously active by his spiritual influences
in the moral system. Here we have less difficulty in conceiving
of God's immanent activity as consistent with the existence of
man in his rational free personality distinct from God, and with
the free action of man under the divine influences. We have
less difficulty in this conception because we know ourselves as
rational free agents and have ourselves experienced the gracious
divine influences of the Spirit of God in our own hearts and lives.
God is immanently active in the moral system, redeeming men
from sin. This redemptive action of God on and among men
was not completed and closed centuries ago when Christ's earthly
life ended, but is perpetuated through all ages in the Holy Spirit.

86 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
In the Spirit he is present and immanently active, bringing on
men all the heavenly influences of his redeeming grace which
perfect wisdom, righteousness, and good will permit or require,
to induce them to turn from selfishness and sin to the life of love,
and so to develop his kingdom on earth, and therein progres
sively to realize his archetypal ideal of all perfection and well-
being so far as possible in a finite universe and a system of finite
free agents.
4. God's immanence and continuous action in the universe,
both in the moral system and the physical, is clearly taught
throughout the Bible. In reply to those who rebuked him for
restoring sight to a blind man on the Sabbath, Jesus said, " My
Father worketh even until now," never interrupted by the Sab
bath, "and I work" (John v. 17). Paul says, "He is not far
from each one of us ; for in him we live and move and have our
being" (Acts xvii. 28) ; "God who worketh all things in all"
(1 Cor. xii. 6) ; " who filleth all in all " ; " One God and Father
of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all " (Eph. i. 23 ;
iv. 6). Some recent writers have said that the religion of Israel
emphasized God's transcendence and regarded him as apart from
the universe rather than immanently active in it. But these
critics cannot be familiar with the Old Testament. Throughout
the history of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament God
reveals himself to Israel as their covenant God, known to them
as such in his memorial name Jehovah and always in the most
intimate relations with them. In their nomadic wanderings his
temple was with them, their guide by day, and every night its
neighborly light was seen from the encampment. Throughout
their "history his mercy-seat was in the temple, behind the veil
in the Holy of Holies, -reminding them always that he is the one
only God, the Spirit whom no eye can see, yet always near,
accepting the worship of his people and from his mercy-seat
caring for their welfare. The whole history is the history of
God's dealings with the people. In the Psalms and prophecies
we find the expression of the consciousness of God as in the
most intimate relations with his worshipers as individuals.
Psalm cxxxix. is an example : " Thou hast beset me behind and
before and laid thy hand upon me." And in the Old Testament
the phenomena of nature are habitually referred to the action of
God : " Jehovah thundered in the heavens and the Most High

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 87
uttered his voice" (Ps. xviii. 13; Ps. civ.). The belief of the
Jews in the immanence of God appears also in . the Apocryphal
writings. For example, the universe is spoken of as God's house
in which he dwells : —
O Israel, how great is the house of God 1
And how large the place of his possession I
Great, and it hath no end !
High and immeasurable. — Baruch, chap. iii. 24, 25.
The immanence of God is implied also in the biblical declara
tions of God's universal providence, extending to the minutest ,
events, already alluded to. It is clearly revealed also in the
whole biblical history of God's development of his kingdom on
earth, culminating in the Word made flesh and dwelling among
us and perpetuated in the Holy Spirit, whom the Son sends from
the Father, "poured out on all flesh" (Acts ii. 17), to abide
with men forever. And all prayer postulates God's continuous
gracious action among men. The door of the closet of secret
prayer shuts out the world and opens into the immediate pres
ence of God. This closet is found in every place. Electricity
continuously courses unseen in its beneficent work through all
nature. Wherever an electrician sets up his battery, he finds and
appropriates the unseen energy. So wherever and whenever any
person seeks God in humble trust, he finds him and avails him
self of his freely-offered grace.
From all these considerations it is evident that God's tran
scendence of the universe and his immanence in it are not
incompatible or contradictory. They are two aspects of one
and the same God, the absolute Spirit, two poles of one and
the same full-orbed truth. Theism, as the doctrine of God, the
absolute Spirit, is necessarily bi-polar. It must recognize God
as at once the absolute Being and the personal Spirit, at once
transcendent and immanent, distinct from the universe and ever
active in it. It is remarkable with what strength the Bible
habitually presents each pole of a bi-polar truth, yet holds them
both in unity with no suggestion of conflict between them.
Thus, for example, it presents God speaking in one and the
same sentence of his transcendence and his immanence : " Thus
saith the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose
name is Holy. I dwell in the high and holy place ; with him

88 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
also who is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of
the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones " (Isa.
lvii. 15 ; Ixvi. 1, 2).
5. The recognition of the unison of God's transcendence. and
his immanence is necessary to insure the proper appreciation of
God's revelation of himself, the true knowledge of God and the
right development of the spiritual life of communion and union
with him.
God's transcendence and his immanence being thus in unison, the
physical universe is not a dead wall separating us from God and
hiding him, but rather the screen on which as in a panorama we
in the darkness see him from the intense light behind pictur
ing himself in his cosmic energizing before our eyes. " The
heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth .
the work of his hands" (Ps. xix. 1). There is no place for the
argument in defence of monkish orders recently urged in a
public address in Boston : " The object has been to keep the
law of God more thoroughly than can be done while engaged in
the occupations of this world." 1 The universe itself is the
temple of God, in which men offer to him the work of their
daily lives and all the daily on-going of life in the service of God
and man and in loving trust in God, a service with which " God is
well pleased " (Heb. xiii. 16). As to the harmony of God's tran
scendence and immanence in the moral system, redeeming men
from sin, in his graciousness to men encompassing, enlightening,
and quickening them with divine influences (here as before I
take an example from the Old Testament), the Psalmist uses the
grandest scenes in the universe as imagery to illustrate it : " As
the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward
them who fear him." Every time we look up to the firmament,
so high, so pure, so all-encompassing, so grand in the glory of
the sun by day and of the moon and stars by night, so bending
in seeming tenderness over us, every one of us is to think, Such
is God's transcending greatness, and such the fulness, beauty and
power of his unchanging love, ever encompassing me, beaming
and glowing upon me with divine and heavenly influences in the
darkest n'.ght as well as in the day. And as each one is always
directly under the zenith of the firmament and in the centre of
the circle of the horizon, so is every one the centre of the love
1 The Congregationalist, Nov. 29, 1894.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 89
of God. And lest this representation of God's love, like the
glorious firmament ever pouring all its glory on each one, should
seem too great and overpowering, the Psalmist immediately comes
down to our homes and our firesides for more human imagery :
" Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them
who fear him " (Ps. ciii. n-13). And in these wonderful pic
tures of God's love we see, not only his immanent activity among
and on us, but also, in harmony with it, his transcendence, the
inexhaustible fulness of his infinite and absolute being, that is
never lessened by expending it. This makes it possible that
each person may have all the riches of his grace ; as each one
has all the light and glory of the firmament without taking away
aught from any other ; as each child has all the undivided ful
ness of the father's and the mother's love. This is like all
God's works. Every blade of grass that grows, every flower that
blooms is ministered unto by the sun and the earth, by the
ocean, the rivers, and springs which supply rain, dew and moist
ure, by the atmosphere, by light, heat, and electricity, by gravita
tion, by physical and chemical forces, by all the cosmic energies ;
and each has the ministry of all. Thus we see God's transcend
ence and his immanent agency in every revelation of himself;
not only in the evolution of the universe, and its greater cosmic
agency, but also in every individual thing that lives or moves.
At times in the history of the Christian religion a tendency has
manifested itself to isolate either the transcendence or the im
manence ; or to positions which would logically imply such isola
tion, though it may not have been intended. But the common
current of Christian belief in all the Christian ages has recog
nized explicitly or at least has necessarily implied both the
transcendence and the immanence and their harmony. For
example, Gregory the Great says : " God dwelleth within all
things, and without all things, above all things and beneath all
things."1 Thomas Aquinas says: "The immediate operation
of the Creator is closer to everything than the operation of any
secondary cause."2 Lord Bacon speaks of "the voice of God
revealed in things." Here we see the significance of the title of a
volume, " The Life of God in the Soul of Man," by Henry Scougal,
Professor in the University of St. Andrews more than two hundred
years ago, which was still in circulation in the first half of the
1 Mag. Mor., ii. 12. 2 Summa Theol., II., Sent. i. 1.

90 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
present century. Similar testimony we find in our own time.
H. W. Mabie, in his " Literature and the Spiritual Life," says :
" Whatever makes the divine element in life more real, credible,
evident, by disclosing the range, the depth, the infinite possi
bilities of that life, contributes as directly to faith as a specific
revelation. The essence of religion is the consciousness of God
everywhere in the universe. In fact, the ability to receive the
specific revelation depends in no small measure on the ability to
conceive of human life broadly and nobly. The view of life, or
of the world, which limits the presence or the revelation of God
to particular activities, is, in the exact measure of such limitation,
atheistic." M. de Vogue, in an article on the " Interpretation of
the International Exhibition in Paris in 1889," says : " The laws
of the outward universe are but the reflex of the moral world
within, and the Universal Force, once adequately distributed into
its proper channels, will inspire the human heart for all purposes
of life. In this new order of things force must regain its noble
ancient name ; with us, as with the Romans, it must be called
Virtus." 1 We have seen that the transcendence and immanence
are implied in the mathematical and. scientific knowledge of the
universe. Both, and their entire harmony, are assumed and
implied in all worship and devotion. The same is expressed or
implied in the loftiest conceptions of the universe by poetic
genius. " But how should matter occupy a charge,
Dull as it is, and satisfy a law
So vast in its demands, unless impelled
To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,
And under pressure of some conscious Cause ?
The Lord of all, himself through all diffused,
Sustains and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire
By which the mighty process is maintained,
Who sleeps not, is not weary ; in whose sight
Slow-circling ages are as transient days ;
Whose work is without labor ; whose design
No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts ;
And whose beneficence no charge exhausts. . . .
One Spirit — His,
Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows —
Rules universal nature. Not a flower
1 Revue des Deux Mondes.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 91
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain,
Of his unrivalled pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odors and imparts their hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes,
In grains as countless as the sea-side sands,
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth.
Happy who walks with Him ! whom what he finds
Of flavor or of scent in fruit or flower,
Or what he views of beautiful or grand
In nature, from the broad majestic oak
To the green blade that twinkles in the sun,
Prompts with remembrance of a present God.
His presence, who made all so fair, perceived,
Makes all still fairer. As with him no scene
Is dreary, so with him all seasons please." J
The same lofty sentiment and sublime conception live in our
contemporary poetry.
" I wander in the thoughtful night
To gaze upon His countless stars,
His eyes of uncreated light
Beam on me through their crystal bars,
And those Eternal eyes I know
Love all who walk with him below.
" I see Him in the burning day,
I feel Him in the viewless air,
In every breath, in every ray
His power is present everywhere ;
And in my soul His wonders grow
Of Life, and Love, and Power, below." 2
Here, then, we see a profound philosophical and theological, as
well as practical and devotional, significance in the poetical
representation of the music of the spheres. Addison says of the
stars, — " Forever singing as they shine,
' The hand that made us is divine.' "
Clement of Alexandria, referring to the wondrous music attributed
by polytheists to some of their gods and to other mythical per
sonages, declares that the God who has revealed himself in Christ
has tuned the universe itself to music. "This deathless strain,
1 Cowper, " The Task," bk. vi.
2 Helen L. Kilbum-Brown, " Trinity Chimes and Songs of the Unseen,"
PP- 33. 34-

92 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the support of the whole and the harmony of all, reaching from
the centre to the circumference, and from the extremities to the
centre, has harmonized this universal frame of things, not ac
cording to the Thracian music, but according to the fatherly
counsel of God which fired the ardor of David. And he who is
of David and yet before him, the Word of God, despising the
lyre and harp, which are but lifeless instruments, and having
tuned by the Holy Spirit the universe itself and especially man,
who, composed both of body and spirit, is himself a universe in
miniature, makes melody to God on this instrument of many
tones. And to this instrument — I mean man — he sings ac
cordant : ' For thou art my harp, and flute, and temple.' " He
adds in explanation, that man is a harp to sound in harmony
with the universe the glory of the Lord, a flute through which the
holy spirit breathes music, a temple to contain the Lord.1
V. The Bible. —Objections of unbelievers arise in part from
the misconception that God's revelation of himself consists solely
of messages given to inspired prophets to be by them communi
cated to men, and that the Bible is merely the record of these
messages written without error under the direct inspiration of
God. This implies that God's revelation of himself does not con
sist primarily in what he himself does, redeeming men from sin
and developing his kingdom, but in communicating to them
truths and moral and religious precepts through inspired prophets.
i. Some of the difficulties involved in this misconception and
the objections arising from it against the reality of God's revela
tion of himself recorded in the Bible are as follows.
It presents revelation as a mechanical process, incompatible
with any reasonable conception of the action in it of either God
or man. According to the theory of verbal or mechanical in
spiration, which has had some currency in the Christian church,
the Bible was regarded as a book of sentences copied word for
word from God's dictation, all of equal applicability for all time,
and each constituting as to the particular thought expressed a
complete and final revelation of divine truth and of the will of
God for all time and all conditions. Canon Burgon, writing on
" Inspiration and Interpretation," says of the Bible : " Every book
1 Exhortation to the Heathen, chap. i. His quotation, " For thou art
my harp," &c, is probably a line from a hymn then familiar.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 93
of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, — where shall we stop ?
— every letter of it is the direct utterance of the Most High."
In the biography of the late Lord Shaftesbury it is said that he
was shocked by the assertion that the book of Chronicles and the
gospel of Luke did not stand on the same ground of inspiration ;
he maintained that " there is no security whatever except in stand
ing on the faith of our fathers and saying that the blessed old
book is God's word written, from the very first syllable to the
very last and from the last back to the first."1 An American
Doctor of Divinity says : " The Bible itself knows of but one
kind of inspiration, and that is an inspiration which extends to
every chapter, verse, word, and syllable of the original Scriptures,
using the mind and mouth, the heart and hand, of the writers, guid
ing them in the least particular, guarding them against the least
blunder, and making their utterance the very word of God to our
souls. . . . The ass on which Balaam rode rebuked the madness
of the prophet, for the Lord opened the mouth of the ass and
she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou
hast smitten me these three times ? Even the higher critics must
admit that this is a clear case of verbal inspiration." 2 And if
this is so, then the whole Bible might have been communicated
through the mouths of asses, or through a telephone or phono
graph, as reafly and as effectively as through the mouths of men.
The one would be as mechanical as the other.
From this conception of the Bible, F. W. Newman, in his book
entitled " The Soul," argues that the alleged revelation in the Bible
is impossible, because men must have ideas of God and of
spiritual realities before a revelation of God in words could con
vey any meaning. From the same misconception of revelation
Rousseau and others have urged the same argument against the
possibility of a divine revelation, and have thought they had thus
struck Christianity its death-blow. This argument hits entirely
aside from the mark ; for it derives its whole force from a mis
conception of what God's revelation of himself essentially is.
God reveals himself by his historical action in the universe, in
the constitution, experience and history of man, in the history of
his kingdom in Israel, in the historical person and work of
1 Vol. iii. p. 7.
2 " Anti-Higher Criticism," Addresses at a Bible Conference, Asbury Park
N. J., Aug. 1893, pp. 334, 349.

94 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Christ, and in the continued presence and action of his Spirit.
Thus men have the idea and the knowledge of God and are
capable of receiving personal communications from him of truth,
law and love.
Another objection arising from this misconception is that
God's revelation ceased with the death of the last of Christ's
apostles. The revelation was then complete and recorded in a
book ; and God leaves that book among men as his finished reve
lation by which the world is to be converted. Then either God
does not continue to illuminate human minds and to touch human
hearts by his Spirit, or, if he does so, the influences of the
Spirit do not constitute a revelation of God to the person thus
influenced. A further objection founded on this misconception arises from
its implying that every sentence in the Bible being dictated word
for word by God is infallibly correct, and is of equal, absolute
and perpetual divine authority and of spiritual significance worthy
to be revealed by him. Silas Marner, reasoning from this mis
conception, believed that the decision by lot is an infallible
expression ofthe just decision of God (Prov. xvi. 33). There
fore, when a decision by lot seemed to him unjust, he began to
doubt the existence of a righteous God. So one's faith in God's
revelation might be shaken through his inability • to find any
spiritual significance as a verbal revelation from God in the
minutely exact account of the length and breadth of king Og's
iron bedstead (Deut. iii. n). Similar difficulties inevitably arise
when one accepts the theory that God's revelation is only in a
book, every syllable of which was dictated directly by God.
Then one's belief in the revelation recorded 'in the Bible, like a
pyramid resting unstable on its apex, rests its whole weight
unstable on every separate word. If a single sentence, phrase
or word is found to involve the slightest error of any kind, or if
it is not of universal applicability and spiritual significance
through all ages, then the person's belief all topples over, the
whole Bible must be rejected as not the revelation of God, and
all belief in Christ and Christianity must be abandoned. Thus,
for example, Mr. Garrison and many abolitionists of his type
denied the divine authority of the Bible as a revelation of God,
because slavery was recognized in the Mosaic legislation and
Christ and his apostles did not at once initiate a crusade against

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 95
slavery as it then existed in the Roman empire.1 This objection
is seen to be futile when we understand aright the nature and
extent of God's revelation of himself by his historical action
among men. It would be equally pertinent to object to the
reality of Christ's revelation of God because he did not incite a
revolt against the despotism of the Roman emperor and attempt
at once to establish republican government by the people ; or,
that he did not make known all the discoveries of modern science
and the inventions of modern art. Accordingly we find that this
misconception of the nature of revelation is rejected by
Christ, who explicitly teaches that the Mosaic legislation failed
to enjoin some applications of the moral law and some develop
ments of the religious life, because the people were not developed
sufficiently to receive them (Matth. xix. 3-9). Thus he recog
nized the principle that God's revelation of himself must be com
mensurate with the development of the people who receive it,
and therefore must be progressive in his historical action in the
redemption, education and development of man and the advance
ment of his kingdom and of the reign of universal righteousness
and good-will.
This misconception of revelation has a tendency to fix atten
tion on truths and laws rather than on the living God and his
loving work among and upon men redeeming them from sin and
developing his kingdom. Extremes meet. The conception of
revelation as a revelation of truth rather than of the living, loving,
and energizing God, as a book-revelation completed and recorded
in the Bible with verbal and literal exactness, has been regarded
as the highest orthodoxy. This generates evil tendencies. One
is a tendency to rationalism. It accustoms the mind to dwell on
abstract truths rather than on concrete realities. Truth stated
in propositions may stand between the mind and the living God.
It may hang as a veil before the Holy of Holies, hiding God and
his mercy-seat. Truth is properly transparent. It is the medium
through which we see reality. But if the eye of the mind rests
1 Rev. Mr. Spurgeon said of the Bible : " I do not believe that from one
cover to the other there is any mistake in it of any sort whatever, either
upon natural or physical science, or upon history or anything whatever. I
am prepared to believe whatever it says, and to take it believing it to be
the Word of God ; for if it is not all true it is not worth one solitary penny
to me."

96 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
on the medium, on the subjective truth stated in a proposition,
instead of looking through it to the concrete reality of which the
subjective apprehension of the truth is the intellectual equivalent,
the reality is hidden from the view. This is analogous to sight.
The medium through which light comes to the eye may obstruct
the light and hinder the vision.
As one who looks on glass
On it may rest his eye ;
Or let his vision through it pass
And then the heavens espy. — George Herbert.
Thus the habit of thinking of God's revelation as merely the
revelation of truths, doctrines, precepts, recorded in a book, tends
to arrest the thought, so that it stops and rests on the book with
its propositions and doctrines instead of passing through these
to the living God ; and so it gradually fades from view that the
Bible is the record of God's gracious action among men continued
in the course of history through the ages till it culminates in the
great revelation of God in Christ reconciling the world unto him
self, and perpetuated through all subsequent ages through the
Holy Spirit in whom God comes to every reader of the Bible in
the exercise of the same redeeming grace, seeking with heavenly
influences to induce him to turn from selfishness and sin and
accept the same free grace offered in the gospel without money
and without price. Hence a tendency of the thought to rest on
abstractions instead of on the living God ; to think of truth,
doctrine, precept, rather than of God. And this is a tendency
toward rationalism. Then those who yield to this tendency
draw the inference that the revelation made by Christ is limited
to his recorded teachings, " the words of the master." Then the
whole historical action of God in the redemption of men from
sin through Christ gradually sinks out of view. Christ is re
garded as one of many eminent teachers, perhaps recognized as
the greatest, but still one of them. Some go even so far as to say
that, since now we have the truth which Christ is said to have taught,
it is entirely immaterial whether he ever existed or not. Thus the
revelation of God by his action in the universe and in human
history is lost from sight. Then the thought is that God is known
not by any action of his own revealing himself in the conscious
ness of the individual and in the history of man, but solely by
the action of man's intellect developing the idea of God. Then

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 97
God sinks into an abstract, impersonal, subjective idea and the
universe is conceived as grounded ultimately in the unconscious
and impersonal. 1
Thus there is danger in this direction of the complete abandon
ment, not only of Christian belief, but also of theism itself. The
belief in God being thus the product solely of the person's own
thinking, the necessary inference is that God is only an idea
created by the person's own mind and without objective reality.
Thence the mind easily drops into agnosticism or ideal
pantheism. Under the influence of this misconception of the revelation of
God in the Bible the thought does not always stop even in the
abstract doctrine, truth, or precept. There is also the tendency,
already alluded to, to stop in the words. The Bible is regarded
as a book of sentences, a repository of doctrines, an arsenal of
proof-texts, a collection of precepts and rules. Then because in
the Old Testament a ceremonial of worship was prescribed
adapted to the needs and development of the people at the time,
the tendency was to substitute the outward ritual for the inward
life which the ritual was designed to foster and develop, and to
regard it as obligatory everywhere and always, a tendency which
the prophets continually rebuke. The same tendency led to the
rabbinical and pharisaical literalism in interpreting the Scriptures.
This Christ rebuked, and of it Paul said, " The letter killeth, but
the Spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. iii. 6). It was an attempt to
apply the outward letter of the Scriptures to every conceivable
condition and circumstance and to the most minute actions. Such
were the minutely ramified rabbinical rules for observing the
Sabbath, rules full of trivialities and quibbles. They forbade the
curdling of milk on the Sabbath because it would be a kind of
building; walking through fields of ripening grain, because it
would be a kind of threshing ; wearing any ornament tempora
rily attached to the dress but not a permanent part of it, because
it would be bearing a burden. With a similar and even more
ludicrous literalism, when the citizens of Florence were eagerly
1 " If religion were a pure product of human reason, philosophy would
be the only competent organ of its discovery and interpretation." — Lotze,
" Microcosmus," B. ix. chap. iv. 1. A recent writer says: "Religion I saw
was an expansive force which would shatter any man-made system of philo
sophy, unless that system were a true image of the universe."
vol. 1. — 7

98 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
looking at the starry heavens through Galileo's telescope, the
priests rebuked them from the Bible in the words of the Vulgate,
then the recognized translation : " Viri Galilaei, quid statis spec-
tantes in coelum ? " (Acts i. n.)
From this literalism a seemingly opposite tendency has been
originated. Because every sentence of the Bible is supposed to
have been dictated directly by God, it must be supposed to be
fraught with important spiritual significance. Then if such mean
ing is not apparent in the words it must be thrust into them.
Hence arises a sort of maxim in interpretation, that a text of Scrip
ture means whatever of spiritual truth- a lively imagination can con
nect with the words. Hence arise allegorizing and extravagant
typifying. Popular lectures have recently been given in many
places on the spiritual signficance of the raiment of the Jewish
High Priest. It was assumed by the lecturer to be legitimate to
ascribe to every item of the high priest's official dress any spirit
ual meaning which the fancy could suggest ; as Whittington inter
preted what the Bow bells said to him. . Bunyan, developing the
spiritual significance of the architecture of the temple, discourses
at length on the spiritual significance of the position of the brazen
oxen which supported the laver, " all their hinder parts were
inward." (i K. vii. 25). As a result of this tendency the
later Rabbinism, it has been said, " found mountains of meaning
in a single word " and thrust a meaning even into the tittle of an
Aleph. 2. These difficulties are removed and the force of these objec
tions is annulled when we return to the fundamental position that
God reveals himself primarily by what he does in the constitu
tion and evolution of the physical universe, in the constitution of
man and in his progressive education and development. The
Bible is then seen to be the record of the special line of God's
action redeeming men from sin and developing his kingdom.
which was intended to issue, and in the fulness of time did issue,
in the coming of Christ and has been perpetuated through all
subsequent ages in the Holy Spirit. What God reveals is prima
rily himself, the living and loving God acting in the universe and
among and upon men. He reveals truth only in a secondary
sense ; for the truth revealed is simply man's intellectual appre
hension of what God really is and does as he has revealed and
is revealing himself in his action, and pre-eminently in his action

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 99
redeeming men from sin and developing his kingdom of righteous
ness and good-will as recorded in the Bible.
All knowledge of God presupposes his revelation of himself by
acting on us or under our observation. By the intuition of reason
we know universal principles regulative of all thinking and act
ing. But by these subjective principles alone we cannot know
what beings actually exist and what are their characters and
lines of action. These can be known only as they reveal
themselves, their constitutional powers, and their characteristics,
by acting directly on us or under our observation, or by the ob
served effects of their action. From the intuition of reason we
know that the absolute Being exists and is the absolute Reason
or Spirit. But what will be the lines of his action and the effects
of the same, we can know only as he reveals himself in action.
As Lotze says, God's revelation is either contained in some
divine historic action in the past, or is repeated and renewed by
his continued action in the hearts and lives of men.1 Even our
knowledge of the existence of the absolute Spirit arises only on
occasion in experience of our knowledge of ourselves actually
existing as rational beings, and of the physical or natural world
which environs us, which we find by observation to be constituted
in conformity with the necessary and universal principles of reason
known intuitively in our own consciousness. The same principle
is true of our knowledge of the physical world ; we can have no
knowledge of it except as it first reveals itself by acting on us.
The same principle applies to the Bible. In it we have the
record of a special line of God's historical action from the earliest
time, culminating in Christ and perpetuated in the Holy Spirit.
Therein God reveals to us, not only his existence, but what he is
as the God of love and what is the archetypal ideal which he is
progressively realizing in the evolution of the universe. That
ideal is called in the Bible the Kingdom of God.
From this point of view it is evident that the common distinc
tion between revealed religion and natural, so sharply defined that
each excludes the other, is misleading. Every religion so far as
it rests on truth, is both revealed and natural. Every religion
may be called revealed because the knowledge of God implied in
it presupposes God's action revealing himself. Hence man in
his normal development finds himself in the presence of God, his
1 Microcosmus, Book ix. chap, iv., Transl. vol. ii. p. 660.

IOO GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
spiritual environment, as really as in the presence of the outward
world, his physical environment. His intellectual apprehension
and definition of the former, but not more than of the latter,
may be fanciful and erroneous. But he knows the existence of
each, because he finds himself in the presence of each environ
ing him, acting on him and so revealing itself to him. It is
equally true that religion is natural to man. It is natural in the
sense that the belief in God is accordant with the constitution
and evolution of the physical or natural universe as the basis
essential to any rational and scientific knowledge of it. It is nat
ural also in the sense that belief in a God and religious service
rendered to him are accordant with the constitution of man and
essential' to his normal development. Accordingly, belief in a
divinity and religious worship of some sort are found in all stages
of man's development, even in the lowest savage,
" whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind."
And religion is essential to the highest perfection and well-being
of the individual and of society. It is an essential factor in the
normal education and development both of the individual and of
the race. Any education of children, which ignores God and all
religious belief and excludes all religious instruction, must fail
to insure the highest and normal development, and must issue in
the deterioration of the people. Our own is the only nation,
Christian or non- Christian, which, at least theoretically, forbids
all recognition of God and religion in the schools. And this pro
hibition is entirely inconsistent with the fact that both the States
and the national government from the beginning, in the adminis
tration of the government, have in various ways officially recog
nized man's dependence on God, and the reality and necessity of
religion. 3. This conception of God's revelation of himself by historical
action does not exclude prophecy, the revelation of himself in the
personal experience of individuals, putting them in possession of
divine truth which they, as witnesses for God, are to communicate
to others. On the contrary, revelation as thus conceived includes
prophecy as part of God's historical action revealing himself
therein to men, and incidental to the development of his king
dom,1 in which he is progressively realizing his archetypal ideal of

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION IOI
all perfection and well-being possible to be realized in a finite
universe in accordance with the eternal principles and laws of
reason by action in universal good- will regulated in its exercise by
perfect wisdom and righteousness.
The possibility of God's revelation of himself in prophecy rests
on the fact that God has made men in his own likeness, and so is
capable of coming into immediate communion with them, and
thus of revealing himself to them. Man, being in the likeness of
God as rational spirit, is capable of receiving God's revelation of
himself. All religions presuppose in the act of worship the pos
sibility of immediate communion of man with God. It is set
forth pre-eminently in Christianity. God in Christ has come into
humanity revealing at once his own righteousness and grace in
seeking men to redeem them from sin, and the ideal perfection
of man attainable through trusting God's grace thus revealed.
This redemptive action of God in Christ is perpetuated in the
Holy Spirit in whom God in his righteousness and grace is ever
seeking men to redeem them from sin and reconcile them to
himself in the life of love. The Spirit is represented as standing
at the door of every heart and knocking. When any one will
ingly opens the door and receives the divine grace, the Spirit is
said to enter in and to abide in him, enlightening and quickening
him in the spiritual life of love. This immediate communication
by God of light and quickening to a person is of the essential
nature of all prophetic revelation of himself. The man who
receives it becomes a witness for God, and can say, " Come and
hear, all ye who fear God, and I will declare what he hath done
for my soul" (Ps. Ixvi. 16). Prediction of future events is not
essential in prophecy. But prophets have often been so enlight
ened by God as to foretell the future. Prophecy in this aspect
also has a basis for its possibility and probability in the character
of the true religion as the religion of promise. The biblical repre
sentation is that, -from the primeval promise in Eden to the promise
to Abraham, and from the promise to Abraham to the coming of
Christ, the true religion was always the religion of promise, look
ing forward to larger development and a future better than the
past. After the institution of the political and religious economy
of Israel at Sinai this promise was sealed in the memorial name
Jehovah, the God in covenant with his people. The same con
tinues to be the character of the religion after Christ, Paul says,

102 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
" We, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise " (Gal. iv.
28). The Christian, then, in every generation can foretell the
future. He knows that all things work together for good to him
who loves God ; that God's kingdom can never be shaken ; that
the gates of hell shall not prevail against it ; that it will grow like
the corn, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the
ear. Through intimacy with God and seeing things with spiritual
discernment in the divine light, he sees in any emergency what
lines of private or public action are in the exercise of love and in
harmony with God, and will secure well-being, and what are con
trary to righteousness and good-will and displeasing to God, and
will insure calamity and ruin. Thus he has clearer discernment,
and sees farther into the future than selfish partisans who in
shrewdness and cunning look only to the expedient. He is the
poor wise man who by his wisdom delivers the city, although no
man remembers that same poorwise man (Eccles. ix. 15). Here
we see that prophecy, in its essential characteristics, is perpetu
ated through all generations in the kingdom of Christ. In this
sense is fulfilled the prophecy of Joel — declared by Peter on the
day of Pentecost to be fulfilled in the descent of the Spirit and
his continued presence and action — that in the Messianic days
the gift of prophecy shall be possessed by all true disciples of
Christ, and perpetuated through all generations in the kingdom
of Christ (Joel ii. 28, 29 ; Acts ii. 17, 18). Therefore the proph
ecies recorded in the Bible do not differ from the continued illu
mination by the indwelling Spirit in the essential characteristics
of prophecy so much as in degree and fulness, especially in the
larger and more specific knowledge of future conditions and events
in the progress of God's kingdom.
We have already seen that man, in the exercise of rational free
will, is supernatural and acts on nature from above it, producing
effects which nature left to itself would never have produced ; and
that this is the essential characteristic of miraculous action. Now
we see that man, quickened by the Spirit of God dwelling in him,
has the gift of prophecy in its essential characteristics. Thus all
a priori objections to both miracles and prophecy as abnormal
and impossible are seen to be without foundation and futile.
The biblical prophecies, being incidental to the historical devel
opment of God's kingdom, are occasioned by special emergencies
in the history of God's kingdom in Israel, and refer primarily to

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 103
the condition of the kingdom at the time. Paul was an inspired
prophet. Yet all his letters refer to particular exigencies and con
ditions of the churches and the individuals to whom he was writing,
and to his own personal condition, needs^ and plans at the time.
That a similar reference to existing conditions characterizes the
written prophecies of the Old Testament is obvious to every intel
ligent reader. The biblical prophecies present what God has
revealed to the prophet in relation to his people and kingdom
under existing conditions. They declare what course of action
God would have them pursue under the circumstances; they
warn the people of the disasters they will bring on themselves if
they do not trust God and obey his directions as made known
to them through the prophet, and announce the blessings insured
to them if they trust and obey him. In connection with this there
is usually an outlook to the progress of the kingdom in the future
and the greater revelation of God's grace and of his intimacy with
man, and foretelling with ever-increasing clearness the Messianic
days. God is represented as revealing himself to his prophets in vari
ous forms or theophanies. When his message is communicated
by a messenger or angel in human form, the angel or messenger
of the covenant, or the angel or messenger of Jehovah, the com
munication is represented as made in words. Even in the mani
festation of God which the Jews called the Shechinah, clothing
himself with light as with a garment, he is sometimes represented
as uttering his will in words, as he spoke to Paul from a bright
ness above the noon-day sun, and to Moses from the Burning
Bush. Nor can we feel that there is any force in objections to
such manifestations of God, if we really believe in the super
natural as the fundamental reality, in the immanence of God in the
universe, and in the possibility and even the probability of miracles
in the greater emergencies which constitute epochs in the devel
opment of God's kingdom. But ordinarily, as we may reason
ably suppose, the inspiration of the prophet does not imply
dictating the divine message to him in words. Rather we may
suppose that God's Spirit brings divine influences on the person
through his rational, moral, and spiritual powers, capacities, and
susceptibilities, quickening his spiritual life and insight, bringing
him into unison with God, so that he sees the condition of the
people as God sees it, and thinks God's thoughts after him, in

104 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the spiritual and moral sphere, as scientists do in ascertaining the
constitution, order, and laws of the physical system, and so are
able to foretell events in the physical system. Then he utters the
divine teaching in his .own words, and in the use of his own
reason and intelligence declares, explains, and illustrates it.
Accordingly Paul declares, " The spirits of the prophets are sub
ject to the prophets" (i Cor. xiv. 32). The biblical prophecy
is rational and intelligent, as distinguished from the mantic fury
of the ancient non-Christian soothsayers. So on Mount Carmel
Elijah was self-collected and calm, while the prophets of Baal, in
a delirium of excitement, leaped on the altar and cut themselves
with knives (1 Kings, xviii. 26).
Because prophecy is incidental to God's historical action in the
development of his kingdom, the prophet will proclaim it from
the point of view of his own time, and from within the bounds of
his own development and that of his age and country. He is
like one within a house to whom a window is opened. He can
see through it to the horizon ; but what he sees is limited by the
frame of the window through which he looks, and the indistinct
ness of distant objects which he, being shut up within the
walls of the house, cannot approach and examine closely. The
prophet may announce great and far-reaching revelations of God,
but his appreciation and' application of them will be limited
within the frame of his development and that of his age. Hence
his apprehension and application of them may be all that is possible
in his time, and best suited to it ; but it may be superseded in its
details by larger revelations of God and the progressive develop
ment of the kingdom of God in later ages.
4. This conception of God's revelation of himself by his histor
ical action discloses the unity and continuity of his revelation in
the redemption of men from sin and the development of his king
dom on earth through all the ages. This gives irresistible evi
dence that the Bible is the record of God's revelation of himself
in this historical action. Here we see the religion recognizing
the one God, the eternal Spirit, amid surrounding nature-worship
and idolatry, and the kingdom of God, founded on his com
munion and gracious covenant with his people, existing from the
earliest times, and perpetuated and developed in the history of
Israel until Christ came. At his coming, this ancient mono
theistic religion is developed into Christianity and perpetuated

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 105
through all the ages by the presence of the Holy Spirit poured
out on all mankind. Ever since Christ rose from the dead, this
religion, as developed by him, has been the most powerful and
benignant agency in the progress of man. In the early ages it
was germinal and imperfectly developed. But from the begin
ning it has been the same religion and the same kingdom of
God in the process of development.
The philosophy of history recognizes some particular line in
which each nation has contributed to the increase of knowledge
and the advancement of civilization. It is evident that the
mission of Israel was to preserve and develop the knowledge
of the one true God, the eternal Spirit, and the religious worship
and service of him. The continued discovery of Babylonish,
Assyrian, and Egyptian inscriptions is enlarging our knowledge of
the history of these great kingdoms, and thus not only confirm
ing the truth of Old Testament history, but also incidentally
enlarging our knowledge of the history of Israel beyond what is
recorded in the Old Testament, and explaining the relations,
occasions, and issues of what is recorded. From these inscrip
tions it is made increasingly evident that the writers of the Old
Testament wrote with predominant interest in the knowledge of
Jehovah, the covenant God of Israel, and in 'the religious worship
and service due to him. They omit details, and sometimes pass
over lightly or omit altogether events recorded in the inscriptions,
which did not bear directly on this prime interest of the Jewish
theocracy. This predominance of the idea of God's kingdom in
Israel is still more evident in the Psalms and the Prophets, so far as
they allude to historical events. The external history is but the
setting of the jewel, "holding forth the Word of Life." There
were also from time to time peculiar conditions in the history of
Israel which seem to put the nation to disadvantage as compared
with the greater and mightier nations around it ; but which are
seen to have been positively advantageous in preserving and
developing the knowledge and religion of the one God, the
eternal Spirit. The Hebraic monarchy never equalled Babylon,
Assyria, or Egypt. Of this, Professor McCurdy says : " This dis
advantage was a decided advantage for the fulfilment of their
providential mission ; since through no other channel than a self-
contained, politically unambitious, locally restricted community,
could, in the old Semitic times, the simple and pure religion of

106 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Israel have been conserved and conveyed to later generations of
men without destructive contamination from the worldly forces
that made for unrighteousness." 1
Therefore the Old Testament is not chiefly concerned with
the political history of Israel. It is primarily the record of that
line of God's action in the redemption of men from sin and the
establishment of his kingdom which was to culminate in the
coming of Christ. The spiritual kingdom was hidden within
the shell of the political organization of Israel, to protect it in
its germinal development. So a chestnut is hidden in its shell
and its rough bur to protect it in its germinal development until
it is ready to burst its envelope, fall into the ground, and grow
into a great tree. Accordingly the Bible is a collection of books
written by many different authors at different times in the lapse
of many centuries. Each author writes from the point of view
of his own age, but presents to us one and the same God in his
covenant relations with his people, one and the same kingdom
of God at different stages of its development, one and the same
outlook, more or less distinct, to blessing to come on all the
nations through the seed of Abraham in the Messianic days. It
matters not if some of the books as they finally appeared in the
Jewish Scriptures show the results of the examination and com
parison of previously written documents. This simply shows
the pains taken to attain from all sources the true history of the
kingdom of God in Israel. Whenever they were written, they
were all written amid surrounding polytheism and the worship of
nature-gods, and all concur in maintaining the knowledge of one
true God, the eternal Spirit, of his covenant relations with all
who trust and serve him, and of his spiritual kingdom living and
germinating within the political and ecclesiastical organization,
and destined to a greater development in the future.
We have already seen that God's revelation of himself to any
prophet or inspired writer must have been received by him from
within the limitations of his own personal development and of
the development of his age. But these are temporary conditions.
All in the prophets' communications peculiar to these conditions,
having fulfilled their purpose, drop off with advancing growth.
So the calyx and flower drop off when the seed appears, and the
1 " History, Prophecy, and the Monuments," by J. F. McCurdy, LL.D.,
Professor of Oriental Languages in University College, Toronto ; p. 58, § 53.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 1 07
bur or shell, or whatever is the coating of the seed, falls off when
the seed is ripened and ready to fall into the ground and grow
into a new plant. The narrative of the Lewis and Clarke ex
pedition to the head-waters of the Missouri and thence across
the mountains to the Pacific, at the beginning of this century,
gives a true description of the country as it then was. It is still
a true account of the course of the rivers, the mountains, the
great physical features of the country. But its account of it as an
uncultivated wilderness inhabited only by Indians and wild
beasts, though correct at the time, is true no longer. Yet there is
no contradiction between it and the true description of the
country now. So the representation in the Old Testament of
the kingdom of God incompletely developed in Israel is true and
is not contradictory to the representation of the same kingdom
in the great epoch of its development at the coming of the Christ.
It is the revelation of the same God, the eternal Spirit, of God in
the same work of redeeming men from sin and developing his
kingdom. But whatever was merely incidental and peculiar to
the earlier stages of the development of the kingdom recorded in
the Old Testament has passed away. With reference to this unity
and continuity of the kingdom of God and of God's revelation
of himself in its progressive development our Saviour says,
" Think not that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets.
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Till heaven and earth
pass away one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law
till all be fulfilled" (Matth. v. 17, 18). And this he says in
that very sermon on the mount in which he sets himself above
Moses and the prophets and unfolds a spiritual significance and
application of the law transcending all previous interpretations
of it, and even forbids a usage which he elsewhere says Moses
had tolerated on account of the hardness of the people's hearts
(Matth. v. 31, 32 ; xix. 3-9). The living but germinal kingdom
had now burst its shell and was unfolding in a higher and spiritual
glory and power.
The fact that the Bible has been thus composed, and is the
product of the development of the monotheistic belief, the true
religion, and the kingdom of God through the ages until Christ
and the introduction of the Christian religion, is not an objection
to it, but a powerful confirmation of its divine origin and author
ity as the record of God's revelation of himself to men.

108 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
5. This is confirmed by its continued spiritual and beneficent
influence through all the ages of the Christian era. Here is this
one religion in the process of development in continuity and
unity through thirty centuries, which at the coming of Christ,
by sheer moral and spiritual influence appealing to reason and
conscience and all that is highest and best in man, in spite of
the opposition of both Jew and Gentiles and of the power of the
Roman emperor, became the religion ofthe whole Roman empire,
through all the Christian centuries has been -the most effective
influence in the advancement of true culture, respect for the
rights of man, humaneness and the highest civilization, and
to-day is the religion of the most enlightened, highly civilized, and
progressive nations. Thus the Bible was itself the outgrowth of
the development of the true religion and of the kingdom of God
through many centuries to the great central historical fact of
the coming of Christ. It struck its roots into human history
through ages before Christ came, and has shot forth its branches
blooming and bearing fruit through all the ages since. Con
trast this with the alleged revelation of God in the Koran. The
latter has no historical roots. It claims to be only a verbal
revelation, a book-revelation made by immediate divine com
munications to one man in a short portion of his one life and
written down by him or at his dictation. Something was borrowed
from the Bible. But that which was borrowed was detached
from its historical and vital connection, like twigs cut from a
living bush and set in a child's garden, where they had no roots
and could not grow. Therefore, as Kuenen says, "Islam was
destined to stereotype itself once for all and assume its un
alterable shape. . . . True universality is to Islam, in virtue of
its very origin, unattainable." J
Mohammed's truth lay in a holy Book,
Christ's in a holy life.
So while the world rolls on from change to change,
And realms of thought expand,
The letter stands without expanse or range,
Stiff as a dead man's hand ;
While, as the life-blood fills the growing form,
The Spirit Christ has shed
Flows through the ripening ages fresh and warm,
More felt than heard or read.
Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton).
1 National Religions and Universal Religions, pp. 57, 58.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 109
In the centuries since Christ, the principal instrumentality used
by the Spirit of God in quickening men to the new life of love
and bringing them into harmony and union with God has been
the special revelation of God in his action before Christ redeeming
men from sin and developing his kingdom, in the coming of
Christ, in his person and work and the descent of the Holy Spirit
constituting the central epoch in God's work of redemption and
the development of his kingdom, and in all the inspired teaching
of the prophets and apostles and the oral teaching of Christ. All
this is recorded in the Bible, and it is in this record that the knowl
edge of God as thus revealed has been perpetuated through the
ages. But here that which is of most importance is not that the
mere knowledge of God's self-revelation in past ages is perpetu
ated, but that in accordance with the revelation in Christ the
Spirit of God himself has continued present and active among and
upon men, redeeming them from sin and developing his kingdom
in continuance and further development of that redemptive action
in which he has revealed himself as recorded in the Bible.
If we accept the old conception of revelation as being the Bible
itself as a book of sentences declaring certain truths, certain rules
of action, certain affirmations of God's righteousness and grace,
then God's revelation of himself was completed and finished when
the canon of Scripture was completed. This issues in the practical
impression, if not the explicit belief, that God had made and
finished a book and put it into the world to convert the world,
while Christ with his redeeming love had withdrawn from the
earth and the earthly life of man. Thus the Bible itself becomes
a dead wall of separation between God and man, which shuts us
out from all contact with God continuing to reveal himself among
men and to them. Many centuries ago,- beyond that dead wall,
God was revealing himself among and to men. But he reveals
himself no more. On the contrary, according to the true concep
tion of God's revelation of himself by his action on and among
men redeeming them from sin and developing his kingdom, God
is still revealing himself to men in the Holy Spirit. This is ex
plicitly declared by Christ in his assurance that he would send the
Spirit from the Father. Christ also says explicitly, "It is expe
dient for you that I go away ; for if I go not away, the Comforter
will not come unto you ; but if I depart, I will send him unto
you " (John xvi. 7). We have traced God's revelation in different

IIO GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
grades : in the constitution and evolution of the physical universe,
in the constitution and history of man, in the special line of reve
lation culminating in Christ, in whom God presents himself to
men as it were in miniature, acting among them under human
limitations and conditions, thus giving at once the highest form of
revelation of what God is as Spirit, and of what man is in his ideal
perfection in the likeness of God. No revelation higher and more
complete than this in kind is conceivable. But this of itself, if
left as a mere isolated historical event nineteen centuries ago,
would not be adequate to the complete applicability and greatest
effectiveness of the revelation in God's redemption of men from
sin and development of his kingdom. If Christ had remained on
earth in the body, he would have been limited to one place. If
he travelled, people would not know where to find him. If he
abode in one place, as the Jews of that day expected that the
Messiah would reign in Jerusalem, people must come from the
ends of the earth to see him, and then would be unable to come
at him for the crowd. To the immense majority an interview
with him, if attained at all, would be the rare event of a lifetime.
He could no longer say, " Come unto me, all ye who labor and
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." It was necessary,
therefore, that this redeeming love and energy of God, revealed
so clearly in Christ, be delocalized and made universal. This is
effected in the outpouring of God's Spirit, seeking all men
through all generations to draw them to God, to enlighten,
quicken, and sanctify them. This precludes forever the idea that
we are living in an inferior dispensation, shut out from spiritual
contact with God in his continued redemptive action developing
his kingdom, and the continued revelation of God involved
therein. On the contrary, we are living on the highest plane
which God's self-revelation has yet attained, under the same
revelation as of old, continued and progressively amplified in
adapting it to new times and conditions. Christians in every
generation, trusting in God, may say, ". God, who commanded the
light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts to give
the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. iv. 6). The revelation in Christ known
to us historically is perpetually renewed to us, being illuminated
by the Spirit of God shining in our hearts and quickening us to
receive and apply it. " He shall glorify me ; for he shall receive
of mine and shall declare it unto you" (John xvi. 14).

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION III
The revelation recorded in the Bible, therefore, is no longer a
dead wall separating us from God and shutting out all present
revelation of him. It is rather the progressive opening of the
heavens pouring the light and glory of God and his love upon all
nations, and more and more in successive revelations. Thus the
action of God redeeming men from sin and developing his king
dom is continued through all generations, and is available for all
men who seek his grace. Instead of being shut out from the
revelation of God closed centuries ago, we find ourselves living
under the same divine and heavenly influences in which God
revealed himself of old, and admitted to personal communion,
fellowship, and union with God. As in the Old Testament we
are not merely reading truths and laws communicated by prophets,
but the revelation of the living God, as in the New Testament we
are not merely reading the oral teachings of Christ and the
written teaching of the apostles, but are acquainting ourselves
with the historical Christ, and the living God in Christ, redeeming
men from sin and opening the way for sinners to return to him, —
so in the ages since Christ Christians have not been left merely to
a book telling of a revelation in ages past, but from which as
finished and closed all subsequent generations are shut out, but
God is ever present in the Holy Spirit, continuing in its higher
stage the same work of redemption, and bringing all the rich
influences of the knowledge of his revelation in the past to bear
on our souls with personal divine influences to draw us to himself
in the life of love, and to hold us thus in unison and union with
himself. In the whole revelation until this day men are not deal
ing with abstract truths or laws, but with the living personal God.
Thus the Christian now is the heir of all the riches of divine reve
lation given in the past, with the continued presence and personal
influence of the God in Christ reconciling the world to himself in
the Spirit of Holiness. We live in the same conflict between love
and selfishness, between the divine and the devilish, between the
kingdom of God and the power of evil, in which Christ lived and
suffered and died. And in it, it is the living God who is with us ;
as Christ himself said, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the
end of the world ; " as Jehovah had said in the Old Testament,
"I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Gen. xxviii. r5 ;
Deut. xxxi. 6, 8; Josh. i. 5 ; 1 Chron. xxviii. 20). Athanasius
says : " While we are illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is Christ

112 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
who illuminates us ; when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ we
drink in."1 Phillips Brooks says: "One idea held by very
earnest people, embodied in very faithful and devoted lives, is the
strangeness of religion to the life of man, as if some morning
something dropped out of the sky that had had no place on our
earth before, as if there came the summons to man to be some
thing entirely different from what the conditions of his nature
prophesied and intended that he should be. The other idea is
that religion comes by the revelation of God from the heavens,
but comes up under the influence of God out of the human life of
man ; that man does not become something else than man when
he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but then for the first time
becomes man in his true development ; that religion is not some
thing fastened on the outside of life, but is the awakening of the
truth inside of his life ; that the kingdom of God is but the true
fulfilment of human life and society."
Is not God now in the world his power first made ?
Is not his love at issue still with sin,
Closed with and cast and conquered, crucified
Visibly when a wrong is done on earth ?
Browning. — Death in the Desert.
We see now that God's revelation of himself by his historical
action gives a much fuller knowledge of him and rests on a much
surer basis of credibility than could any revelation in words dic
tated to a prophet or written by " the finger of God." It might
be thought that it would have been a clearer and more assured
revelation of God if he had written on the sky in letters of stars,
GOD IS A SPIRIT. But the inscription would be unintelligible
unless God had previously revealed himself so that man had
already attained the idea of God and spirit ; it would be invisible
to the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere ; it must be written
in some language not in existence when the stars came into
being ; it would be seen only in the night, so the sun would out
shine and hide the revelation of God ; it would be easier for the
skeptic to refer it to chance than to refer to chance the actual
rational and scientific constitution and evolution of the universe
accordant with rational and scientific law from the minutest atom
to the largest star. Thus it would be a less assured and less
1 Epistle to Serapius, i. ig.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF HIS REVELATION 1 1 3"
significant revelation of God than that which we have in the
constitution and order of the universe, in the constitution and
history of man, and in the development of God's kingdom pro
gressive through all the ages. The revelation of God in these
ways, and pre-eminently in that line of historical revelation of
which the Bible is the inspired record, is, therefore, better verified
and more intertwined, identified, and accordant with the normal
constitution and development of the physical universe, and of
man and the moral and spiritual system, than any other of which
the human mind can conceive. This historical revelation in
Christ continued historically in the Holy Spirit meets the wants
of humanity which have been felt in all ages and supplies the
spiritual forces effective in rescuing men from sin, reconciling
them to God and advancing his kingdom of righteousness and
good-will. Browning in his " Cleon" expresses truly the want, felt
among the non-Christian nations, of realizing union with God
which God in Christ alone can satisfy. He makes Cleon say :
" Long since I imaged, wrote the fiction out,
That Zeus or other God descended here,
And, once for all, showed simultaneously
What, in its nature, never can be shown
Piecemeal or in succession ; — showed, I say,
The worth both absolute and relative
Of all his children from the birth of time,
His instruments for all appointed work.
I now go on to image, — might we hear
The judgment which should give the due to each,
Show where the labour lay and where the ease,
And prove Zeus' self, the latent, everywhere ! "

vol. 1. — i

CHAPTER III
GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING
We are now to ascertain what we can know of God as the
Absolute Spirit, unconditioned and unlimited by any being, power
or environment independent of himself. This topic is usually
designated in theology, The Attributes of God. It is objected
that the so-called attributes of God are merely subjective ideas
of theologians and are not objectively real in God. But we have
seen that man does not attain his idea of God through subjective
speculation merely, but by God's revelation of himself in various
lines ; and his thinking of God carries with it knowledge of
objective reality. It would be just as pertinent to object that the
attributes of the sun as discovered and declared in science are
merely subjective ideas in the mind of the scientist. It is also
objected that in ascribing attributes to God we regard him as
divided. This has force only against an erroneous conception of
simplicity in God, which some theologians have included among
his attributes. It would be just as pertinent to object that a man
is regarded as divided when we ascribe to him intelligence, will,
and other powers, or that an atom of oxygen or of iron is divided
by attributing to it various properties and powers. Each of
these two objections is frivolous, and, if valid, would imply that it
is impossible for man to have any knowledge of God whatever.
John Smith, one of the Platonic divines of the seventeenth century,
says : " Though in our pursuit after knowledge we cast wisdom,
power, eternity, goodness and the like into several formalities,
... yet in our naked intuitions of them, we clearly discern that
goodness and wisdom lodge together, justice and mercy kiss each
other ; and all these, and whatsoever pieces else the cracked
glasses of our reasons may sometimes divide the divine and intel
ligible Being into, are fast knit together in the invincible bonds

GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING 115
of eternity." 1 The truth in this is that God reveals himself to
us as the one absolute Reason or Spirit, but in many ways and
in various aspects ; and by studying these revelations we must
apprehend, as well as we can with our finite minds, what God is
as thus revealed in the various aspects and attributes of his being.
So the sun has been revealing itself to men through the ages in
various ways and various aspects, and they have been studying
the revelation to ascertain and declare in science what the sun as
thus revealed is. And as the powers and qualities which we find
revealed in the sun are objectively real in it, so the attributes
which we find revealed in God are objectively real in him. But
they are powers and attributes of him in his indivisible oneness
as the perfect Spirit. Thus we reject the agnostic and pantheistic
speculation which recognizes no distinct powers and qualities in
the absolute Being. On the other hand, we must equally reject
the superficial conception of a real division or separation. In
man we distinguish reason, will, feeling, and their manifestations.
But the one undivided person is revealed in every act. So God's
attributes are the varying but harmonious aspects of his indivisible
personality in which they are all at one. And in his consummate
revelation of himself in Christ this harmony of his unchanging
righteousness and benevolence, this unity of all the attributes, are
most conspicuously manifested.
In speaking habitually of the attributes as the object of
investigation there may be danger that the thought will rest on
the attribute as an abstract idea instead of passing through it to
God. As Sir Isaac Newton says, " It is not eternity and infinitude,
but the eternal and the infinite Being." 2 It is important, there
fore, in all our study and phraseology to keep in mind that we are
seeking to know the one only living God in all the aspects in
which he has revealed himself.
Theologians have proposed various classifications of the attri
butes of God. They have been most commonly classified as
Natural and Moral. It seems to me that the most obvious and
reasonable classification of what we know of God must rest on the
two aspects of his being as the absolute Spirit. By unfolding
what God is as the absolute Being, so far as he has revealed
1 Select Discourses, 2d ed., Cambridge, 1673, p. 94.
2 Principia : Scholium Generale.

Il6 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
himself, we get one class o.f his attributes. By unfolding
what he is as absolute Spirit, so far as he has revealed himself, we
gel another class of his attributes. These would comprehend all
which we can know of what God is in himself.
In this chapter we are to ascertain what we can know of God
as the absolute Being, unconditioned and unlimited by any power
or environment independent of himself. God in this aspect of
his being can be defined only by negation. Hence some
theologians have designated this class of the attributes of God
as Negative, and the attributes of God as Spirit, Positive. This is
misleading ; it gives occasion to specious pantheistic and agnostic
objections and covers not a little false reasoning. The negation is
only in the definition, and is the negation only of limits and con-
ditionedness. It is, therefore, itself the affirmation of real power
beyond all limits and conditions. All the attributes of God,
whether as absolute Being or as Spirit, are real and positive. In
fact the affirmation of finiteness, as denying the existence of
power beyond a definite limit, is the real negation. It is also
evident that the modes of God's existence and action as the
absolute Being thus defined by negation of limits and conditions
cannot be pictured in the human imagination. Man never passes
beyond the limits of the finite and has no data for picturing the
absolute. We have already seen that, in our intellectual processes ascer
taining the reasonable grounds of our spontaneous belief in a
divinity and what we can know of him, we find at the outset that
it is a universal principle of reason that some absolute Being must
exist. Then we ascertain that the absolute Being reveals himself
in various ways as the absolute Spirit. Now we see that, because
the negations implied in defining God's absoluteness have no
meaning except as denying conditions and limitations of positive
powers, we carry with us into our thought of the absolute the
positive attributes of God as Spirit. In this way the absolute
ness of God, though defined negatively, has always a positive
significance. We do not deny the essential powers of the
personal Spirit by denying that they are limited and conditioned ;
on the contrary, we affirm that they are great beyond all limits.
Thus we never lose our grasp of the known and essential
attributes of God as Spirit in our thought of him as the absolute

GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING 117
Being. God is the absolute personal Spirit, unlimited and
unconditioned by any power independent of himself.1
The fact that God is unconditioned involves the fact that he is
all-conditioning. If he is unconditioned by the whole web of
finite causes and effects, this implies that he is independent of
them ; therefore that the universe with its entire chain or web
of finite causes and effects is dependent on and conditioned by
him. He is the all-conditioning, the Creator. The ' universe,
with all in it that is finite, must be created by God and
dependent on him.
It must, therefore, be borne in mind that the attributes of God
as absolute are not to be studied as abstractions. Illimitation
apart from any being that is unlimited is a mere zero. Absolute
ness has reality only as predicated of the living God, the absolute
Spirit, unconditioned and unlimited by any power or condition
independent of himself.2
It may be supposed, because the absolute is defined by
negation of limitations and conditions, that the number of attri
butes of this class must be indefinitely large. It is easy to
enumerate many such negations, as that God is independent,
immutable, incorporeal, indivisible. On the contrary it will be
found that all the supposed negations may be included under
four heads. These we proceed to consider.
I. Self- Existence. — The self-existence of God, the absolute
Spirit, denotes that for his being and the powers essential in his
being he is not conditioned by dependence on any cause. He is
not an effect, but is uncaused. The whole chain of finite causes
and effects and all the causes in it have their origin in God the
first cause and are dependent on him. ' God is not in that chain,
1 Biedermann says : " If we start from the empirical idea of man, we get
only the representation of a finite spirit enlarged to infinity. Therefore our
thought will proceed more securely from the pure logico-metaphysical idea
of the absoluteness of God's being. This leads us through itself to the
other essential element, the pure spirit-being, finding that this and the
absolute being are one. The absolute being is the element of formal deter
mination, the Spirit-being is the element of the real determination of the idea
of the absolute Spirit, which is in itself one." — Christliche Dogmatik,
p. 621, § 699.
2 For further investigation of philosophical theories, questions and
objections as to the absolute, see " Philosophical Basis of Theism," chaps.
vi. vii. xii. ; " Self-Revelation of God," chaps, viii. ix. x.

Il8 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
except as from above it he acts in it sustaining and directing it.
He is above it and independent of it. The name Self- Existence
is positive in form ; but the attribute can be defined only by the
negation of all dependence. God is self-existing and self-deter
mining. His being and his powers have never been derived from
without himself.
Theologians have attempted to define this attribute positively,
by saying that God is the cause of himself. Lactantius says :
" God before all things was procreated from himself. God of his
own power made himself. . . . He is of himself; therefore he
is such as he willed himself to be, incapable of suffering, un
changeable, incorruptible, blessed and eternal." x Jerome says :
" God is the origin of himself and the cause of his own sub
stance." 2 This form of definition continues in use at the present
time. Julius Mtiller says that if there is in God any determinate
essence or constitution ( Wesen) which he has not caused by his
own conscious self-determination, he would not know in the light
of his own self-consciousness the depths of his own being, any
more than a man can penetrate by his own consciousness the
darkness in which the beginning of his own being is enveloped.
The definition, God is the cause of himself, must be understood
as positive, not in a negative sense as interpreted by some of our
older theologians. " Its true significance is this, that the essence
( Wesen) of God is merely his own act. . . . How can a being
( Wesen) be the cause of itself in any other way than as it brings
itself forth by conscious self-determination?"3 He assumes that
it must be a limitation and imperfection of God and must subject
him to an external necessity in all his acts, if he is the eternal
Reason, the almighty and all-perfect Spirit, and yet did not make
himself so by his own conscious and self-determining act.
This error springs primarily from assuming that the existence
of God is an inference from the principle that every beginning or
change must have a cause ; hence it is necessary to find a cause
for God. But for the very reason that this principle has to do
only with the beginning and change, it has no applicability to
God, who never began to be. The very idea that God brought
1 Divine Institutes, Bk. i. chap, vii., Bk. ii. chap. ix.
2 Commentary on Ephesians, chap. iii. 14, 15.
a Die Christliche Lehre von der Siinde, 5th ed., vol. ii. pp. 171-175;
Translation, third ed., vol. ii. bk. iii., Part I. chap. iv. p. 138.

GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING 119
himself forth by a conscious act of self-determination makes him
an effect and implies that he had a beginning. When it is seen
that the truth that the absolute Being exists is not an inference
from the law that every beginning or change must have a cause,
but is a primitive principle and constituent element of reason and
a universal law of thought, the whole question about God's being
the cause of himself disappears.
The error that God is the cause of himself is downright absurd
ity. If God is the cause of his own being as Spirit, we must sup
pose a cause without personal attributes or essential powers of
any kind causing or creating God as the absolute Spirit. But a
cause without essential attributes is the same as nothing. It is a
zero indicating absurdity or at least the cessation of intelligent
thought. It implies that, before God came into being, he created
himself. The necessary issue is that the universe and God him
self are ultimately grounded in inanity. It implies the truth of
an old doctrine, that God is pure action {actus purus) . But pure
action without an agent is a nonentity. And on this philosophy
of emptiness Muller is at last obliged to rest, a position totally
incompatible with his theology as he actually has developed it.
He says : " The original beginning of all being, before which
nothing is presupposed, is freedom, action." And he quotes
Schelling with approval : " In the ultimate and highest resort
there is no other being than volition. Volition is original being."
But this is using words without meaning. Volition and action
with no being that acts is nothing at all. It is finding as the ulti
mate ground of the universe an " abyss " of nonentity into which
from the days of the Gnostics till now many have fallen ; and
some Christian writers without being aware of it.
The true meaning which Muller, Dorner, Rothe, and others
seem to be trying to express in saying that God is the cause- of
himself is indicated by Schelling. "The nature-philosophy of
our day has first set up in science the distinction between being
( Wesen) so far as it exists, and being ( Wesen) so far as it is the
ground of existence. . . . Since nothing is before or without
God, so must he have the ground of his existence in himself.
This all philosophers say ; but they think of this ground as a
mere idea without making it into anything real and actual. . . .
God himself needs a ground whereby he can be ; but this is not
out of him, but in him." Rothe says, " The absolute Being has

120 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
determined himself into the absolute Ich or the absolute person
ality. The divine personality is first in the actual being of God.
Through its breaking forth comes the movement in the absolute
rest of the divine Being." x This seems to imply that God rested
in unconsciousness until at a certain time he waked himself up to
conscious personality. In plain English, all the true meaning in
this is that qualities, powers, and action presuppose a being. We
may distinguish the being from its existence (ex-sis to) in which
it stands forth in action and reveals itself. The agent is the
author of his own action and of the character formed and
revealed therein. Using the word existence in this sense we may
say that God is the cause or author of his own existence, — that is,
of his own action and character. God is always self-determining
and self-exerting or energizing. But we must equally distinguish
a being from its powers and qualities, under the category of sub
stance and quality. A being cannot create its own essential
powers and qualities, but can only act through them. Therefore,
even with this explanation, the proposition that God is the cause
of himself sinks into hopeless absurdity. God is. His name is
evermore, I AM. It certainly can be no limitation of God that
he is absolutely unlimited and independent ; that he is uncreated
and eternal, endowed from all eternity with all possible perfection
as the absolute Spirit, unconditioned and unlimited as to his being
or existence or powers or the exercise of his powers by any power
independent of himself, determined only as he determines him
self to act in harmony with the principles, laws and ideals of his
own eternal and absolute reason. It is no limitation of God that
he is eternally the all -perfect Spirit. If, for example, we consider
God's love, it is in him what in man we should call his character
as distinct from his constitutional capacities and powers. God's
love is the harmony of his will with his reason in his eternal free
choice. It must therefore be conceived as eternal self- determin
ing activity. But always the action of God presupposes his
being. II. Immensity. —The immensity or omnipresence of God de
notes that he is not limited or conditioned in space. Space and
time, in which the finite universe is conditioned, are themselves,
with the finite universe which they necessarily condition, archetypal
i Rothe, "Theologische Ethik," vol. i. p. 85, note, § 23, and pp. 121, 122,

GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING 121
and eternal in the absolute and universal Reason, which is God.
They are thus subjective in the mind of God. But when, by
God's creative action, they with the universe which they condi
tion are projected into outward and finite reality, they are, like
the universe which they condition, objectively real to us.1 There
fore God's transcendence of them is not incompatible with their
objective reality, because they have reality as conditions of the
finite. The fact that he sustains relations to them is no limita
tion of him, because they with the universe which they condition
have the cause and reason of their existence in him and thus are
dependent on him. So Schleiermacher says : God is " the abso
lutely spaceless causality conditioning, with all that is extended
in space (allem rdumlichen) , space itself." 2 And the fact that
God acts in space and time and thus is immanent in the universe
and reveals himself in it, is no limitation of him. The contrary
would be true. If God were excluded from space so that he
could not cause any effects in it, his causal energy would be
restricted and he himself would be limited and conditioned by
space. Therefore, in affirming God's immensity, we do not deny
the reality of space nor the fact that God is present and active
in it ; we deny only that God is limited or conditioned by it.
Hence, we properly use the positive designation, omnipresence,
denoting that God is everywhere in space ; yet we must always
fall back on the negative idea of immensity or immeasurableness,
because while in space he transcends it ; he is not extended in it,
nor bounded by it, nor does he occupy it to the exclusion of
finite bodies ; and consequently he is without shape or form.
The omnipresence of God cannot be pictured in the imagina
tion. We are not to conceive him as an invisible ether extended
through all space. Then he would be extended, measurable,
divisible ; -a part of him would be here and a part there ; the
parts could be measured, so many cubic feet in one room, so
many in another room ; and God in his wholeness and oneness
would be nowhere. On the contrary, he is equally and inte
grally present in every place.3 Nor may we attempt to picture
him, as some have done, as present only energetically by his uni
versal knowledge and all-pervading action, as a man is said to be
1 See " Philosophical Basis of Theism," pp. 162-165.
2 Christliche Glaube, vol. i. § 53, p. 273.
8 " In seipso ubique totus." Augustine, Epist., 187 : 4 : 14.

122 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
present in a room. This would imply that in his substantial
being he is limited to a place and bounded in a shape or form.
Attempts have been made to illustrate the integral presence of
God in every place, by various analogies. The older theologians
use the analogy of the human spirit, which is undivided and
entire in the whole body and in every part of it. Socrates refers
to the day, which is the same and undivided in every place. Sir
Isaac Newton gives the analogy of an indivisible moment of time,
the same throughout all space. So a universal truth is true of
every individual thing and in every place through all space.
These illustrate the possibility of realities transcending space
and not conditioned by it. But the imagination of man cannot
picture the omnipresence of God.
Practically there is no difficulty. We know that God is pres
ent in every place in the sense that everywhere he is accessible
to his rational creatures. Wherever a man may be he may enter
into his closet and shut the door. And the door which shuts
out the world opens into the immediate presence of God, and
the man, solus cum solo, may commune with him and receive the
communications of his grace. And so it is sublimely set forth in
the Bible : " 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? If I ascend into heaven
thou art there ; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou art
there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the
uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me
and thy right hand shall hold me."1
III. Eternity. — The eternity of God means that he is not
limited or conditioned in time.
It has been shown that time, like space, has objective reality
as the necessary condition of the created universe, and that, as
inseparable from the universe which it conditions, it, like the uni
verse itself, has no existence independent of God. Schleiermacher
says : " God is the absolutely timeless causality conditioning, to
gether with all that is temporal, time itself." 2 It follows that
God is not limited by the fact that he is related to and active in
time and the created universe existing in it. If God were ex-
1 Psalm cxxxix.
2 Der Christliche Glaube, vol. i. § 52, p. 268.

GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING 123
eluded from time so that he could not cause any effects in it,
his causal energy would be restricted and he himself would be
limited and conditioned by time ; as excluded from acting in
space and time he would be limited as really as man is by being
shut up in time and space and unable to transcend them. There
fore we properly make the positive affirmation that God is present
in all time as really as in all space, and accessible to all his
rational creatures who would seek him at every moment through
all time as he is at every point of space. Yet we must always
fall back on the negative aspect of this truth, that while God acts
in time he is not shut up within its limits. And this again dis
closes the positive significance of the negative definition, that
God is not limited within the bounds of time, because he tran
scends them.
We proceed to consider the limitations of time denied in defin
ing the eternity of God.
The eternal Being exists without beginning or end. Existence
limited in time must have a beginning and may have an end. A
dependent being has no guarantee of itself that it will exist for
ever. Its existence may be terminated by the power on which it
depends. These limitations are denied of God. In respect to
these no difficulty is usually felt.
Another limitation of a being in time is that its existence is
transitional through a succession of events. This commonly occa
sions more difficulty. The following statement, so far as it goes,
seems to give a real meaning. God as the absolute Spirit exists
independent of time. Time, with the universe conditioned by it, is
dependent on him. Acting in time God remains through all its
succession and changes immutable and the same. He is not in
the chain of causes and effects. He does not exist in transition
through successive forms of being. In his being and his essential
attributes as personal Spirit, he is immutably the same, the eternal
One from whom all succession of events issues and by comparison
with whom as the unchanging standard succession is possible. He
is the I AM. Even in our own being we find an analogy with
this. Every personal being persists in identity, while the subject
of successive acts and events. A man, in the likeness of God in
his rational free personality, is also an I AM ; he abides one and
the same person, unchanging in his personality and its essential
attributes, through all the transitions and changes of his life. Matter

124 G0D. THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
is in constant action and flux. Yet even this gives us a faint
analogy. We are obliged to think of ultimate atoms unchanged
and unabraded by all the collision and grinding of this energetic
action ever since the worlds were made. God is unchanged and
eternal not only in his being and his essentia] attributes, but also
in the fulness of his knowledge, without increase or diminution,
and therefore without succession. But as God's exemption from
limitation in time does not preclude his presence and acting in it,
so it does not preclude his knowledge of the distinctions of time
and of events as present, past, or future. The universe in its
whole existence is archetypal in the reason of God ; he sees in it
the map or plan of all that is being progressively realized in time.
But he sees the difference between a being existing in time and
another seen only ideally as about to exist in a distant future
or that has existed in the past and exists no longer. If he could
not know this he would be limited in time. He would be not only
unable to act in it, but even to see into it. But his Reason is an
open eye, seeing all which is, has been, or will be, and seeing it in
its relation to time as actually measured by events. Only with
this qualification is it true,
" To thee there 's nothing old appears,
Great God, there 's nothing new."
God's purpose to realize this archetypal plan in the finite universe
in the forms of space and time is an unchanging and eternal plan.
Yet immanent and ever active in the universe, he is progressively
realizing it by his action in time. And his love, which consti
tutes his character, is an eternal and unchanging love which he
is continuously and progressively expressing in all his action of
creation, preservation, providence, and redemption.
The result which we have reached is, not eternity as immeasur
able time, but the eternal and immutable God existing in all time
and progressively revealing himself in the universe as it exists in
time. God is the I AM. The universe is that which becomes.
God is eternal. The universe is the progressive and never-com
pleted revelation of him in time and space.
The eternity of God is involved in his self-existence. He is
uncaused. Therefore he must be without beginning. He tran
scends the whole chain of causes and effects. Therefore he can
never cease to be. As Biedermann expresses it, " The eternity

GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING 1 25
and omnipresence of God are the pure spaceless and timeless self-
existence of the Absolute Ground of the universe." :
God's immutability is involved in his eternity. God is immut
able in his being, in his personal identity, in his essential powers
and attributes, in the fulness of his knowledge, in his universal
and archetypal plan, and in his character as love. But this im
mutability is not incompatible with his immanence in the universe,
progressively realizing in it his archetypal thought and acting in
and on the finite beings in it in accordance with their constitu
tions and characters. God blessed Adam before he sinned, and
afterwards condemned him. Each act was the expression of the
same character. The change was not in God but in Adam.
When a man steps from the sunshine into the cellar he passes
from light to darkness ; but the change is not in the sun but in
the man. So always, as the world changes, God's action on it
changes to adapt itself to it; but it is the world which changes,
not God.
It is impossible for a finite mind to picture God in the imagina
tion. The second commandment forbids the attempt to make any
image of God with the mind not less than with the hands.
We attempt to picture eternity in imagination by tracing the
succession of events backwards and forwards without beginning or
end. Imagination wearies in the attempt and stops at last in the
negation with which it began, "without beginning or ending."
But the attempt to grasp the idea of the eternal through the suc
cession of events in time helps to fill out with reality our idea of
God who is eternal. In the universe as it is evolved in time, God
is revealing himself and the fulness of his power, wisdom, and love,
without beginning or ending, never greater and never less, inex
haustible, eternal. This revelation of the eternal is forever pro
gressive but never complete. It gives a significance to the words
of Plato, that time is the moving image of eternity.2
1 Dogmatik, p. 627, § 702.
2 In conceiving of the creation Plato supposes first an invisible sphere of
living intelligence, in which are all the truths and principles of perfect reason
and knowledge. Within this sphere and concentric with it the Creator has
placed the sphere of the visible and corporeal universe. Thus the intelli
gence of the invisible sphere is interfused through the concentric and visible
one and revealed in it. The invisible sphere of living intelligence is the
pattern of the visible universe. " And as the pattern was eternal, the father
and creator sought to make the universe the same so far as might be. Now

126 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
An attempt has often been made to picture God's eternity
as an eternal Now. This form of representation goes back to
Augustine. It was common in the middle ages. The maxim
of the schoolmen was : " In eternity is one only instant always
present and persistent." Cowley versified it.1 This is only an
attempt to picture eternity in forms of time, and to describe it
in words peculiar to succession in time : the eternal now doth
always last ; the one only instant always persists. It involves
absurdity, the same as in saying that a point of space, while
remaining a point, is extended through all space. It is only an
attempt to hide ignorance in words which convey no meaning.
We do not find an eternal Now, but an eternal God.
IV. Plenitude. — The plenitude of God denotes that he is not
limited in quantity. His power, his knowledge, all his perfections
are unlimited in quantity or degree. If it were worth while to
distinguish the absolute from the infinite, this attribute, as deny
ing limitation of quantity, would be the infinitude of God, and
the three others would denote his absoluteness. But this distinc
tion I think unnecessary; it is confusing rather than helpful.
The plenitude or fulness of God are names positive in form, but
the definition is negative.
V. The practical influence of our investigation of what we can
know of God as the absolute Being is not to remove him from us
the nature of the intelligent being is eternal, and to bestow eternity on the
created was wholly impossible. Therefore he resolved to make a moving
image of eternity, and, in setting in order the heaven, he makes an eternal
image, going in measured movement, of eternity resting in unity; and this
is what we call time." (Timsus, 37.) Augustine says, "Tempora fabrican-
tur et ordinantur aaternitatem imitantia." (De Mus., vi. 29.)
1 Above the subtle foldings of the sky;
Above the well-set orbs' soft harmony ;
Above those petty lamps that gild the night ;
There is a place o'erflown with hallowed light ;
Where heaven, as if it left itself behind,
Is stretched out far, nor its own bounds can find.
On no smooth sphere the restless seasons glide,
No circling motion doth the time divide ;
Nothing is there to come and nothing past,
But an eternal Now doth always last.
Davideis, Bk. i. lines 347-352, 359-362.

GOD THE ABSOLUTE BEING 127
in his immeasurable and inconceivable greatness ; but rather to
bring him near to us. It does not annul, but greatens and inten
sifies all those spiritual attributes of the divine Being, his wisdom,
power, and love, which attract us to him as the object of our
loving trust and service. We can define his absoluteness only by
negation of all limitation, conditionality, and dependence ; we
cannot picture him in the boundlessness of his glory. But by
that very greatness transcending all dependence and all measure
of space, time, and degree, we see that he is ever near us, and
that to every rational being in every world through all space and
time he is equally and integrally present and accessible in all
the grandeur of his being and the fulness of his perfections and
glory. All the resources of his absolute Being are available for
the help of every one who seeks him in loving trust. The biblical
writers do not present his transcendent greatness, as the absolute
Being philosophically or metaphysically, but poetically, devotion-
ally, and practically. " He is not far from every one of us ; for
in him we live and move and have our being " (Acts, xvii. 27, 28).
" One God and Father of all, who is above all and through
all and in you all " (Eph. iv. 6) . " Lo, I am with you always, even
unto the end of the world" (Matth. xxviii. 20). "Where two
or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the
midst of them" (Matth. xviii. 20). "The heaven and heaven
of heavens cannot contain thee, yet have thou respect unto the
prayer of thy servant and to his supplication " (1 Kings, viii. 27).
"Thus saith the high and holy One who inhabiteth eternity,
whose name is Holy : I dwell in the high and holy place ; also
with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the
spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite
ones " (Isa. lvii. 15).

CHAPTER IV
GOD IS A SPIRIT :  REASON
God is the one only absolute Spirit. We have considered
what we can know of him in his absoluteness or unconditionedness.
We proceed to ascertain what we can know of him in the other
aspect of his being, as Spirit. Here the basis for classifying our
knowledge of him must be the essential attributes of a spirit,
Reason, Free Will, and Feeling responsive to his consciousness
of his own perfections and his manifestation of them in action,
and therefore to the evolution of the universe and to the charac
ter and action of finite rational beings in it. In all these aspects
of his being and his revelation of them in action he is conscious
of himself as one and the same absolute Spirit. In this chapter
we are to consider God as Reason ; God in the aspect of his
being as intellect, as intelligent, and having knowledge. Here
theological thought is usually restricted to God's omniscience,
the universality of his knowledge. The real object of. investiga
tion is God himself as the absolute Reason. Therefore we must
consider the fact that his knowledge is archetypal and perfect as
well as universal, and his relation, as The Absolute Reason, to the
constitution and evolution of the universe and to all human
knowledge. I. God's Knowledge is Archetypal. — God knows the uni
verse in his own eternal ideal before it exists as a finite reality in
time and space. His eternal thought is the archetype of the
finite universe.
i . God's knowledge as archetypal is independent of any out
ward and independent environment. It does not necessarily
presuppose any object revealing itself by acting on him. Man's
knowledge is never self-originated, but first arises on occasion of

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 29
the action on him of some outward object in his physical or
spiritual environment, which thus reveals itself to him. It is only
after he is thus from without waked to the consciousness of the
outward, and therein to self-consciousness, that he can make
himself and his own mental states the object of his attention,
and can complete the circuit of knowledge within himself. But
God is not waked to conscious mental action by the action on
him of any object from without. He needs to receive no revela
tion. We stand on this side of the created universe. We know
it only after it exists and ascertain what it is only by observation
and investigation of it and by inference from the results of the
same. But God's knowledge is eternal. He knows the universe
in its archetype in his own reason before it exists in time and
space. And this is the meaning of Augustine : " We see the
things which thou hast made because they exist ; but as to thee,
they exist because thou seest them." x
2. God's knowledge as archetypal is the consciousness within
himself of all the universal principles, laws, and ideals of reason,
which determine what it is possible and right for power to effect,
what are the rational laws according to which the universe is
constituted and the rational ends for which it exists, and which
make it susceptible of being known in science. So the inventor
of a machine must know the principles and laws of mechanics,
and the ends to be accomplished by it, before he can form a plan
of it in his own mind. This is the primary and deepest signifi
cance of the fact that God's knowledge is archetypal. When I
designate God as Reason, I do not use the word to denote the
mere power of reasoning, but to denote the Mind or Spirit in
whom are eternal and immutable the universal principles, laws,
and ideals of reason, which render reasoning possible and are
regulative of all thought and energy. This conception of God's
knowledge as archetypal is presented poetically in the personi
fication of Wisdom as being with God in his creation and devel
opment of the world as counsellor and master-workman (Prov.
viii. 22-31). So Isaiah, after describing the minute mathematical
exactness with which God had created and arranged the heavens
and the earth, the sea and the land, the mountains and even the
small dust of the earth, asks, " Who hath directed the Spirit of
the Lord or being his counsellor hath taught him ? With whom
1 Confessions, Lib. xiii. xxxviii. 53.
VOL. I. — 9

130 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
took he counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the
path of judgment, and taught him knowledge, and showed him
the way of understanding?" (Isa. xl. 12-14).
3. God's knowledge, as archetypal, is the ideal or plan of the
universe and of all things in it, as by his creative action they are
to exist in actuality in accordance with these rational principles,
laws, and ends. An architect who plans a cotton-mill or a
cathedral must not only know the principles, laws, and ends,
regulating the construction, but must plan it to the minutest speci
fications. Thus the machinist or the architect knows the machine
or building archetypally before he knows it in actuality. Others
stand on the hither side of the structure and know it by observa
tion and investigation. He who planned it stands on the thither
side and knows it in its archetype before it is built. So the
universe with all in it is seen by God as an archetype in his own
reason which by his creative act is to have actuality. This gives
a true meaning to the words of Mr. Hazard : " The material
creation is but the imagery of the mind of God made palpable
to us." 1
This conception of the universe as progressively realizing and
expressing the archetype eternal in the mind of God has been
set forth poetically by Edmund Spenser : —
" What time the world's great Workmaster did cast
To make all things such as we now behold,
It seems that he before his eyes had placed
A goodly pattern, to whose perfect mould
He fashioned them as comely as he could,
That now so fair and seemly they appear
As nought may be amended anywhere.
" That wondrous pattern, wheresoe'er it be,
Whether in earth laid up in secret store,
Or else in heaven that no man it may see
With sinful eyes, for fear it to deflower,
Is perfect beauty, which all men do adore ;
Whose face and feature doth so much excel
All mortal sense, that none the same may tell."2
Boetius expresses a similar thought : —
" Tu cuncta superno
Ducis ab exemplo, pulchrum pulcherrimus ipse
Mundum mente gerens, similique imagine formans,
Perfectasque jubens perfectum absolvere partes."8
1 Freedom of Mind in Willing, p. 44.
2 A Hymn in Honor of Beauty, lines 29-42, Works, vol. v. p. 332.
" De Consolatione Philosophiae, Lib. iii. metrum ix.

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — REASON 1 3 1
Voigt says, " All created things are originally ideas in the divine
Spirit, and ideas related to one another in the unity of a system
or plan. By creation these ideas are realized in the forms of
space and time, and are thus made finite and individual beings ;
but also through their reciprocal dependence in an order of
nature, they are bound in unity in a universe." x Plere is the
truth in Hegel's conception that the ultimate reality of the
universe is thought. His error is that it is unconscious, imper
sonal thought abstracted from being. It is a very different con
ception that the ultimate reality of the universe is the thought
of God, the absolute Spirit, the absolute Reason. Thomas
Aquinas taught that "The ideas or types of things are God's
thoughts ; created beings are their realization. Man can become
acquainted with these created beings through the senses ; and by
the light of reason he can attain more and more significant
knowledge of the ideas which they express, as the mirrored images
of the thoughts of God." 2 In fact, this conception of God as the
absolute Reason and the contrary conception of him as sovereign
Will not subject to reason were under discussion in the middle
ages throughout the scholastic period. The latter view reached
its extreme development in the philosophy of Duns Scotus and
Occam. They pushed the supremacy of God's sovereign will to
the extent of declaring that God's moral law itself was but the
enactment of God's arbitrary and sovereign will, and that if he
had commanded just the contrary, all persons would have been
under equal obligation to obey, and what had been wrong would
be right and what had been right would be wrong. This is the
logical issue of not teaching that the universal and necessary
truths of reason, on which all science and philosophy and morals
as well as all theology depend, are eternal and unchangeable in
the absolute Reason of God. The conception of the naked
sovereignty of arbitrary and resistless will has been a prolific
source of pernicious theological errors which have continued even
into the present century. The error can be corrected and its
pernicious influence counteracted only by returning to the full
recognition of God as the absolute Reason, in his free will
eternally self-determining in the light of reason and acting always
in strict accordance with its eternal principles and laws and for
1 Fundamental Dogmatik, p. 304.
2 Noire, " Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes,'' pp. 388, 389.

132 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the realization of its ideals of perfection and well-being. God
always acts in conformity with law. But it is not law imposed
on him from without, but eternal in himself as the absolute Rea
son. Even man is so far in the likeness of God that in his own
reason .and conscience he is a law unto himself. To this day
current theological thought fails adequately to appreciate in its
full significance the fundamental reality that God as a Spirit is
the absolute Reason, in whom all the essential and universal
principles, laws, and ideals of reason, which regulate human
thinking, are eternal. The truth which God reveals is not truth
because he reveals it ; he reveals it because it is eternal truth.
The law which God commands us to obey is not law because he
commands it ; he commands it because it is eternal law.
4. The divine Reason is not an empty capacity or power of
knowing which fills itself by acquiring knowledge. It is the
eternal fulness of knowledge. The following gives us in the
concrete a slight intimation of this fulness : "At a scientific
meeting in Baltimore, Professor Peirce demonstrated that it would
take an able mathematician 200,000,000,000 years to make a pre
liminary examination of a series of plane curves which he had
pointed out. These were curves of the simplest laws. Add the
more complicated ; take also those revealed by different methods
of investigation ; add those which are not confined to one plane ;
pass then to the laws of surfaces and solids ; and it is evident
that in geometry, the simplest of possible sciences, there is
opportunity for endless occupation and delight to an intelligent
spirit. The other departments of mathematics, arithmetic, and
algebra, are equally boundless in resources. The physical
sciences, the historical group, the domains of psychology and
metaphysics, and our gropings after ontology and theology, remain
yet to show us what infinite resources there are for intellectual
occupation in the coming cycles of eternity. And all this truth,
which to eternity by its discovery may be giving fresh pleasure to
the expanding mind, has been from eternity known to God." 2
And the Christ said of himself: "I am the truth," and it is said
of him : " in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge
hidden." 1 Rev. Thomas Hill, D. D., LL. D., " The Natural Sources of Theology,"
p. 58. 2 John xiv. 6; Coloss. ii. 3.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 33
5. God, in the fulness of his knowledge of the archetype and
reality of the universe, is not passive but active. All knowledge
is mental action. We are conscious of a strain on our minds
when we try to attend to many things or to comprehend a com
plicated object. But this is ' the consciousness of perplexity and
difficulty incident to our limitations and weakness. Greater
minds, transcending our limits, also transcend our perplexities
and difficulties. Newton saw at a glance geometrical conclusions
which inferior minds reach only through a process of demonstra
tion. In the " M^canique Celeste " the often-repeated phrase, " It
is easy to see," by which Laplace passed to a conclusion at a
single step, needs to be expanded into a demonstration for the
ordinary mathematician ; and Laplace himself in correcting the
proof-sheets was sometimes obliged to study an hour to recover
the dropped links. Yet this rapid action of the great mind is
not less but more energetic than that of the laborious plodder.
And when our minds are most intensely acting in the concentra
tion of our whole attention and interest on an object, we become
absorbed in it, we forget ourselves and take no note of the lapse
of time, and are unconscious of effort. Such facts may help us
to some conception of the infinite intensity of God's mental
action, as, in the infinite fulness of knowledge, he concentrates
his attention and interest on the universe, of which a single
spatial form could be traced out by the greatest human mind
only in thousands of millions of years. It may also help us to
some conception of his unconsciousness of effort and of successive
steps in knowing in this intense activity.
II. God's Knowledge is Universal. — It is unlimited in
space, time or quantity. He is omniscient.
The attributes of God as absolute are predicated of him as the
personal Spirit. Self-existence cannot be predicated of knowl
edge directly ; for knowledge presupposes a being who knows.
God's knowledge is archetypal, as already shown ; and this is the
characteristic of his knowledge corresponding to his self-existence
and implied in it. We now affirm that God's knowledge is uni
versal. This is the characteristic of his knowledge correspond
ing to his immensity, eternity, and plenitude, and implied in
them. While he knows all which is limited in space, time and
quantity, his knowledge is not confined within these limits but

134 GOD> THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
transcends them. It is universal; the fulness or plenitude of
knowledge. i. God's knowledge as universal is primarily his knowledge of
himself, the absolute and all-perfect personal Spirit. He is self-
conscious. This includes the knowledge of himself as the absolute
Reason ; therein of all the principles, laws, ideals, and ends of
the absolute and all-perfect Reason, and of the archetype of the
universe accordant with them ; also the knowledge of himself as
almighty and free will, choosing in eternal harmony with Reason
this archetype of eternal truth, right, perfection, and good, to be
realized in his revelation of himself in the forms of the finite.
This eternal choice in harmony with Reason is love ; and his
knowledge, thus vitalized with love and guiding his creative and
self-revealing action, is wisdom.
2. God's knowledge as universal is also his knowledge of all
that is possible in any imaginable universe, and of all that is
actual in himself and the existing universe.1
God's knowledge of the possible is his knowledge of all that is
possible for almighty power to effect if God so willed. Nothing
finite is possible in itself, but only as a result, immediate or
remote, of the action of God. But the universe is ultimately
grounded in Reason, pervaded by it, through and through intel
ligible and explicable to it. In such a universe what is possible
and impossible cannot be defined from power alone. We may
suppose, indeed, that God knows what it would be possible for
almighty power to effect if unregulated by Reason. But he
knows also that in fact no such absolute almighty power exists or
can exist. Power as unintelligent force, or irrational caprice, or
wickedness defiant of rational truth and law, cannot be absolute
and unconditioned. Eternally the absolute Being is absolute
Spirit. This alone can be the absolute, the unconditioned, the
all-conditioning. In this alone is power almighty ; and it is
power enlightened and regulated by Reason, energizing only
within the bounds of Reason ; it is Reason itself energizing, and
it cannot reveal itself as un-reason. Therefore what is possible
for almighty power to effect is determined by the Reason. This
1 This has been the common classification in theology. The former has
been variously designated as Scientia simplicis intelligentiae, Scientia inde-
finita, Scientia necessaria, Scientia naturalis ; the latter as Scientia visionis,
Scientia definita, Scientia libera,

GOD IS A SPIRIT: —REASON 135
determination of the possible by Reason is twofold. First, it
determines a complete impossibility. No power as such, however
great in quantity, can annul the principles and laws, the ideals of
perfection, the norms of worth and good, the distinction of the
absolute and the finite, which are eternal and immutable in the
absolute Reason and are the constituent elements of all reason ;
nor cause anything the existence of which is absurd. No power,
even though almighty, can cause a thing to be and not to be at
the same time, or produce a beginning or change of motion with
out a cause, or make a triangle whose three angles should be
equal to six right angles, or construct a circle with the radii
unequal, or make selfishness to be right, obligatory, and promotive
of well-being, or universal love to be wrong, deserving punish
ment, and destructive of the universal well-being. Thus the uni
verse is grounded in absolute Reason and constituted according
to its eternal truths and laws, its ideals of perfection, and its
norms of worth and well-being. These encompass it as with
flaming walls which no power, not even the almighty, can break
through or overpass. Here the principles of reason determine
what is a complete impossibility to power. Secondly, the almighty
power of God, is regulated by his eternal love. A free will
endowed with almighty power, if considered abstracted from
everything else, may be conceived as refusing to conform its
action with the law of love and using its almightiness in doing evil.
Finite persons, beginning undeveloped and under the necessity
of forming character, may sin. But God's will is fixed in love
by his eternal free choice. This eternal love is the infallible
guarantee that the power in the universe which alone is almighty
will always be exercised in wisdom and love. God's knowledge
of the possible, therefore, is the knowledge, not only of what an
almighty will unregulated by reason might do, but also of all
which it is possible for almightiness to effect in consistency with
God's absolute reason and with his eternal and all-encompassing
wisdom and love.
God's knowledge of the actual is his knowledge of all that has
been, is, or will be, as the result, immediate or remote, of the
action of God's will in the exercise of his almighty power. It is
his knowledge of the universe itself, the ever-dependent product
of his creative and energizing will progressively realizing, in the
limits of dependence and of time, space, and quantity, the arche
type eternal in the divine Reason.

136 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
The knowledge of the actual, in popular usage, is called fore
knowledge. This name is misleading^ and has occasioned mis
takes and needless objections. It assumes a point in time from
which God is supposed to look forward to the future. But, in fact,
God's knowledge of the actual, that is, of the finite, is his eternal
knowledge of the universe as conditioned in time and space, of
all finite things in their dates and successions in time and in their
positions and motions in space, consequently of the present and
the past as well as of the future.
An objection is urged that, if God foreknows only finite reality
resulting immediately or remotely from the determination of his
will, that determination must itself have been made blindly,
without knowledge. What has been said exposes the futility of
this objection. The creative energy of the divine will is put
forth in the light of his reason, realizing the eternal archetype
which his Reason sees to be accordant with his perfect wisdom
and love.
3. God's knowledge of the actual includes his eternal knowl
edge of actions of free agents. This has been strenuously
denied. The first refutation of this denial is that it flatly contradicts the
revelation of God recorded in the Bible. The Bible teaches that
God not only foreknows, but in many cases has foretold the
actions of men ; yet it recognizes the freedom and responsibility
of the agents fulfilling the prophecies. The biblical representa
tion corresponds throughout with the words of Peter on the day
of Pentecost : " Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel
and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did
crucify and slay." And God is revealed in the Bible as not only
foreknowing and foretelling the actions of free agents, but also as
knowing what, under different circumstances, they would have
done but never did ; as David was told from Jehovah that if he
remained in Keilah the men of the city would deliver him up to
Saul. The second refutation of this denial is that it contradicts what
is essential in the idea of God. It involves the denial of God's
omniscience. If God does not know the action of free agents,
and know them as in time, past, present, or future, his knowledge
is not universal. Millions of free agents are constantly acting ;
and God never knows what any one of them will be doing the

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 37
next minute. Thus he is always acting in the dark ; is even-
moment getting knowledge of innumerable facts of which he had
been ignorant, and must often be surprised at what he had not
anticipated.1 Thus God, the absolute, in his knowledge is
always limited and conditioned in time. The objection is there
fore incompatible with the essential idea of God as the absolute
Spirit. The denial further involves insuperable difficulties as to God's
universal government. In the light of the principles, laws, ideals,
and norms of reason, he forms an archetypal plan of what, in his
perfect wisdom and love, he fain would realize. But, on account
of his total ignorance of what the free agents constituting the
moral system may do, his plan is liable to be frustrated in any
part or even as a whole at every moment. He brings rational
persons into existence in a moral system to be illuminated and
guided by his wisdom and to be the recipients of his love ; and he
does not know but that every one of them will at once sin against
him and continue in sin forever. He comes in Christ and his
Spirit to redeem them from sin ; but he does not know that
a single one for whom Christ died will accept him and be saved.
He completes the work of redemption and gathers his redeemed
in heaven ; and he does not know but that every one of them will
at the next moment sin and thus turn heaven into hell. He is
trying a tremendous experiment with no certainty that it will not
issue in the endless sin and misery of every rational creature.
A third answer is that the denial that God can foreknow the
acts of rational free agents rests on the false assumption that the
mode in which God knows is the same with the modes of human
knowledge. For example, Martensen says : " Only that reality
which is per se rational and necessary can be the object of an
unconditional foreknowledge, but not that reality which might
have been otherwise than as it is." Rothe says : '• Thought can
foreknow with absolute certainty only the absolutely necessary."
Weisse says : " Only so far as it follows with organic necessity out
ofthe past and the present." And Rothe says that any man
1 In reply to the question : " If God foreknew that man would sin, why
did he create him ? " Rothe answers that God did not know it, and in the
nature of the case it could not be foreknown. Julius Muller asked if Rothe
really meant that God gained new knowledge in every act of man, and Rothe
replies without hesitation that he does mean this.

138 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
from the known character of a person can conjecture how he will
act. But so long as his " freedom is not yet ripened beyond all
subjective discretion," so long as " he has not attained a perfectly
ripened character," it remains conjecture, not real knowledge.
God is capable of such a precalculation of the actions of such
moral beings, but cannot have certain knowledge of them. But,
according to Rothe, God can foreknow with certainty the acts of
a morally perfected free agent, because such a being will always
act right; and because in such a being freedom has passed
beyond all discretionary liberty, and has "become absolutely
identical with necessity." To this last position of Rothe it is a
sufficient answer that it inevitably requires the preposterous infer
ence that when a person has become perfect in love to God and
man, when he no longer obeys the precepts of the law piecemeal
from the fear of punishment or the sense of obligation, but in the
spontaneity and enthusiasm of love, when, as a rational personal
free agent, he has attained his highest and normal development,
then he is no longer a free agent, or, what is the same, a rational
personal being, but thenceforward, " like dumb, driven cattle,"
acts only under necessity. It identifies all right moral character
with necessity, and declares it incompatible with free will. It
inevitably requires also the inference that God, who is eternally
perfect in love, cannot be free, but is eternally subject, like the
gods of the heathen, to fate. And besides this, in all those posi
tions it is assumed that the methods of God's knowing must be
limited so as to be the same as those by which man acquires
knowledge ; that his knowledge of man's free acts is, like human
sense-perception, dependent on the person's actual doing of the
act and its presentation or revelation of itself from without to
God's observation; that God acquires knowledge through pro
cesses of thought ; that he infers man's action, as an effect from
a cause, from his character; that his inference is sometimes
merely conjectural, sometimes a conclusive certainty. But God's
knowledge transcends man's and all the processes through which
man proceeds laboriously and doubtfully to his conclusion.
God in his absolute, self-dependent knowledge may know the
future in intuition, seeing into future time as we see events in
space. This is the common scriptural representation. " There
is no creature that is not manifest in his sight ; but all things are
naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have
to do" (Heb. iv. 13).

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 39
The objector also confounds the inconceivable with the un
knowable. He is trying to conceive of God's knowledge in
imagination, to picture God's eternal knowledge in the forms of
time. Thus he disregards a fundamental maxim of theology, that
God as the absolute Being cannot be pictured in the imagination.
Mystery rests all along the line at which the absolute reveals itself
in the finite. The revelation is always through the veil.
A fourth line of refutation of the denial that God can foreknow
the actions of free agents is the fact that the arguments by which
this denial is supported, being founded on misapprehension, are
totally fallacious.
The leading argument in support of this denial of foreknowl
edge is that God cannot foreknow the acts of rational persons
because his foreknowledge would be incompatible with free will
both in God and man. " The affirmation of an unconditional
foreknowledge of everything yet to come, though made with as
much assurance as by Augustine himself (' if not foreknowing
all things future, he is not God at all'), is, say what one will,
nothing but positive and glaring determinism, — a determinism
which precludes the freedom of God in his own future acts, and
which annuls the freedom of created beings when applied to all
their future acts."1 And Rothe says: " If God foreknows ab
solutely everything as absolutely determined from all eternity, the
necessary presupposition is ... . that everything is absolutely
necessary. It may be said that it is by God himself that all is
thus absolutely fixed. But this does not save the freedom of
God. It only establishes that God himself from eternity has
subjected himself to an unalterable necessity, has himself set a
Fate on the throne over himself, and thus has renounced what
belongs essentially to the idea of God .... This would imply
that God had retained for himself through the whole course of
the development of the universe only the intolerable tediousness
of idle looking on." 2
In effect the argument is that, if God could foreknow an act of
any rational person, he would cease to be God. The logical
conclusion would be practically atheism.
1 Ch. H. Weisse, "Philosophische Dogmatik," vol. i. p. 609; Augustine,
" Civitas Dei," Lib. v. cap. 9.
2 Theologische Ethik, 2d ed., vol. i. pp. 231, 232, § 54. For the argu
ment supporting this objection, see pp. 211-234; also Martensen, "Die
Christliche Dogmatik," pp. 193, 244-257, 415.

140 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
We may now see that this argument from the incompatibility
of God's foreknowledge of human actions with free will is
founded on misconceptions and has no reasonable basis. It
necessarily implies that thought carries in itself causal efficiency.
God has in the light of eternal Reason the archetypal ideal of
all perfection and well-being possible in a finite universe and he
is immanently active in the universe in the progressive realization
of this ideal. His knowledge of the thoughts, actions and char
acters of his rational creatures is no hindrance to his continued
action among and on them in the fulness of his love. An archi
tect plans a building to its minutest details. If he could foresee
with absolute certainty that he would procure the necessary
material, employ and direct skilled workmen and finish the build
ing as planned to its minutest details, this knowledge would not
supersede his own continuous activity in its erection nor hinder
the constant exercise of his free will in his work, but would
stimulate and encourage him in it. And if this is true even of a
finite man much more is it possible for the infinite God. He
has in his mind the archetypal plan of the universe, he knows
that the universe will be developed in accordance with it, and
he is continuously active in progressively realizing it. And all
his action is in the continuous exercise of his own free will in
free accordance with his eternal free choice of the archetypal
ideal of the universe, to be realized in its creation and evolution.
Nor does the fact that God knows the actual, past, present,
and future, annul or abridge the free agency of finite rational
beings. It rather insures and perpetuates it. Otherwise God's
ideal contemplating the development of the kingdom of God
consisting of rational persons in the exercise of free will serv
ing God and one another in love, must fail of realization. Noth
ing higher than impersonal matter would exist. The denial of
God's foreknowledge rests on the gross error that knowledge car
ries in its essence efficient causation and the determination of will
by such causation. But the mere subjective certainty of any
mind that an event will happen exerts no causal energy in caus
ing or hindering it. As Origen says, " God's foreknowledge is
not the cause of things future, but their being future is the cause
of God's foreknowledge."
If I know that my neighbor will go to his counting room
to-morrow morning, this knowledge would be no hindrance to

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 141
his freedom in going. And yet, according to the objection, my
certainty determines his action in absolute fixedness and annuls
his freedom. If I look down from a steeple and see the people
acting below, my knowledge of their action in no way affects
their power or freedom. And if I had the power to look for
ward into time as I can look outward into space, and see actions
now future, my seeing them would not affect the power or free
dom of the actors. So God's knowledge of men's future action,
simply as knowledge, cannot abridge their power or annul their
freedom. In fact, it is true to-day that certain acts will be done
to-morrow by a certain person at certain definite points of time
and space ; and it is equally true, whether any mind knows it or
not. And if any mind attains to-day subjective certainty that this
is true, the certainty does not in the least affect the freedom of
the agent. The futurition of the event is objectively certain,
whether any mind knows it or not. The subjective certainty
of a mind that discovers it does not make the futurition of the
event any more sure and fixed than it was before. But accord
ing to Rothe this fixed objective certainty or futurition of an act
destroys its freedom. It necessarily would follow that all future
acts of free agents are necessary and under fate, whether any
mind foreknows them or not. Therefore it is an unwarranted
assumption that God's foreknowledge of the action of a free
agent would destroy the agent's freedom.
The objection rests on a further misconception of the relation
of God's action, in realizing his archetypal plan, to the foreseen
action of men, as if it permitted no adaptation to their action.
God's foreknowledge of the acts of free agents has been urged
as proof of the supralapsarian doctrine of predestination uncon
ditioned by any act of man. Foreknowledge is denied in order
to nullify this argument. We now see that God's foreknowledge
of man's free action does not imply this predestination. The
archetype of perfection and well-being which God is progressively
realizing is not an arbitrary decree of naked and resistless will.
It is chosen in the light of reason to be realized by divine action
in exact accordance with the eternal principles and laws of
reason. God knows that all rational persons who come into
existence in the moral system must be finite, and must be
progressively educated and developed under divine influences
adapted to their degree of development and their attainments in

142 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
knowledge. He knows what they will do under his gracious
influences. He knows that a person's character and action can
be determined only by the person himself; that no external
power, though almighty, can determine them or change the
person's determination. For it would be determination by the
external power, not by the man himself. And he exerts on
every person, to induce him to live the life of love, every
influence which perfect wisdom, righteousness, and good-will
permit or require. Thus his eternal knowledge of their acts does
not interfere either with their freedom or his own. He simply
adapts his action in wisdom, righteousness, and good-will, to the
character, condition, development, and needs of each one.
We suppose that, in God's eternal archetype of the universe, he
knows not only all that finite persons will do but also all which they
would do under different circumstances and a different development
of the universe ; that if God had seen that the conduct of his
rational creatures in the existing universe would be such as to make
his action in it to fail to be the expression of perfect wisdom and
love, he would have proceeded in some other line of action which
would insure their perfect expression ; that, foreseeing the action of
his rational creatures, he plans his own action in reference to theirs,
so that it shall be the perfect though progressive expression of his
wisdom and love ; and that thus the universe and all creatures in
it never escape his control but are ever within his power and
cannot frustrate his plan to realize his archetypal ideal. But
Rothe insists that such reference to the action of his creatures
would " involve a total reversal of the relation of dependence
between God and the creature. Thus the attempt to guard the
absoluteness of God actually results in sacrificing it altogether."
This is of equal force against the moral government of God, de
claring his law and explicitly awarding blessing to the obedient
and condemnation and punishment to the disobedient. It is of
equal force against God's redemption of men from sin through
Christ, in which he justifies and glorifies those who ,accept his
freely-offered grace and, trusting in God, live the life of Christian
love, and condemns and punishes those who reject his grace and
persist in sin. Thus God determines his own action in accord
ance with the action of man, and so, according to Rothe, God's
moral government and his redemption of men from sin in their
very essence " involve a total reversal of the relation of dependence

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — REASON 143
between God and the creature." His argument implies that if
God determines any act with reference to the action or character
of a finite person, as for example condemning a sinner for his
sins, God would be therein dependent on and conditioned by
the creature. Therefore Rothe's objection, if valid, proves the
impossibility of God's exerting any influence on men adapted to
their needs, either in moral government under law or in redeem
ing them from sin. He also overlooks the dependence of the
creature on God, and God's immanence and action in the
universe continually. On the contrary, as Lotze says, "we
cannot mean that the images of different worlds were present and
known to God as being in themselves possible or impossible ; " 1
but only as dependent on God and by virtue of principles, laws,
ideals, and norms, eternal in the absolute reason, and of the
harmony of his will with them in his eternal free choice and
in all his action in time. Thus freedom of will is essential and
inseparable from the rational and moral constitution of a person ;
it persists unchanged through all his action, right or wrong, and
through all changes and conditions. And yet the person is
always dependent on God for his being and his continued exist
ence and for the gracious offers and influences of God's love. If
he chooses wrong he can never thus realize his perfection and
true good, but will find that what he wilfully chose as the good
is only evil, and that he cannot frustrate God's plan of expressing
and revealing in the universe his perfect wisdom and love.
Whatever the man does, God's, action in reference to it will be
the expression of perfect wisdom and love. Therefore the
freedom of the man, however he may act in the exercise of it, does
not imply the man's independence of God ; and God's wise
adaptation of his action in relation to the man's development,
character and action, does not imply any dependence of God on
the creature or any limitation of his absoluteness. Rothe admits
" God has this self-subsistent world absolutely within his power in
all its points and moments. . . . While God concedes to personal
creatures the free unfolding of the capacity of self-development
implanted in them by himself, he still holds them in the hand of
his all-seeing omnipotence, from which, notwithstanding their
freedom, they cannot escape." This admission takes away the
foundation on which the objection rests. And this Rothe
1 Microcosmus, trans, vol. ii. p. 705.

144 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
himself would have seen, if he had clearly seen in, what freedom
of will consists and what is the true relation of God's archetypal
knowledge to the action of free agents. In view of the fact that
some will sin, God proceeds with reference to them in a method
different from what would have been his method of procedure if
they had not sinned. But he nevertheless fully acts out his divine
perfections and realizes the archetypal plan of his eternal wisdom
and love.
When the misconceptions and false assumptions of the
objection are removed, the antinomy which it presents is
dissolved. A further answer is that the objector, in evading the argument
that the denial of foreknowledge of the acts of free agents is a
denial of God's omniscience, is driven to positions which are
untenable and involve contradictions.
When it is urged that the denial of foreknowledge is the denial
of God's omniscience, and thus implies that he is limited and
dependent, some writers have answered that God might know
the acts of free agents, but does not choose to know them.
But choosing not to know them implies some knowledge of them
as a reason for the choice. If I choose not to read the columns
of crimes and casualties in the morning paper, it is because I
have knowledge of their general character and wish to avoid the
suffering which the reading of them would cause. Besides this,
the choosing not to know the acts of free agents would imply
moral weakness and delinquency. It represents God as thinking
that if he allowed himself to know the acts of free agents he might
find it necessary to change his own plan of action to prevent
them. This would be charging God with a cowardly and wilful
shutting of his eyes to the consequences of his action. And,
after all, the denial of omniscience remains unrelieved and
God's knowledge would always be incomplete and he would be
always learning.
A more respectable attempt to evade this difficulty is in the
position that the action of free agents through all time is not a
legitimate object of knowledge ; that, therefore, ignorance of them
is not a limitation of knowledge ; and it is claimed that this is
analogous with the fact that the giving of reality to what is absurd
is not a legitimate act of power. But there is no analogy here.
Knowledge and causal energy are different in kind ; they move

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 145
in different planes. It is impossible to move a stone by an argu
ment, or to draw an inference by a steam-engine, or to annul a
principle of reason by an explosion of dynamite, or to make a
machine which gives reality to a contradiction. On the contrary,
the acts of free agents are known, and therefore are in their nature
legitimate objects of knowledge. It may now be said that a future
act of a free agent is not yet done, and therefore is not a legiti
mate object of knowledge, which is the intellectual equivalent of
reality. But an eclipse foreknown for next year has not yet taken
place, and therefore for the same reason would not be a legitimate
object of knowledge. The objection rests entirely on the mis
leading word, foreknowledge. Let us return to the theological
designation, the knowledge of the actual or real. Both the eclipse
and the act of the free agent are actual or real events in time, and
are known as such. The fact that they are known as actual or
real in a future time does not change their essence as knowable.
In fact all legislation, all laws of trade and political economy, all
education, all domestic arrangements, all travelling, all the prac
tical arrangements of society and management of the affairs of
personal life, assume that the future acts of men are legitimate
objects of knowledge, and depend on man's confidence that he
knows them. If God were obliged to act in total ignorance of
them, he could not act with unerring wisdom. And if human
knowledge of the future acts of free agents is sufficient to be the
safe guide of human action, certainly these acts are legitimate
objects of knowledge, and it is reasonable to believe that God
may know them all with certainty without impairing the free will
of the agents.
It is evident, therefore, that the denial of God's knowledge of
all the acts of free agents is, after all attempts to evade the con
clusion, a direct denial of God's omniscience and, by necessary
inference, of his perfectly wise universal government, and conse
quently the denial that he is the absolute, unconditioned, and all-
conditioning Being.
Equally evident is the utter invalidity of the argument of a
class of theologians, affirming God's eternal knowledge of the acts
and characters of rational free agents, that this foreknowledge
proves the supralapsarian doctrine of God's universal, absolute
decree of salvation or reprobation unconditioned by any foreseen
action of man.
vol. 1. — 10

I46 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
4. Here we see the importance of recognizing, as the funda
mental principle of all true theology, the truth that the universe
is ultimately grounded in Reason, not in Will independent of reason
and above it. The latter of these two doctrines assumes, as the
ultimate ground of the universe, an almighty power conscious of
itself as almighty, and exerting its almightiness in arbitrary caprice
unregulated by any truth or law' of Reason. The conception of
the universe grounded in almighty caprice is the most terrific
conception which the human imagination can form.
It is a common misrepresentation of theism that its fundamental
principle is precisely this assertion of the supremacy of almighty
will independent of reason, and unregulated by any rational truth,
or law, or end. The arguments against theism very often have
this misrepresentation for their only foundation. Mr. Spencer
says : " Religious creeds, established and dissenting, all embody
the belief that right and wrong are right and wrong simply in
virtue of divine enactment." 1 Miss Martineau says : " When we
have finally dismissed all notions of subjection to a superior law
less will — all the perplexing notions about sin and responsibility
and arbitrary reward and punishment — and stand free to see
where we are, and to study our Own nature and recognize our own
condition, the relief is like that of coming out of a cave full of
painted shadows, under the free sky with the earth open round
about us to the horizon." 2
Theologians, it must be acknowledged, have given some occa
sion for this misrepresentation. They have defined God's knowl
edge of the possible with reference to almighty power only. From
the time of Duns Scotus the doctrine gained currency that God's
will is absolute and supreme, independent of and above reason
and all laws and principles of reason ; that the distinction of right
and wrong in the moral law depends solely on the sovereign
enactment of God's will, and virtue is right solely because God
commands it. And this type of thought did not entirely pass
away in the Protestant Reformation. Turretin says, " No con
ditioned future event can be knowable apart from God's decree."
He had explained just before that by " decree " he means, not
God's generic purpose, but his special decree of the particular
1 Data of Ethics, p. 50.
2 Martineau and Atkinson, " Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and
Development," p. 219.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 47
event.1 Descartes says, " God did not will that the three angles
of a triangle should be equal to two right angles because he knew
it could not possibly be otherwise. But because he willed that
the three angles of a triangle should be necessarily equal to two
right angles, therefore this is now true ; and so of other things." 2
This doctrine has not even now entirely disappeared in Christian
theology. Mohammedism regards God as omnipotent lawless
will-power, and so sinks into practical fatalism. Similar must be
the issue of any doctrine of God's universal foreknowledge which
rests on the assumption that the universe is grounded in absolute
will-power independent of reason. Such a power in fact could
not be a free will. It is of the essence of free will that it acts in-
the light of the truths and laws of reason, which cannot be an
nulled by any causal efficiency, whether conscious or unconscious.
But the conception of the supremacy of will independent of rea
son is entirely foreign from theism. It would be as reasonable
to teach that the truth of any theorem of geometry is dependent
on a fiat of will. Theism teaches that the principles and laws of
reason are not external to or independent of and above God ;
also that they are not caused by his will or dependent on it ; but
are eternal in God, the absolute Reason. Then God knows all
that is possible, not merely as dependent on his power, but as
determined by the truths and laws, the ideals of perfection, and
norms of worth, which condition all efficient power and are eter
nal in God, the absolute Reason. In this sense the words of
Calvin are true : " Nowhere will be found one drop of wisdom
and light, or of justice, or of power, or of rectitude, or of pure
truth, which does not flow from God." 3 From this point of
view God's knowledge, at once archetypal and universal, is con
sistent with his own eternal freedom and with the freedom of all
rational beings. From this point of view we must assume that
there is known to God a sufficient reason in his perfect wisdom
and love for all his actions ; that his will, illuminated with the
light of reason and in harmony with its principles and laws in
love, always acts in perfect freedom ; and that in all his action he
respects the inviolable freedom and moral responsibility of his
rational creatures.
1 Inst. Theol., Locus III. Quaest. xiii.; Opera, vol. i. p. 194.
2 Responsiones, § 6.
8 Institutes, Bk. I. chap. ii. 1.

148 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
III. God's Knowledge is Perfect as Knowledge. — As
such it must have the following characteristics.
It is certainty of knowledge, excluding doubt, presumption,
conjecture, and probability.
It is clear and definite, excluding obscurity and indistinctness.
A person may pass a building every day ; yet if he should attempt
to draw a plan of it in all its details, and with mathematical ex
actness, he would find himself continually at a loss. A person
cannot recall his own thoughts for half an hour with completeness
and accuracy in their order. A person's knowledge of what he
supposes himself to know most intimately is always more or less
indefinite and inexact. God's knowledge of any object is always
clear, exact, and complete.
It is correct or true, excluding all error.
God's knowledge is immediate or intuitive. His knowledge is
not presented to him through a sensorium or any medium. It is
not acquired by any process of investigation or reasoning ; he
does not know by inference. He knows all the real relations of
beings by which they exist in the unity of a system and are com
prehended in a unity of thought, but he does not pass through
the processes of observation, investigation, and argument by
which man discovers them.
God's knowledge is individualizing, and not by abstraction and
generalization. He knows all the resemblances and relations by
which man classifies objects and comprehends them under gen
eral notions and designates them by general names. But he has no
need to resort to these expedients in order to know them. The
Bible represents God's knowledge of his creatures as so intimate
that he calleth them all by name. Isaiah, speaking of the stars,
says : " He bringeth forth their host by number ; he calleth them
all by name ; " x like a numbered and enrolled army, answering to
their names at the roll-call. The prophet also represents God as
a shepherd tenderly caring for each one in his flock according to
its peculiar needs.2 And our Saviour illustrates his own care of his
people by the same comparison with a shepherd, who " calleth his
own sheep by name." 8 Man can have such individualizing knowl
edge of very few objects. We know by name a few familiar ac
quaintances, a few pet animals. The most are known only in
1 Isaiah xl. 26. ' John x. 3, 4.
2 Isaiah xl. 11.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 49
general as men, horses, dogs. Even science makes little attempt
to know individuals by name. Astronomy, though dealing with
worlds, names only the planets of the solar system and a few of
the stars. Already the asteroids are so numerous that only a
professional astronomer attempts to know their names; the fixed
stars have to be grouped in constellations and designated by let
ters and numbers. And when we come to the Milky Way, where
suns seem drifted together like snow, all attempts at naming
them or even grouping them in constellations cease. The other
sciences make no attempt to call individuals by name. The
most learned botanist or zoologist knows the plants and animals
only in their genera and species. If we should attempt to know
all things in their individuality, every beast and bird, every tree
and every leaf and every blade of grass, every pebble and every
insect, our minds would be overwhelmed by the multiplicity, no
memory could learn the names, we should be unable not only to
communicate thought, but even to think. Therefore we must
resort to an expedient. We bring resembling objects into groups
and designate them by a common name. We bring them together
into a bundle and bind the bundles with the names. Then we
can apprehend them in thought and pass them from one to an
other in speech. It marks the greatness of man that he is thus
able to form a language and so lift himself out from the over
whelming multiplicity of things ; that his thought can thus get
the mastery of the universe, can apprehend it in its multitudi-
nousness and complexity, and possess and communicate the
knowledge of it. But while this power is proof of man's great
ness and of his pre-eminence above other terrestrial beings, it
reveals his limitation and feebleness in comparison with God.
His strength is weakness. We now see the significance of the
biblical representation of God's knowledge as individualizing
objects, calling them all by name. It uses even more wonder
ful representations : he clothes the lily with its beauty ; not a
sparrow falls to the ground without his notice ; the very hairs
of your head are all numbered.
God's knowledge, as archetypal, universal, and individualizing,
cannot be pictured in our imagination. " Such knowledge is too
wonderful for me ; it is high, I cannot attain unto it." 1
1 Psalm cxxxix. 6.

150 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
IV. The Constitution of the Universe. — The phrase, the
constitution of the universe, or its equivalent, the constitution of
things, is in common use in philosophy and theology. When a
fact cannot be more specifically accounted for, it is often said to
be according to the constitution of things. The expression often
floats in indefiniteness, and is sometimes no more than a sounding
phrase used as a cover of ignorance. It is even used to account
for God's action ; he acts according to the constitution of things,
as if this constitution were independent of God, determining his
action. We are now able to apprehend it in its definite meaning.
1. The constitution of the universe is the archetypal ideal of
God progressively expressed or realized in it. The archetype of
the universe is eternal in the mind of God. It is the archetype
of all that is accordant with the eternal truths and laws of reason
and realizes its ideals of perfection and of the good or well-being
which, estimated by the norms of reason, has true worth and is
worthy of the pursuit and enjoyment of a rational person. This
archetype is not itself a creation of God's will. It is equally true
that it is not external to God and independent of him. God in his
consciousness of himself is conscious of all the principles, laws, and
ideals of reason, as constituent and eternal elements of his own rea
son, and so is conscious of himself as the absolute Reason. There
fore, these principles, laws, ideals, and norms of reason are not
independent of God and external to him. And they are not mere
abstractions. They are concrete as cbnstituent elements of the
absolute Reason, the guiding lights of the divine intelligence and
action, and are real with all the reality of God, the ultimate
ground of the reality of the universe. But the constitution and
evolution of the universe, progressively realizing this archetypal
ideal, is dependent on God and caused by the free action of
God's will. This archetype has been freely and eternally chosen
by him, among all possible conceptions of a finite universe, as the
one accordant with eternal Reason and presenting the highest
ideals of perfection and well-being possible to be progressively
realized in accordance with the principles and laws of reason in a
finite universe and in the forms of space and time. Therefore,
while the truths and laws of reason are eternal, immutable and
uncreated in God as the absolute Reason, they are the truths and
laws in accordance with which, in the exercise of his almightiness,
God freely determines to act, the ideals and ends to which he

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — REASON 1 5 1
freely determines to direct his action in constituting and evolving
the universe. He freely bows and controls his almightiness into
conformity with the truths and laws of reason in the progressive
realization of its archetypal ideal. Thus this archetypal ideal be
comes the constitution of the universe. It is the mode in which
God in his almightiness acts, the plan of perfect wisdom and love
which he is progressively realizing. The universe in its constitu
tion and evolution reveals, as its fundamental reality, God the
absolute Reason, and the almighty Power acting in harmony with
reason. 2. As thus constituted the universe has a dependent but actual
reality in itself. God knows the archetype of the universe subjec
tive and uncreated in his own self-conscious Reason. He knows
the universe, not as his subjective thought nor as identical with
his own subjective action, but as the objective reality brought into
being by his own causal energy and realizing his archetypal thought
in finite beings in the forms of space and time. The universe,
therefore, is the objective reality on which he exerts his power,
the plastic medium in which he expresses his thought; and by
using its energies he progressively realizes in it the ideals of his
wisdom and love. It is the mirror in which God sees and reveals
his own image ; for he sees in it, in progressive realization, the
archetype of his own perfect wisdom and love, and therein sees,
objectively expressed, what he himself is as absolute Reason,
and what he is as almighty Will acting freely in harmony with
Reason. God creates matter and endows it with its interacting forces so
that it is real being and is capable of real interactive energy
in the chain of causes and effects which we call the course of
nature. Thus he constitutes the physical system. Immanent in
this, God acts on it and through its agencies and energies, direct
ing its evolution and more and more revealing his archetypal
thought in it as it becomes susceptible of higher manifestations of
his wisdom and power. And thus every molecule in it, every unit
of force, by whatever name called, is a real recipient and a real
agent, on and by which God acts in realizing his archetypal
thought, and thus more and more revealing himself in the pro
gressive development of the system. God also creates personal
beings. Each of these is a real individual being, a sub-creative
centre of intelligence and energy, on and through whom God by

152 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
his spiritual influences is advancing his kingdom and revealing the
higher ends of his wisdom and love.
3. Because the universe is thus constituted it is symbolic, it is
the expression of thought. It is so as a whole, in its archetypal
idea. It is so in all its parts, even in the ultimate units or con
stituents of matter. Six hundred years ago some architectural
genius made the plan of the cathedral in 'Cologne. The building
was finished only a few years ago. In the process of building it
through these centuries it has been progressively realizing and re
vealing the thought or plan of the architect. At the outset, ma
terial suitable for the plan of the structure must be selected.
Then the material selected must be fitted to its position and use
in the building. Both the selection and shaping of the material
and the fitting of it into the building in its progressive construc
tion must be guided by the archetypal thought of the architect.
According to this analogy, we think of God as first bringing into
being the matter of which the world was to be made. But from
all kinds of material seen by omniscience to be possible, that
only must be chosen which would be suitable for realizing the
archetype of perfect wisdom and love. This, again, in all its
parts must be adapted to its place and use in the universe as
it is constituted and developed according to the archetypal plan.
Thus every constituent element of the universe, every molecule in
it must have been fitted for its place and purpose in harmony
with the constituent elements of Reason, which are the principles,
laws, and ideals constituent of the universe ; it is therefore sig
nificant of rational thought, and reveals something of the archetypal
plan of the absolute Reason.
" Mirrors God maketh all atoms in space,
And fronteth each one with his perfect face."
" Though God extends beyond creation's rim,
Each smallest atom shows the whole of him." 1
Thus the deepest significance, as well as the deepest reality, of
the world, is in the fact that it is the realization of the archetype
of God's eternal reason expressing in it his perfect wisdom and
love. This is why it is intelligible through and through, and
when we investigate it we find that its intellectual equivalent as
1 W. R. Alger, " The Poetry of the East," pp. 109, 165.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 53
we apprehend it in our knowledge is rational science. Scientists
explore the universe intent only on finding the actual facts and
substantial reality of it ; and what they find in it is reality consti
tuted according to the most exact scientific thought. Science
finds that every sun, every planet, every atom, in every movement
is regulated by exact, unchanging law. The ideal is revealed in
the real and gives it its scientific explanation. Every individual
thing, in itself and in its relations to other things, and the universe
as a whole, each and all reveal the principles and laws, the ideals
and norms of reason, embodied in the material and the real. The
very names which the intensest realism of science must use to
designate the fundamental realities of the universe are meta
physical, as atom, molecule, force, ether; and its ultimate
principles, whether mathematical or philosophical, are ideal.
Modem science is demonstrating that an irremovable basis for
the real in the universe can be found only in the ideal, unchange
able in a mind behind the universe.
" Forever through the world's material forms
Heaven shoots the immaterial; night and day
Apocalyptic intimations stray
Across the rifts of matter."
A man is limited to a spot in space and a moment in time.
Yet in his small eye he takes in and sees at a glance the whole
expanse of the starry heaven. And with the eye of reason man
sees in and behind the starry heaven, and, ever present in and
coincident with it, the sphere of the invisible, the spiritual and
supernatural, the eternal Reason, and in it the eternal truths
and laws, the ideals of perfection and norms of worth, the eternal
archetype of wisdom and love, of which the universe is the pro
gressive realization and revelation. Whatever is perceived through
the senses may also be apprehended in the unchanging forms of
reason, and thus known as a symbol or revelation of the eternal
thought of God, — a point of light in which the spiritual and divine
shines out upon us like a single star shining out of the darkness
and revealing the immensity of the universe.
" Two worlds are ours ; 't is only sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within,
Plain as the sea and sky.

154 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
" Thou who hast given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out thee
And read thee everywhere." 1
Vaughan presents a similar conception, which may have suggested
to Wordsworth his famous " Ode on Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Childhood " : —
Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my angel-infancy ; . . .
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back at that short space
Could see a glimpse of His bright face ;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity ; . .
And felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness. Silex Scintillans : The Retreat.
Accordingly Christ spoke for all time in parables, setting forth the
ideal in the real. And language transfers the names of physical
things and powers to the spiritual realities which they symbolize,
and therefore has been significantly called " fossil poetry."
Pure theism compared with Christianity is sometimes spoken
of disparagingly, as if of little worth and poor in spiritual truth.
But pure theism is the basis of the realism of all science, and of
its possibility as science ; it illuminates all science and all human
history and reveals their deepest significance, and all science and
all human history enrich it with their treasures. We must know
the whole universe in order to know all the contents of pure
theism. And we must know God in order to understand aright
the universe or anything in it.
4. Because the constitution of the universe is the archetypal
thought of God, it is ordered under law ; and the law of its being,
action, and development is the archetypal truths eternal in God,
the absolute Reason.
These are the laws of nature in the true meaning of that
phrase. Because physical things and powers in nature have no
choice, its constitution according to the principles, laws, ideals,
1 Keble, " Christian Year."

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 155
and ends of reason insures in it continuity and uniformity of
sequence. Its factual and uniform sequences are commonly but
incorrectly called the laws of nature. The true laws of nature are
inherent in the constitution of the physical system, and are the
principles eternal in God, the absolute Reason, and realized and
revealed in nature. The uniform sequences are merely observed
facts in which the conformity of the course of nature and the
action of physical forces with the laws of reason is manifested.
The law of love, which is the law of all rational beings, is also
inherent in the constitution of the moral or spiritual system, and
eternal in the absolute Reason. Because rational persons are .free
agents, the moral law does not insure the certainty of their
uniform obedience to it. Some of them may sin. The fact that
men sin is not an absurdity ; it is accounted for by the fact that
they are finite free agents. But the sinner can be justified to
reason only on the supposition that a life of selfishness is in
eternal harmony with the truths and laws of absolute reason, and
essential to the realization of God's archetypal ideal of all perfec
tion and well-being. This supposition is absurd. In a life of
selfishness the sinner puts himself in opposition to the constitution
of the universe, and to the eternal principles and laws of the
absolute Reason. There is no place nor time in the universe in
which a person may realize his perfection and well-being in a life
of selfishness. If there were, the universe would no longer be
grounded in absolute Reason, but would sink into chaos. The
law of love is in the spiritual system analogous to the law of
gravitation in the physical. It is designed to bind all in harmony
and unity, each individual being attracted by and attracted to
every other, and all moving each in his appropriate orbit around
the central "Sun of Righteousness," attracted by God's love.
Thus the laws both of the physical system and ofthe spiritual are
eternal in the absolute Reason and are the constitution of the
universe. As Kant says : " Everything in nature acts according
to laws ; the distinction of a rational being is the power of acting
in the consciousness of law." Because the principles and laws,
as well as the ideals and worthy ends to be realized in both, are
rational, the physical system according to its constitution must
be subordinate to the spiritual and moral. It furnishes a place
for rational beings to live in and powers and resources for their
use ; means of education, discipline, training, and development ;

156 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
death itself is but an epoch in their development. Thus the
physical and the spiritual are constituted in the unity of one
system or universe accordant with rational principles and laws,
and progressively realizing the archetypal ideal of the highest
perfection and well-being possible in a finite universe according
to the principles and laws of eternal Reason.
Professor Clifford says that religion requires chiefly the observ
ance of rites, the neglect of which may be forgiven ; on the con
trary, he says, there can be no escape from the penalty of dis
regarding laws inherent in the constitution of things ; and that,
because it does not recognize these unchangeable laws, the
influence of religion in promoting true morality is insignificant or
even deleterious. x But we now see that the knowledge of God
recognized in religion is just that which shows that the law of
love is inherent in the constitution of the universe ; and also just
that which shows the true significance even of the laws of nature
as anything more than factual sequences. They are eternal in
God, the absolute Reason, and the universe is constituted and
evolved in accordance with them. It follows as a fundamental
principle, as we have already seen, that in a universe thus con
stituted according to the principles, laws, and ideals of the
divine reason, one who lives a life of universal love exercised in
righteousness must realize his highest perfection and well-being,
and be working in harmony with God in progressively realizing
the noblest ends ; and every one who lives in supreme selfishness
must miss his highest perfection and well-being and be working
against God and against the constitution of the universe in bring
ing evil on himself and on others. But God ever encompasses
the sinner with divine influences of good-will exercised in
righteous conformity with the eternal truths and laws of reason,
to induce him to repent and return to God in the life of love.
When he begins this life of love he begins to undo the evil he
has done and progressively to realize his highest perfection and
well-being and to work in harmony with God in the advancement
of his kingdom of universal love exercised in righteousness.
Professor Clifford unwittingly declared the necessity of atone
ment in the remission of the penalty of transgression of the law.
It is the essential atoning significance of God's redeeming grace
in Christ that in thus redeeming the sinner from his selfishness
1 The Ethics of Religion: Lectures and Essays, vol. ii. pp. 212-243.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 157
and sin God does it in good-will exercised in righteousness, in
exact conformity with the eternal truths, laws, and ideals of
reason, and so with the constitution and evolution of the universe.
Thus, in the redemption of the sinner from the life of selfishness
to the life of love and the remission of the penalty to the sinner
who repents, God maintains and vindicates the supreme and
immutable authority of the law as really as in the punishment
which, through the constitution of man and of the universe, he
inflicts on the persisting sinner. God does not undo the evil
already suffered and done by the sinner, for it is a fact of past
history which no power can obliterate. But through the influ
ences of his redeeming love the sinner has returned to God and
so into harmony with the eternal law of reason and with the
constitution of man and of the universe. Thus, in the new life
of love, he begins to work with God for good, and, availing himself
of God's never-ceasing gracious influences, gradually eliminates
the evil and corruption which by sin he had brought into his
own being, and ultimately realizes his own highest perfection and
well-being. Thus the Christian revelation of God discloses law
inherent in the constitution of the universe, which Professor
Clifford, totally misrepresenting Christianity, regarded as foreign
from its teaching and spirit. It also discloses the rational
ground and necessity of this conception of the constitution
of the universe.
5. Because the constitution of the universe is the archetypal
thought of God accordant with the eternal and unchangeable
principles, laws, ideals, and ends of reason, the realization of the
archetype in the universe in the forms of space and time must be
progressive and at every point of time incomplete.
The necessity of this progressiveness rests on the fundamental
principles of reason, determining the constitution of the universe.
It is a necessary principle of reason that absolute Being exists.
It is equally a principle of reason that the absolute Being cannot
create another absolute Being through whom and to whom he
reveals himself. The supposition of two absolute Beings is
absurd, because each would condition the other, and both would
be finite. Then reason would demand the real absolute on whom
both would depend. If, then, God reveals himself it can only be
through the finite to the finite. But the absolute can never be
commensurate with the finite nor be completely revealed in it.

158 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
If God reveals himself it must be in the finite, it must be pro
gressive and at every point of time and at every limit of the finite
incomplete. The assertion of the contrary is simply absurd, and
its realization absolutely impossible even to almighty power.
Science finds this progressiveness to be a fact. Independently
of the theory of evolution, geology reads the history of the develop
ment of the earth recorded in its strata, and demonstrates that it
has been progressive from lower to higher forms of being. And
in the Bible the work of God in advancing his kingdom is progres
sive ; the Saviour presents it as like an organic growth, " first the
blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." It is
objected that God himself created the material on and through
which he works. But this does not touch the point in question.
The progressiveness does not rest on the fact that the existing
material is limited here or there, but on the principle that, what
ever it may be, it must be finite. This is involved in the consti
tution of the universe ; and the constitution of the universe
is the archetype accordant with all the principles, laws, ideals,
and ends of absolute reason and expressing perfect wisdom and
love. This thought may be feebly illustrated from human art. By
the vision and faculty divine of genius, an ideal flashes into the
mind of a great artist, and as he sees it in the mental creation it
seems an ideal of perfect beauty. But when, with material brush
and paints, he would realize it on the canvas, he must begin with
formless blotches and proceed with immeasurable painstaking to
elaborate it to perfection. In the mental image it is perfect. In
its realization it is progressive through imperfection. So the
archetype of the universe is perfect in the eternal and divine
reason; its realization in the finite is progressive through
imperfection and at every point of time incomplete.1
1 Professor Haeckel presents the following caricature as the actual teach
ing of theists on this point: " In the realm of biology, which is still gov
erned by Teleology, and especially in the realm of Organic Morphology, we
see the ridiculous arbitrary government of a personal and thoroughly
humanlike creator, who vainly wearies himself in the endeavor to create a
perfect organism and constantly rejects the earlier creations of a former age,
because he is constantly setting up new and improved editions in their
places. . He is ... an architect, who is engaged in carrying on the
construction of the world according to some plan, but who never gets done
with it, because during the process of completion he is always hitting on

GOD IS A SPIRIT: —REASON 1 59
6. Therefore the universe at every point of time is typical and
prophetic of a higher future. As revealing the archetypal thought
of God it is the record of the past, symbolic in the present, typ
ical and prophetic of the greater future. It is so in nature. The
protozoa, at their appearance, are the type and prophecy of sen
sitive life in all the crowded realms of animal existence. The
first vetebrate animal was the type and prophecy of multitudes of
the same structure in higher species up to man. It is the same
in human history. The first rude tribal or patriarchal govern
ment is the type and prophecy of the higher forms of national
organization. History repeats itself. Hence there is in the con
stitution of the universe a basis for the types and prophecy of the
Bible. David, the theocratic king of God's kingdom in its earlier
period, is properly the type of the anointed one who is to come,
the Christ. Elijah is the type and prophecy of John, coming in
the spirit and power of Elijah. And the high priest and sacri
fices of the temple worship are the type and prophecy of Christ,
the true High Priest offering the true sacrifice for the sins of
men. So in the scriptures the human family is a type of the
family of God, and he describes himself by family relations, — the
father, the husband. And because no one type is all-compre
hending, the human commonwealth also is a type of the kingdom
of God ; God is the law-giver and king, and men are fellow-
citizens in his kingdom. And all the pure natural affections of
man, domestic and social, are types of the higher love and fellow
ship of the spiritual realm ; the mother's love is a type of God's
love to men. Redeemed humanity on earth is the type and
prophecy of humanity glorified in heaven. There is nothing
unnatural or forced in these interpretations. The universe itself,
according to its constitution, is at every point of time the type
and prophecy of something higher and greater in the future.
" Only that which made us meant us to be mightier by and by,
Set the sphere of all the boundless heavens within the human eye,
Sent the shadow of himself, the Boundless, through the human soul,
Boundless inward in the atom, Boundless outward in the Whole."1
new and better ideas." — Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. ii.
Bk. viii. chap. 30.
It would be as pertinent to sneer at an artist progressively expressing on
the canvas the ideal of his genius, or at an architect progressively realizing
his plan of a building, that he is continually changing his ideal or plan be
cause he is continually getting new and better ideas.
1 Tennyson, " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After."

l6o GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
V. Theistic Realism. — ¦ Realism is now used as the name of
any theory purporting to present a reasonable basis for the reality
of human knowledge. It is the opposite of idealism or phenom
enalism. The reality of human knowledge cannot be proved by
argument, because proof is possible only in the use of knowledge.
The reality of knowledge is certified in the act of knowing. But
the question arises whether we can find any ground in reason for
this self-certification of knowledge.
In answering this question, Sir William Hamilton1 gives us the
theory of Natural Realism. This is a true theory, though it is
essentially a mere explication of the fact that man is "so constituted
that he knows outward objects through immediate perception, and
himself in perceiving them. He is awaked to intellectual activity
and self-consciousness by the impact of his physical environment
on him through his sensorium. In one and the same act he
perceives the outward object and himself as perceiving it. There
fore his knowledge of the outward object is as real as his knowl
edge of himself, the subject or inward object. If either is unreal
the other must be unreal also, and the knowledge of both would
disappear. Then all human knowledge would be impossible.
The common-sense of mankind accepts this immediate knowl
edge in consciousness as real knowledge. Even those who have
speculatively denied its reality as knowledge have conformed to it
as real knowledge in every action. Objections against the reality
of this immediate knowledge are no more pertinent against the
ology than against physical science — for the objection, if valid,
sweeps away all human knowledge ; man himself and the world
around him are alike illusions or phantasms, and all men may say
with literal exactness, " What shadows we are, and what shadows
we pursue."
But we cannot stop in mere Natural Realism. Recognizing its
truth so far as it goes, we push on our investigations to ascertain
whether there is not some deeper ground in reason for the self-
certifying reality of human knowledge. This we find in Rational
Realism.1 Man is constituted with the power of rational intuition,
by which he knows universal and self-evident principles which are
laws to all thought and energy. In immediate knowledge in con
sciousness he knows himself and the outward objects that act on
him, not as mere phenomena or appearances, but as real beings
1 See "The Self-Revelation of God," pp. 75-82.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON l6l
manifesting themselves in the phenomena. Thus he attains in
an individual case the idea of being manifesting itself in phe
nomena. In the intuition of reason he sees the universal prin
ciple that all phenomena are the phenomena or appearances of
some being. This is the category of substance and quality. In
the exertion of his own energy, and meeting the resistance of it by
outward objects, he knows in immediate consciousness that the
energy or force which he exerts or resists is different from the
motion which is caused by it. Thus in individual cases he gets
the ideas of power or force as distinguished from motion, and of
a cause as distinguished from its effect. In rational intuition he
knows that it is a universal truth that all motion is the manifesta
tion of force, and that every beginning and change must have
a cause. In immediate consciousness he finds himself existing in
space and time, and among men and material things, as one among
many. In rational intuition he sees that the first principles of
geometry, arithmetic, and of all mathematics, are universal and
immutable principles. In immediate consciousness he finds him
self among rational men in a system of interdependence, inter
action, and reciprocity. In the intuition of reason he sees that
he is under obligation and owes duties to men, that he has not
the right to live solely for himself, appropriating the universe to
himself as if he owned it, but must respect the rights and have
regard to the well-being of others as well as of himself. In every
object which he perceives through the senses he also perceives an
ideal through rational intuition ; he perceives the object at once
in the forms of sense and in the forms of reason. Natural Real
ism appeals to Rational Realism, and is both justified and supple
mented by it. In the light of reason we see the universal in the
particular ; the rational, the ideal, and the spiritual in the physical
or material. In man's further investigation of observed facts,
reasoning from the known to the unknown, his conclusions are
real knowledge if his observation of facts has been correct and his
reasoning at every step accordant with the principles and laws of
reason. But Rational Realism itself is not ultimate. The important
truth which it presents leads us on to Theistic Realism. We ask
why the rational intuitions themselves may not be mere subjective
and illusive impressions of an individual mind. We may answer
that the universe is found by scientific investigation to be consti-
vol. i. — II

1 62 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
tuled in accordance with them ; that' their validity is implied as
essential in all knowledge ; that reason is the highest power of
intelligence, and therefore cannot rise above itself to criticise the
truthfulness of its own principles and laws, and that any appeal
from its judgments can be made only to reason itself. This is
true. But something more is implied in this answer itself. It pre
supposes that reason in man, in its essential and constituent prin
ciples, norms, and laws, is the same in kind with the reason that
reveals itself pervading the universe and enlightening and regu
lating the almighty power energizing in it. And this is precisely
the answer which theism gives.
Theistic Realism is the doctrine that the reality of human knowl
edge necessarily presupposes, as its only reasonable, basis, the
existence of God and the likeness of man to him in his rational
constitution. Human knowledge presupposes that the universe
is constituted intelligible, susceptible of being known by the
human mind. When the universe or anything in it is studied, it
is found to be constituted scientifically, so that the knowledge of
it, when expressed and vindicated in words, is found to be science.
If the science had not first been expressed in the universe the
human mind could never have read it there, and recorded it in
a scientific treatise. This implies that the absolute power that
reveals itself energizing in the universe, sustaining and evolving it,
is enlightened and directed by reason, the same in kind with
human reason in its essential and constituent principles and char
acteristics as reason. It is, therefore, identical with what the theist
calls God, and the existence of God and of man in his likeness is
the necessary presupposition of the reality of human knowledge.
Any power enlightened by reason is self-directive and self-exertive,
— a personal being. Reason is everywhere and always the same
in kind ; otherwise knowledge is impossible. God is Reason in
the form of the absolute and unconditioned. Man is reason, the
same in kind, but in the form of the finite and the dependent.
Therefore man's self-certifying knowledge is real and valid knowl
edge, because the human reason that certifies its reality is, in its
essence and constituent principles as reason, the same in kind
with reason absolute and eternal in God. The universe is the
expression of the archetypal thought of the absolute reason. That
divine thought is the eternal archetype exactly accordant with all

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 163
rational truth, law, ideals, and ends, eternal in God, the absolute
Reason. It is the original science of the universe eternal in the
mind of God, and progressively expressed in the universe. It is
the revelation of reason eternal, in the form of the absolute, to
reason, essentially like it as reason, though in the form of the
finite and dependent. Here, then, is a reasonable and philo
sophical basis of the reality of man's self-certifying knowledge.
The universe, being the revelation of reason, must be intelligible
to reason ; being the expression of rational thought, human reason
can read and interpret it ; being the expression of science orig
inal in the mind of God, man observes and interprets the universe,
and the record of his discoveries is science in the strictest accord
with the principles and laws of human reason.
This is theistic realism. It is the reasonable and sufficient
basis of the reality of human knowledge. And there is and can
be no other. If the universe is not ultimately grounded in reason,
if it is not the expression of rational thought, then it cannot be
interpreted as the expression of rational thought ; it cannot be
translated into science, it is in its essence unintelligible. This
Mr. Spencer acknowledges when he says that " the axiomatic
truths of physical science unavoidably postulate absolute Being as
their common basis."
Atheism, therefore, in any and all its forms, can be true only
as it presupposes universal skepticism, the denial of the possibility
of any human knowledge.
I proceed to exemplify and verify theistic realism in the various
spheres of human knowledge.
The truth of theistic realism is exemplified and verified in
physical science. Instead of excluding all knowledge of God,
as some have loudly asserted, physical science demands the
existence of God as the presupposition necessary to the possi
bility and reality of scientific knowledge.
All science depends on the truth of the intuitive principles and
laws of reason. If any scientists do not recognize them, if on the
contrary they positively deny their validity, yet they use them all
the same in every process of scientific thought; and on the
validity of these principles and laws the correctness of all their
conclusions depends. But physical science can give no account
of them and their significance, and no reason why they are trust
worthy as laws to all thought and action. This theism alone
can do.

1 64 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Therefore, if there is no God who is the absolute Reason, and
if reason in man is not essentially like reason in God, then all
science breaks down. We assume that the principles of con
tinuity, of uniformity, of non-contradiction are true in every star
and in every atom. We spin our geometry, our arithmetic,
algebra, and calculus out of our own minds ; we apply the results
to the observed positions of the heavenly bodies, and find that
their positions and movements correspond. We thus get our
astronomy. But if reason like our own does not rule in the
planets, the sun, and the stars, then all our astronomy is worthless.
Then the " Principia " of Newton, the " Me'canique Celeste " of
Laplace, are only collections of subjective calculations expressed in
meaningless symbols and issuing in total lack of knowledge. Mr.
Norman Lockyer estimates that light — which comes from the sun,
a distance of over 90,000,000 miles, in eight minutes — cannot be
less than 3,500 years in coming from a star of the twelfth magni
tude visible through a telescope not of the very highest power.1
This assumes that, throughout a sphere whose radius is this
immense distance, the universe is regulated by reason the same
in its principles and laws as the reason of man ; that the same
mathematics which regulate our thinking regulate the movements
of all bodies within that sphere ; that the same ether and the
same laws of chemical dynamics prevail throughout it, and that
these all have remained unchanged during all the centuries in
which that light has been speeding toward the earth. This is
only a single instance exemplifying the fact that all science rests
on the presupposition that the power energizing throughout the
universe is enlightened and directed by reason which, in its
essential principles and laws, is the same in kind with our own.
The same is exemplified in the immeasurably greater distance of
stars which cannot be seen through the most powerful telescope,
and reveal themselves only by the action of the actinic rays on a
photographic plate, implying a vastly greater sphere and many
more centuries of the journey of light through it. The same
assumption of science is exemplified in all scientific discovery
through what is now called induction. The scientist constructs
in imagination, from what is already known, an hypothesis, ac
cording to the principles and laws of reason, as to what the
unknown fact or law may be ; he then deduces, in accordance
1 Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1889.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 165
with the principles and laws of reason, what the fact or law would
be if his hypothesis is correct ; he then makes further observations
and ascertains whether the facts known correspond with the
necessary deductions from his hypothesis. Thus in all scientific
induction science assumes that the necessary principles and laws
of human reason are true throughout all space and time, and
verifies the assumption by ascertaining through the observation of
facts that the universe is constituted and evolved in accordance
with this assumption and the conclusions founded on it. This is
further exemplified in the fact that science assumes that the
universe in every part is constructed scientifically, in accordance
with reason like our own. As Professor Huxley says, the object
of science " is the discovery of the rational order which pervades
the universe." x Whenever a new fact is observed science assumes
that it is capable of scientific explanation, that it is in conformity
with law and in harmony with the rational order of the system.
It never for a moment assumes that it has found anything in
capable of scientific explanation. For however long a time an
observed fact remains unexplained, science assumes that it is
because the facts which will explain it have not yet been dis
covered, never that it is in itself inexplicable and unscientific.
Thus the possibility of a scientific knowledge of the universe neces
sarily presupposes the existence of God and the likeness of
man, as rational, to him. As we see in the light of the sun, so we
know in the light of the divine and eternal Reason, " the true
light which lighteth every man." Thus science itself must look
reverently to God, the absolute and eternal Reason, and say with
the Psalmist, "In thy light shall we see light " (Ps. xxxvi. 9).
When a skeptical scientist awakens to the consciousness of the
dependence of his own science on the recognition of the universe
as grounded in absolute Reason, constituted and evolved in ac
cordance with the eternal principles and laws of absolute Reason
and for the progressive realization of the archetypal ideal of that
Reason, he may well exclaim, with Jacob when he awoke, " God was
in this place and I knew it not " (Gen. xxviii. 16), and will see
science itself as a ladder between heaven and earth, on which
God's revelations come down to man and the thought of man
mounts up to God. This the scientists of former centuries were
wont devoutly to recognize. Listen to Kepler : " I give thee
1 Lecture on the Progress of Science in the last Half Century.

166 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
thanks, Lord and Creator, that thou hast given me delight in thy
creation and I have exulted in the work of thy hands. I have
revealed to mankind the glory of thy works, so far as my limited
mind could take in that infinite glory. ... If I have given forth
anything that is unworthy of thee, or if I have sought my own
fame, wilt thou, gracious and merciful, forgive me." Hear
Linnaeus, in his researches among plants : " God eternal, omni
scient, omnipotent, I have seen from behind as he has passed by,
and have been awed." Hear Lord Bacon, joining this choir of
kingly worshipers : " Thou, therefore, Father, who gavest the
visible light as the first-fruits of the creation, and at the comple
tion of thy works didst inspire the countenance of man with
intellectual light, guard and direct this work, which, proceeding
from thy bounty, seeks in return thy glory. ... If we labor in
thy works, thou wilt make us partakers of thy vision and of thy
Sabbath. We pray that this mind may abide in us ; and that, by
our hands and the hands of others to whom thou shalt impart
the same mind, thou wilt be pleased to endow with new gifts the
family of man."
Many scientists of our own time are theists ; they see no con
flict between physical science and theism, but rather regard
science as enlarging our knowledge of God. It is unnecessary to
mention names, for many of them are eminent and widely known
both as scientists and as theists.
Professor Agassiz prefixed to his great work on "American
Natural History " an elaborate Introduction in more than thirty
chapters on "The Method of Classification." The fundamental
principle which he maintains through the whole is, that all attempts
at artificial classification in " Natural History " are futile ; that all
classification must be natural, and must consist in seeking by the
study of individuals to find out the thought of the Creator, the
plan which he is realizing in them. All genera and species, all
gradations of the orders of animals are simply expressions of the
divine thought realized in them.
Science of late, even when not explicitly recognizing God, has
reached positions rendering the recognition of him logically and
reasonably necessary. The Positivism of Comte recognized no
absolute Being. In consistency with this it denied all knowledge
of cause, of force molar or molecular, of atoms, of the ether, or
of any substantial being. These he contemptuously rejected as

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — REASON 167
mere metaphysical ideas having no place in science. He limited
knowledge to the subjective phenomena of sense. He expected
and predicted that his Positivism would prevail and that in it
the highest progress of man in knowledge would be realized.
But science in its progress has already rejected it as inadequate
to meet its demands. In fact what Comte rejected as meta
physical ideas are now treated as realities and have of late been
among the most prominent topics of scientific thought. Thus
science itself with its conservation and correlation of force, its
distinction of force potential and energizing, its ether-theory of
light, heat, and electricity, its atoms and molecules, its theory of
evolution, has been teaching us that the reality of the physical
lies in the rational, the ideal, the spiritual, and depends on the
principles and laws of reason which are constituent elements of
human reason and are assumed in all science as true and immut
able through all space and time. Because science finds the
universe constituted and evolved in accordance with these- eter
nal and universal principles and laws, the universe itself as known
in science becomes a demonstration, not only of the real exist
ence of the absolute Reason in whom these principles and laws
are eternal and immutable, but also of the entire trustworthiness
of the rational intuitions of the human mind, through which man
knows these principles and laws. The scientist reasons on the
assumption that these principles and laws of reason are univer
sally and immutably true and regulative of rational thought and
action. Then science finds that the constitution and evolution
of the universe and the action of all physical forces in it are
regulated in unerring accordance with these principles and laws.
There is no longer any place for skepticism which resolves all
knowledge into mere conjecture and denies the reality of
knowledge. A further noticeable approximation of the thinking of skeptics
to the position of the theist is found in the fact that, with the
exception of the few who accept Comte 's Positivism in its full
significance, atheism itself in all its current forms acknowledges
the existence of some absolute being. This is acknowledged by
Spencerian agnostics, by pantheists, and by materialists. Thus
they admit the ¦ knowledge of real being as distinguished from
mere subjective illusion, and the reality of Power as distinguished
from motion, and the reality of causal energy. But if the power

168 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
manifested in the universe reveals the absolute being as power,
certainly the reason manifested in the universe, regulating the
power, equally reveals the absolute being as reason. If the abso
lute being is recognized as blind, irrational force, this would give
no basis for the truth of the universal principles of human reason,
or for human knowledge of any kind, and pre-eminently no basis
for the reality of human science, which is the knowledge of the
universe as scientifically constituted in accordance with principles
and laws like those essential and constituent in the reason of
man. Therefore atheism in all its forms presupposes the impos
sibility of any scientific knowledge of the universe and of the
reality of any human knowledge.
Materialistic scientists have maintained that the phenomena of
conscious mind are fully accounted for, under the law ofthe conser
vation and correlation of force, as molecular motion of the brain
transformed into thought, choice, love, and other manifestations
of conscious mind. Mr. Edward Clodd, in " The Story of Crea
tion : a Plain Account of Evolution," says : " The nebulous stuff of
which the universe is the product held within its diffused vapors "
all that we have knowledge of, including " genius." A reviewer
of the book wittily says, " The story of creation is shown to be the
unbroken record of the evolution of gas into genius." 1 But in the
progress of scientific investigation scientists are more and more
finding insuperable difficulties in each of these theories. Professor
Haeckel is compelled to postulate in the brain a peculiar kind of
mind-cells. Professor Clifford assumed the existence of a " mind-
stuff," a small portion of which he supposed to be present in every
thing. These materialistic assumptions fully recognize mind as
entirely distinct from other forms of matter ; they recognize the old
ineffaceable distinction, but totally fail to explain it. They merely
try to hide the insuperable difficulty of materialism by pushing it
back into still deeper obscurity. Much more truly scientific is
Professor Tyndall : " While accepting fearlessly the facts of
materialism. ... I bow'my head in the dust before the mystery
of mind, which has hitherto defied its own penetrative power,
and which may utterly resolve itself into a demonstrable impos
sibility of penetration. . . . The passage from the physics of
the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is incon
ceivable as a result of mechanics. . . . The problem of the
1 Contemporary Review, Aug. 1888, p. 194.

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — REASON 169
connection of body and soul is as insoluble in its modern form
as it was in pre-scientific ages." John Fiske says of the theory
that mental phenomena are the molecular motions of the brain
transformed into thought : "That it cannot possibly be the product
of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated
beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of
physical forces. The Platonic view of the soul, as a spiritual
substance, an effluence from Godhood, which under certain con
ditions becomes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is
doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our
knowledge." 1 Professor Tyndall says that the supposition that
mental phenomena — and he mentions as an example his emotions
in seeing the avalanches on the Alps — existed in the original
nebulous matter would necessarily change our entire conception
of what matter essentially is.
The acceptance- of one or the other of these two theories is
absolutely essential to materialism ; either the molecular action
of the brain must be transformed into conscious mental action,
or the mind must have existed as a distinct entity in the original
homogeneous stuff. Each theory recognizes the complete dis
tinction between matter and mind ; the latter, that mind has
distinct existence in the homogeneous, carries the distinction
back antecedent to the beginning ofthe evolution and incorporates
it into the very substance and constitution of the universe. Each
involves a change in the essential idea either of matter or of mind.
And each totally fails to remove the difficulty. Thus materialism
totally fails to account for the fundamental facts of human knowl
edge and to give any reasonable basis for the reality of human
knowledge. This of itself is a complete disproof of materialism.
On the contrary, theism presents a perfectly clear exposition of
both realities and a reasonable basis for our knowledge of them
in accordance with the common consciousness of mankind. In
this, therefore, Theistic Realism is exemplified and verified.
That the reality of human knowledge presupposes the exist
ence of God, and man's likeness to him, is also exemplified and
verified in ethics. The principles of moral law present them
selves as of imperative obligation, absolute authority, and uni
versal application. We must think the law of love obligatory on
persons of every country and of every age. If we think of any
1 The Destiny of Man, pp. 42, 43.

170 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
world inhabited by rational persons anywhere in space, or in any
period of time however remote, we must think its inhabitants are
under obligation to obey that law. It is no " provincialism of
this planet." 1 It is as universal as the law of causation or the
principles of mathematics. Lockyer estimated that between
30,000,000 and 50,000,000 of stars are visible to man. If
every one of these has planets inhabited by rational persons, in
every one of them the law of love must be supreme. If it is not
so, then that law is no longer the one supreme, universal, and
imperative law having its basis in eternal and absolute Reason.
Thus the knowledge of right and wrong, of duty, of the law
of love presupposes the existence of God, in whom, as the
absolute Reason, this law is eternal ; who energizes in accord
ance with this law in constituting and developing the universe,
and from whom it becomes the law to all rational beings. And
it is only because his rational creatures are, as rational, essen
tially like God, that they, in their own rational and moral devel
opment, come to have knowledge of this law, and, conforming
with it in the exercise of love, are capable of becoming like God
in moral character. If there were no God there could be no
moral law.
Atheism in all its forms involves the impossibility of moral
law and government, and of the unity of all rational persons in
one moral system.
I have already alluded to the teaching of Mr. Kidd in his
"Social Evolution," that it is not reasonable that a man should
have any interest in any generation of men living after he him
self will be dead, because his own welfare does not depend on
the conduct of men in that future time. For the same reason it
would follow that he is not interested in the people of his own
generation except so far as his own welfare is affected by their
action. This resolves itself into the Hedonistic theory of ethics
in its lowest form, — that the supreme end of all right action is the
agent's own happiness. This being the teaching of human rea
son, the law of love is imposed on men by an ultra- rational or
supra-rational power above and beyond reason. Then the ques
tion arises how man can have any knowledge of such ultra-
rational power having nothing in common with human reason.
It would seem to shut man out from all knowledge of God, and
1 James Martineau, " Study of Religion," vol. i. pp. 27, 28.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 71
to shut God out from the possibility of revealing himself to man.
Or, if man can know him, he would know him only as an arbi
trary resistless power, forcing his own arbitrary and supra-rational
behests on man, and punishing him for not obeying. This car
ries us back to the philosophy of Duns Scotus and Occam, who
taught that God's law is the enactment of his naked and resistless
will; and that, if God had commanded just the contrary, man
would have been under equal obligation to obey him. In such a
theory of a supra-rational God is no basis for any eternal and
immutable distinction of right and wrong, nor for the reality of
human knowledge in any sphere. It would certainly be in direct
contradiction to all physical science, for this is continually de
monstrating that the physical universe is constituted and ordered
in accordance with the principles and laws which are constituent
elements of human reason.
Theistic Realism is exemplified and verified also in aesthetics.
The language of skepticism is, " If language be intended not to
veil but to convey thought, the phrase ' poetic interpretation of
nature ' implies that nature means something and has something
to say. I must venture to affirm, in contravention of this implica
tion, that nature is a dumb oracle, who of herself says nothing,
but will most obligingly emit any voice the poet chooses to put
inside of her." x This is simply the language of universal skepti
cism. It would imply that nature would be equally obliging to
the scientist and emit any voice that the scientist might suggest
to her. The existence of God as the absolute Reason and the
likeness of the divine to the human, as rational, are necessarily
presupposed in all aesthetics which recognizes the beautiful as
anything more than the pleasing or agreeable, and which recog
nizes ideals of perfection as creations of the mind in accordance
with norms or standards of reason, and so aims beyond mere
copies of what is observed in nature. If such rational norms or
standards of the perfect and the beautiful exist in the reason of
man, their prototypes must be eternal in God, the absolute Rea
son, and that absolute Reason must be in its essence as reason
like the reason of man. Moreover, human reason sees that the
universe must exist for a rational end, realizing progressively an
ideal which commends itself to human reason as reasonable, right,
1 Contemporary Review, November, 1877. Review of " Shairp's Poetic
Interpretation of Nature."

172 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
and worthy. Whatever difficulties present themselves in our
empirical observation which we cannot immediately harmonize
with such an ideal, the human mind still insists that a perfect
moral ideal must be in process of being realized in the progres
sive evolution of the universe. Human reason revolts from the
conception of this vast and glorious universe as a complexity of
blind forces grinding forever to accomplish no reasonable end.
And all objections to theism on account of evil in the universe
rest on the assumption that the universe . ought to exist for a
reasonable end worthy of its grandeur. But if an ideal of some
end worthy of this vast and complicated expenditure of power
exists and is in process of realization, it must be eternal and
archetypal in the mind of God. And human reason sees such an
ideal in the kingdom of God and the universal reign of good-will
directed by righteousness ; it foresees and expects its progressive
realization in a future always better than the past, and opening in
endless vistas of glory into the life eternal. And this it is able to
see and to expect, because human reason is in essential likeness
to the divine, and participates in its eternal light.
Atheism excludes every reasonable conception of the beautiful
and identifies it with the pleasurable or agreeable ; it excludes
every rational ideal of the perfect and all reasonable expectation
or hope of progress toward its realization, and smothers all hope
of immortality.
The truth of theistic realism is exemplified and verified still
further in the knowledge of the Good, or of true well-being.
Love both in God and man is good-will regulated by righteous
ness. Theism teaches that God has constituted and evolves the
universe in accordance with the principles and laws of reason, in
the exercise of the love required by the law, and for the realiza
tion of rational ideals and ends. If the universe is thus consti
tuted, it is impossible for any person to attain real well-being
except in accordance with the principles and laws of reason and
with the law of love. Man, therefore, must sit in judgment on the
sources of his enjoyment and decide which have true worth or are
worthy of the pursuit of a rational being. He can do this only
because he sees in his own constitution, as rational, principles and
laws the same in kind with those which have enlightened and
guided the divine mind in the constitution and evolution of the
universe. If there is no God, then there are no eternal prin-

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 73
ciples, laws, and ideals of perfection in accordance with which
the universe was constituted, and by which the good or well-being
possible in the universe is determined. Then nothing is left us,
in defining the good or well-being, but the lowest type of egoistic
hedonism. The good can be ascertained only by measuring em
pirically the quantity of enjoyment, as to duration and intensity,
obtained in the pursuit, possession, and use of any object. Any
one who is finding his enjoyment in sensuality, or in any line of
selfish gratification, has no standard of truth and law by which he
can judge and condemn these as unworthy, but is shut up to seek
ing his enjoyment in them, because he dislikes nobler pursuits and
can see no pleasure in them. The latter do not attract but are
only repulsive to him. Accordingly we find that the great ideas
which vitalize modern political and social progress presuppose the
existence of God and derive therefrom their beneficent power.
Such are the ideas of the brotherhood and equality of man, his
dignity and worth as man, the sacredness of his rights. Under
the influence of such ideas the people have been putting away
despotism and slavery, establishing popular government, opposing
the reign of covetousness, opposing plutocracy, and asserting for
laborers their rights. These ideas are significant only from the
facts that there is a God, that men are in his likeness as rational
and capable of being like him in love, that they are objects of his
providential care, his moral law and government, and his redeem
ing love. Accordingly it is a fact that this progress has been
confined to the Christian nations and has affected the non-Chris
tian peoples only as carried to them from Christian countries.
Atheism, therefore, necessarily implies that there is no ultimate
unchanging standard of good and evil, but that every one must
seek what seems good to him, whatever he desires and enjoys,
following his own lusts.
Therefore Theistic Realism is exemplified and verified as the
ultimate ground of all belief in human progress. Skeptics object
that, by the methods of empirical science which alone they recog
nize as science, we do not find that the universe exists and goes
on in the harmony and unity of a system progressively realizing a
rational ideal. An obvious answer is that in this very objection
the skeptic himself appeals to an ideal existing in his own mind
accordant with immutable principles and laws of reason, by com
parison with which he judges the universe to be imperfect. Thus

174 G0D> THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
he acknowledges the reality of rational principles, laws, and ideals
in the human reason, which gives a standard of appeal and judg
ment in accordance with which he affirms that the universe ought
to be constituted and evolved and so be progressively realizing
the ideal. Thus by his own objection he refutes his own skepti
cism. If such supreme, universal, and immutable principles exist,
they must be eternal in God, the absolute Reason.
A further answer is that, as soon as we acknowledge God the
absolute Reason, we see the unity and continuity of the universe
as progressively realizing a grand archetypal ideal of reason. And
science discovers that the universe is thus progressive in the unity
and continuity of a reasonable system toward the realization of
an archetypal reasonable ideal. It begins in the homogeneous
nebulous stuff; it is evolved through successive epochs, realizing
higher and higher orders of beings, until it becomes fitted to be
the sphere in which finite rational beings can live and act. Then
these beings come into existence. They are rational persons in
the likeness of God, who is a Spirit ; they know him and read his
thoughts after him as he has expressed them in the universe.
Then we discover an end worthy of the existence of the universe,
in the progressive development of the kingdom of God, which
consists of finite rational persons in the process of education to
know God and to serve him, in unity with God and with one an
other in the life of love, and forever advancing under God's guid
ance and influence in spiritual development, knowledge, and power.
When we think of this education and development of rational and
immortal beings going on in innumerable worlds and constituting
the kingdom of God increasing in glory through endless time, we
certainly perceive the universe in the unity and continuity of a
rational system progressively realizing a grand ideal worthy of
God. On the contrary, physical science, when not recognizing
God, is driven to the conclusion that in the evolution of the uni
verse there is a continuous waste of energy which sooner or later
must issue in the cessation of all life and motion, and our universe
will become and remain a silent, motionless, dark, and frozen
mass. Thus human knowledge in every aspect and every sphere presup
poses the existence of God the absolute Reason, the likeness to him
of man as rational, and his possible likeness to him in love. This
is true of the common knowledge of every-day life. It is equally

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — REASON 1 75
true of physical science, of ethics, of aesthetics, and of practical
or teleological knowledge as to the ways of promoting the well-
being of the individual and of society.1 We may, therefore, join
with an ancient writer in saying : Wisdom " is a breath of the
power of God and a pure effulgence from the glory of the
Almighty ; therefore no defiled thing falls into her. For she is a
reflection of the everlasting light, and an unspotted mirror of the
efficiency of God and image of his goodness. Though but one,
she can do all things ; and though remaining in herself, she maketh
all things new ; and, from generation to generation entering holy
souls, she equippeth friends of God and prophets. For God loveth
none but him who dwelleth with wisdom. For she is more beau
tiful than the sun and above every position of the stars ; being
compared with light she is found superior. For after light cometh
night ; but vice shall not prevail against wisdom." 2
In Patmos, John saw in vision the heavenly city, the new Jeru
salem : " And the city hath no need of the sun, neither of the
moon to shine upon it ; for the glory of God did lighten it and
the Lamb is the light thereof" (Rev. xxi. 23). And if we see
things as they are, it is equally true of this world that it is the
glory of God which lightens it. All human knowledge presupposes
the Divine reason pervading and illuminating the universe. All
man's seeing is by participation in the Divine light. It had
become a proverb in ancient Israel : " The spirit of man is the
candle ofthe Lord, searching all the innermost parts" (Prov. xx.
27). Human nature and life are full of enigmas and hard prob
lems. It lies in darkness. The spirit of man is its light, search
ing all its deepest recesses. But the spirit of man is itself the
candle of the Lord. Its light is from him. All man's knowledge
comes from his being, as rational, in the likeness of God and
participating in his light. God is " the father of lights " (James i.
17). If this were not so, all man's knowledge would be extin
guished and total darkness would settle upon him and his life.
1 A distinguished English scientist, in one of his published writings,
sneers at theologians as publishing their theology "in great volumes of
colossal ignorance." But ignorance can nowhere be more " colossal "
than in the man who has no knowledge of God, nor of himself as any
thing but a flitting phantom, nor of the universe except as an ever-revolving
and ever-dissolving panorama of shadows which themselves are shadows
of nothing.
2 The Apocrypha: "The Wisdom of Solomon," chap. vii. 25-30.

176 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
So Jesus said : " If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great
is that darkness." Similar was the thought of Sir Henry More : —
" I come from heaven, am an immortal ray
Of God ; O joy ! and back to God shall go ;
And here sweet love on wings me up doth stay.
I live, I 'm sure, and joy this life to know.
Night and vain dreams begone. Father of light,
We live, as thou, clad with eternal day.
Faith, wisdom, joy, free love and winged might — ¦
This is true life ; all else death and decay."
Voltaire said : " God made man in his own image, and man
has returned the compliment." But this objection that theism is
essentially anthropomorphic is now effectually silenced. For all
human knowledge, and pre-eminently all scientific knowledge, is
indisputably anthropomorphic in the same sense in which theism is
so. It assumes that the whole universe is constituted and ordered in
accordance with the same principles and laws which are essential
and constituent in human reason. If it is not so, then all human
knowledge, scientific or non-scientific, dissolves into illusion.
The necessary conclusion is, that the fundamental reality in the
universe is the spiritual and supernatural, not the material and
physical. The absolute Being is God, the absolute Spirit, in
whom all the powers in the universe originate and by whom, as
absolute Reason, they are directed. In him as Reason all the
fundamental and universal principles of reason and the rational
archetype of the universe are eternal ; in him as almighty all the
causal energies of the universe originate, in him are all the powers
and resources making the universe possible. Thus the absolute
and fundamental reality of the universe is the supernatural, God
the eternal Spirit. And among earthly and finite beings the fun
damental reality is the supernatural, the mind and spirit , f man,
who is in the likeness of God. Instead of the common impres
sion that the fundamental and substantial reality is matter and its
forces, the things we see and feel and handle, and that spirit is
ghostly, phantasmic and unreal, we must accept as true the very
contrary, — that the spiritual and supernatural is the fundamental
reality, that the material is a medium in and through which spirit
reveals itself.

CHAPTER V

GOD IS A SPOUT:  WILL

The will is the attribute of a personal being considered as hav
ing causal efficiency or power and capable of determining in the
light of reason both the direction and exertion of his energy. All
power is not will, but all will is power. It is power self-directive
and self-exertive in the light of reason, as distinguished from
power acting in necessity as it is acted on. In our thinking we
necessarily abstract will from reason. In reality they are differ
ent but inseparable aspects of one and the same personal being.
Will is practical or energizing reason ; reason is rational power
or will. In the preceding chapter we have considered God as
Reason ; in this chapter we are to consider him as will. In dis
cussing the two we simply contemplate God, the one personal
Spirit, in the two aspects of his being, the rational and the effi
cient or energizing. His reason, whether in its intellectual aspect
as the organ of truth or in its ethical aspect as the organ of law,
is never separated from his power or will.
The attributes of God as Will are Almightiness, Freedom and
Love. I. Almightiness or Omnipotence. — God's power is uncon
ditioned and unlimited by any reality independent of himself.
i. Power or causal efficiency is an attribute of God. It is the
basis of the idea of will. Freedom can have no reality except as the
attribute of a being endowed with causal efficiency and capable
of causal energy. Therefore, in considering the attributes of God
as will we must begin with his power, which is the basal reality of
will. God is the first cause of the universe, and is ever energizing
in it. Power, or causative efficiency, is an attribute recognized
in every conception of a divinity, even in fetichism and the
vol. i. — 12

178 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
worship of the so-called nature-gods. It is essential in the idea
of the absolute Being. All who believe that absolute Being
exists, even though denying its personality, recognize it as the
Power which manifests itself in all the phenomena of the uni
verse. God's power is creative. This is involved in the fact that as
the absolute Being he is unconditioned and all -conditioning. As
such he is the origin and first cause of all that is. He alone is
self-existent. Finite creatures derive their being and power from
him and exist only as dependent on him. As the source and
support of all beings and their powers, he is their creator.
God's creative power is primarily the efficiency of his will. It
has no analogy to the exertion of muscular strength. It is rather
analogous to man's moving his arm by a volition. The opening
lines of the eighth book of the Iliad are often quoted as exem
plifying the sublime. Jupiter forbids the gods under the direst
penalties to aid either the Greeks or the Trojans. To remind
them of his resistless might he challenges them to hang a golden
chain from heaven, and all of them, both gods and goddesses, to
lay hold of it ; and he warns them that, striving to their utmost,
they would be unable to drag him down. But he would grasp
the chain and swing them all, with the earth and sea besides;
and then would fasten the chain around the summit of Olympus
and leave them all dangling in mid-air. Here is nothing but
muscular strength, a sort of athletic contest. How immeasura
bly more sublime the scriptural representations : " Let light be,
and light was." " He spake and it was done ; he commanded and
it stood fast." " By the word of the Lord were the heavens made ;
and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth." a Longi-
nus, in his treatise on " The Sublime," cites this verse in Genesis
as a most remarkable example of the sublime.
2. God is almighty, or omnipotent. In all his attributes as per
sonal Spirit, God remains always the absolute Being. This must
always be borne in mind in defining the personal attributes.
Accordingly God is absolute in power. As self-existent, uncon
ditioned by any being or causal efficiency independent of himself,
his power is underived and independent. As eternal and every
where present, his power is not limited within any period of time
or any locality in space. In the plenitude of his being his power
1 Gen. i. 3 ; Psalm xxxiii. 9, 6.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — WILL 179
is not limited in quantity. Thus he is almighty; his power is
not limited or conditioned by any being or power independent of
himself. It is objected that we do not know that God is absolutely
almighty, but only that he has power adequate to cause what
actually exists. This objection rests on the supposition that God
is known to be the absolute Being only by inference from observed
effects. If so, we could infer only a cause adequate to the effects.
But the objection is of no force against the true position that
the existence of the absolute Being is known through a funda
mental principle of reason which is a necessary law of thought.
God is not the first term in the chain of finite causes and effects ;
he is the absolute Being who transcends the whole chain and is
the ultimate and necessary ground of all finite being and power.
It is also objected that it would be a limitation of God if he
should cause finite effects in space and time. But the objection,
if valid, would itself imply that God is limited. If he is shut out
by the boundaries of time, space and quantity, he is limited as
really as. if, like finite beings, he were shut up within them.
Further, his creation of a second absolute Being is absurd and
impossible, and the objection denies that he can cause any finite
effect. Therefore, if the objection is valid, his whole activity is
shut within himself, he cannot reveal himself in the universe nor
in any effect on finite creatures ; the universe is not dependent
on him, he never acts upon or in it, and to all finite minds he is
a mere zero. His power to cause effects within the limits of
time, space and quantity is essential to his absoluteness. Accord
ing to the most strictly philosophical meaning of the absolute, he
is not excluded from space and time, but is able to cause effects
within their limits and thus to reveal himself to finite persons in
a finite universe. That the absolute Being exists is a necessary
principle of reason. What he is further than this is revealed to
us only through the universe in time and space. The attempt
to picture the absolute Being, as he might exist in transcendence
of the universe and not revealed in it, is in vain and is prolific of
error. 3. While God is not limited in the exercise of his power by
any reality independent of himself, it is equally true that in its
exercise his action is regulated by the rational principles and
laws, the rational ideals of perfection and well-being, the rational

180 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
distinction of the absolute and the finite, eternal in himself, the
absolute Reason. In other words, his power is inseparable from
his reason; it is God, the absolute Reason, who himself is
energizing. This regulation, as shown in a preceding chapter, is twofold,
constitutive and ethical. It is constitutive in the sense that the
principles of reason, the contradictories of which are absurd,
determine what it is possible for power to effect. Even almighty
power cannot give reality to the absurd. So Lucretius reasons
against the mythological creations of his time : It is impossible
that there is a centaur, because a man is young when a horse
dies of old age ; or Scylla with the body of a fish girdled with
oogs, because dogs cannot live under water nor fish out of it ; or
a chimaera, consisting of a lion, dragon and goat, breathing fire,
because fire consumes flesh. The regulation is ethical in the
sense that God's will by his eternal free choice is in harmony
with his reason in perfect love. The first is his rational constitu
tion, making it impossible for him to give reality to the absurd ;
the second is his moral character, making it certain that he will
do nothing wrong. These are the two bases on which the
stability, uniformity and continuity of the universe rest, and
which insure its progressive development in accordance with the
truths and laws and toward the realization of the ideals and ends
of perfect reason.
The former of these was considered in the discussion of
omniscience. It remains only to exemplify it in some of its
applications. No power can annul the distinction between the absolute and
the conditioned, the infinite and the finite. We have seen that
whatever God creates must be finite, and must be constituted
according to truths, laws, ideals, and worthy ends of reason. But
the finite can never be equal to the infinite nor a completed
manifestation or revelation of it. Necessarily, then, God's revela
tion of himself in the universe must be progressive and at every
point of time unfinished and incomplete. At every point of time
it must be prophetic of a greater revelation in the future.
We have seen that God in creating the universe has given it a
reality in itself and has made it stable by constituting it according
to the principles, laws, ideals, and ends of reason.
Therefore, after he has thus created and constituted it, the

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — WILL l8l
effect of his action in it must be commensurate with the constitu
tion and capacity of the being on which he acts. Having created
a stone, he cannot instruct it in knowledge, nor convince it by
argument, nor move it by an appeal to compassion. After creat
ing man a free agent, he must act on him, if at all, as a free
agent, by influences adapted to a rational free will. He cannot
change his will by almightiness any more than he can move a
stone by eloquence, or impart to a person virtue in pound-weight
packages. So, in revealing himself to man, the revelation must
be commensurate with the capacity of the man. God cannot
reveal himself to an oyster at all. He cannot reveal himself to a
child or a savage beyond his power to understand. At the wed
ding in Cana there were six waterpots filled to the brim with
water, and it was all converted into wine. If they had been only
half as large the divine miracle would have been the same, but
there would have been only half as much wine. As men grow in
capacity, knowledge, and culture they grow in capacity to receive
and communicate the gracious revelations of God. So our Lord
said to his disciples : " I have yet many things to say unto you,
but ye cannot bear them now." "What I do thou knowest not
now, but thou shalt understand hereafter."1
The effect of God's action must be commensurate also with
the constitution and capacity of the agent through which he acts.
Effects caused through physical agencies must be commensurate
with the constitution and powers of the agents, and accordant
with the unchangeable laws of their action. The momentum of
a moving body must be according to its mass and velocity. A
plant can produce fruit only according to its constitution and the
laws of its organic life. " Do men gather grapes of thorns, or
figs of thistles?" God by miraculous power may produce effects
in nature which nature left to itself would not have produced.
But, so far as he acts through physical agents, the effects must
be commensurate with the powers and constitution of the agent
and the unchanging laws of its action. Nature makes no leaps.
It is inseparable from the idea of a physical system that it is con
stituted according to rational principles and goes on its course
by the action of physical causes energizing according to the laws
of the system.
The same principle is true of personal beings in the moral
1 John xvi. 12, and xiii. 7.

1 82 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
system. Man is placed in the world to supply his wants by his
own skill and industry. The supply will be commensurate with
his physical and intellectual power, and his skill and industry in
attaining knowledge of the resources and powers of nature and
in mastering and using them for his own ends. And it is in
doing this that he attains his own highest development and his
due dominion over nature. TertuUian argues that what God
himself has not made is not pleasing to God. He infers that it
is not right for women to wear purple or scarlet raiment, because
God has not created sheep with purple or scarlet wool.1 But
this supposes that God is to do everything for and instead of
man, and that man has nothing to do with the reason and free
will with which God has endowed him. What God accomplishes
through the agency of man must be commensurate with the
powers of the man and the skill and faithfulness with which he
uses his powers. What man misses through this arrangement is
no disproof of God's almightiness. The arrangement is insepar
able from the essential constitution of a moral system ; and
according to the constitution of things it is only in this way that
the man can realize his highest perfection and good. So, in the
kingdom of Christ, Christians are " stewards of the manifold
grace of God." Under the quickening and guidance of God's
Spirit the kingdom is to be established and extended through the
world by the agency of Christians with the influences of truth
and love. This agency is essential to the existence of a moral
system and the growth and development of the spiritual life in
it. The result must be commensurate with the receptivity of
the Spirit's influence by faith, and the power, wisdom, and faith
fulness of the disciples of Christ.
-Thus the action of God in the exercise of his almighty power
is regulated by the principles which are constitutive of reason,
which no power can annul, and the contradictories of which are
absurdities which no power can make actual in being.
It is also regulated ethically, in the sense that his will is, by
his own free choice, in eternal harmony with reason. God is
love. His character makes it certain that he will always act in
harmony with the principles and laws of reason and for the reali
zation of all which absolute Reason sees as perfect and good.
God's almightiness is in its essence a rational and moral and
1 On the Apparel of Women, bk. i. chap. 8 ; bk. ii. chap. io.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — WILL 183
therein a self-limiting 'power. It is Reason itself energizing
according to its own eternal laws for the realization of its own
ideals of perfection and of the good, which it estimates by its
own unchanging norms as of true worth. Swedenborg expresses
this truth in his peculiar language as " the marriage of the Good
and the True." l It is the complete union of love with the
knowledge of the truth which constitutes wisdom ; and these in
this union regulate all the action of the Almighty.
The certainty that God will never do wrong is as complete
as the certainty that he will never give reality to the absurd.
Hence it is said, "It is impossible for God to lie."2 But the
certainty and impossibility in the former case are founded on
God's love, in which his will, in its own free choice, is in eternal
harmony with reason ; in the latter case they are a necessity
founded in the very constitution of the eternal and universal
Reason. 4. This regulation of almighty power by reason, in this two
fold way, implies no limitation of God.
Instead of being a limitation or defect, it reveals the perfection
of God as the absolute Reason. The action of almightiness is
shown in it to be his energizing in accordance with Reason in
the expression and realization of its constitutive principles, laws,
ideals, and ends. God in all the action of his almightiness
reveals continually the union of perfect knowledge of all truth
with perfect love, constituting perfect wisdom. An almightiness
acting otherwise would reveal folly in undertaking to realize the
impossible and wickedness in doing what is wrong ; thus it would
prove itself foolish and wicked, and therein not almighty, not
God, the absolute and all-perfect Being. God is not the less but
the greater for being consciously rational and free. A God, con
scious, free, and personal, is a greater and nobler being than any
impersonal substance or impersonal law conceived as the ultimate
ground of the universe ; and is the only conceivable object of
adoration, worship, and love. According to any pantheistic con
ception of God as first coming to consciousness in man, man
would be a being of a higher order than God.
This regulation of almighty power by Reason is not a limita
tion of almightiness, because the establishing of principles of
1 The True Christian Religion, p. 417, chap. x. sec. xii. n. 624.
2 Heb. vi. 18.

1 84 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
reason and the annulling of them in effecting an absurdity are
not proper acts of power. An engine, of whatever power, would
be unable to draw an inference. Physical power has nothing to
do with demonstrating a proposition in Euclid. The will cannot
construct a circle with unequal radii. This implies no limitation
of power within its proper sphere. It simply implies the eter
nal supremacy of reason and the impossibility of dethroning it.
Power cannot act in the sphere of reason. Almightiness itself
cannot even enter its eternal temple. It can only wait at the door
to receive its commands. It has power to disobey them ; but
it cannot annul or change their truth and obligation.
And, lastly, though God's action is always regulated by reason,
the universe is never beyond his control. He can interrupt
any physical sequence, frustrate any plan of finite free agents,
annihilate any creature, if reason demands it in the interest of
truth and right and love and according to the behests of perfect
wisdom. When it is said that God's government is under law, an objection
is urged that God cannot be under anything ; if he is under law
and obeys law he cannot be the absolute, the unconditioned and
all-conditioning. This objection would be valid if the law were
independent of God, and imposed on him from without. It
would be valid, for example, on the theory that the law is a con
stitution of the universe or a nature of things, existing eternally
independent of God. Then God would be conditioned and
bound under a law external to and independent of himself. Then
he would no longer be God. Impersonal law would be supreme
and no personal God would exist. The objection has no force
when it is understood that all truth and law, all norms and arche
types of perfection and good, are eternal in God, the absolute
Reason. In obeying law he is not conditioned by any being,
power, or law independent of himself. It is simply that God in
the exercise of will is by his own free choice in harmony with his
own reason ; God in the free exercise of his power is in harmony
with himself as absolute and eternal Reason. Even man finds the
law in himself and obeys his own reason and conscience. This is
not a limitation of man. It is of the essence of his greatness as
being in the likeness of God. The limitation is that he is finite
and not the original and eternal reason. God finds the law in
himself and obeys it, knowing that in himself, the absolute Reason,
it is the eternal, absolute, and universal law.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — WILL 1 85
Here another objection is urged, that if God is thus the abso
lute Reason, he is conditioned and limited by his own constitu
tion. He finds himself constituted as the absolute Spirit. His
constitution is something " given," something imposed on him
with which he had nothing to do. This objection is urged by
Dorner, Rothe, and others. The same objection applied to man
would be that because man is constituted a rational person, with
the power of self-determination in the light of reason, he is not a
free agent. This is simply the absurdity that because man is
constituted with all the constituent elements of free agency,
therefore he is not a free agent. The absurdity is more glaring
when the objection is applied to God, of whom, as rational Spirit,
we not only predicate reason and the constituent elements of
freedom, but also affirm that in exercising his freedom he is
absolutely unconditioned and unlimited by any power or environ
ment independent of himself. This objection leads directly to
the absurdity that, if God is a free agent, he must have created
himself. Much more, then, man cannot be a free agent because
he has not created himself, but owes his being and all its constitu
tional endowments to God. The necessary inference would be thai-
there is no rational free agency either in God or man, — there
fore, no moral system of rational free agents under the moral
government of God. The objection rests on a total misconcep
tion of what freedom of will or free agency is. As shown in a
preceding chapter, the truth which these objectors are blindly
groping after is simply that God by his own free choice eternally
and always determines himself to act in accordance with the
eternal principles and laws of reason in the progressive realization
of the eternal archetype of all perfection and well-being possible
to be realized by almighty power in a finite universe, in accord
ance with the eternal principles and laws of reason. Therein he
freely determines his own moral character and its manifestations
in the action of love.
5. The eternal existence of intractable matter is not necessary
to explain this regulation and restriction of the divine almighti
ness. In fact it would not explain, but would annul it. Eternal
matter existing independent of God would be a real limitation of
his power and incompatible with his absoluteness.
Nor is the objection of John Stuart Mill valid, that God himself
created the matter which he finds so intractable, and that, having

1 86 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
all power, he has only to will it and every difficulty will disappear.
This is founded on the supposition that the God of theism is an
almighty caprice, free from all law. For such an almighty caprice
there could be no difficulties. Every end might be realized in a
moment by the fiat of this absolutely lawless almighty Being.
But this is only a caricature of true theism. God is not a
lawless and capricious almightiness, but the absolute Reason.
And that which regulates and restricts his action is not intract
able matter, but the principles and laws constitutive of his own
eternal reason. Therefore they regulate the action of his power
without limiting or conditioning him by any reality independent
of himself.
And if the absolute Being were a lawless and almighty caprice,
the universe could not be constituted rationally and be intelligible
through and through to reason, as it now is ; it could not be a
system, physical or rational, capable of being known in science
or of progressively realizing a rational end.
But because almightiness is regulated by reason, there is scope
for wisdom in planning, creating and developing the universe,
and this wisdom the universe reveals to scientific investigation.
Then there are principles of reason which make the absurd
impossible, and moral laws which forbid wrong-doing. Then any
created universe must be finite and progressively developed ; and
the effects of almighty power must be commensurate with the
constitution and capacity of the beings on and through whom it
acts ; it must work its way progressively to its proposed results,
and at every point in its progress it must always be incomplete.
Then there will be also what Hamilton has called incompos-
sibility, as the impossibility of two bodies occupying the same
place at once ; or, when a young man has two lines of business
open to him for his life-work, if he chooses the one he must give
up for all time the other. Each is possible in itself, but impos
sible with the other. Whatever influences for good the almighty
may bring to bear on rational free agents, he must leave them to
determine for themselves their own action, character and destiny.
Almighty power cannot change the determination of the will of
any other person. Any change so effected would not be the act
of the person but of the almighty power that effected the change.
Thus innumerable problems present themselves which wisdom
only can solve, and principles and laws regulate and restrict

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — WILL 187
the action of almightiness. It is not almighty caprice. Yet
because this regulation is by the Reason itself, which is energiz
ing in the universe, it does not limit God or bring him under
conditions in the exercise of his almightiness, in a way incompat
ible with his absoluteness, but rather reveals him as the absolute
Spirit, perfect in knowledge and love and acting always in
unerring wisdom with almighty power.
II. Freedom. — God's will, in his own free choice, is in eter
nal harmony with his reason. His love is not a physical necessity,
— as trees grow, and as water runs down-hill, — it is his rational
free choice.
The fact that the choice is eternal is not incompatible with its
freedom. Choice, as directing energy to an end, is in its nature
abiding. A good man's choice of his neighbor equally with
himself as the object of service abides through life. A saint in
heaven chooses God as the supreme object of trust and service,
and this choice will remain unchanged for ever. Persistence
being of the essence of choice, its persistence, whether longer
or shorter, does not change its freedom as choice. When
ever it comes up in the person's consciousness, he is con
scious of it as his own free choice. God's choice in harmony
with reason is his love. The choice is eternal, but it is eternally
free. And there is nothing essential in free will rightly defined which
is incompatible with the freedom of God's will in his choice in
eternal harmony with reason in love. Freedom is essential in the
idea of will. The definition of will is the definition of free will.
Will is a power self- directing and self-exerting in the light of
reason. It is reason energizing. Rationality is of the essence of
free will. Freedom is inherent in rationality. Whether a choice
continue a longer or shorter time, it is a continuous free choice.
God's choice in harmony with reason is eternal. But its eternity
does not require the change of a syllable in the right definition of
free will.
The belief that God's choice cannot be free because it is
eternal is founded always on some false idea of free will. Pro
fessor Haeckel says : " God is absolutely perfect. His action,
therefore, can never be otherwise than perfectly right. Therefore
he can never act arbitrarily or freely. That is to say, God is

1 88 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
necessity." 1 This rests on the supposition that free will, in order
to be free, must be mere caprice ; that it is free only when it is
in an equipoise of indifference ; that it must be always without
character, as ready to choose wrong as to choose right, and in
entire indifference as to which to choose. It assumes that as soon
as a man has any preference or any character he ceases to be
free. It assumes that God, if free, must be an almighty caprice,
acting without reason, without character, and without law. Kant
intimates that we may not attribute will to God : " For I have
this conception only in so far as I derive it from my inner
experience. But therewith must underlie it, as its ground, depend
ence of my satisfaction on objects which we need, and therefore
sensibility,' which is utterly contradictory to the pure idea of the
Supreme Being." 2 But this assumes that will is identical with
desire, — that it is merely the optative part of our nature. It
entirely misses the essential significance of will as power illumin
ated with reason, — as reason itself energizing ; or, as Kant himself
named it in a later work, the practical reason. According to the
true idea of free will, the duration of a choice, however long, the
fixedness of character, however complete, do not imply the loss of
a single element essential to free will.8
Any philosophical theory of the will which involves a logical
necessity of denying the free agency of God is thereby proved to
be false. For if God is not a free agent he is not a personal or
moral being ; he is not a rational Spirit. It also involves with
equal logical necessity the denial that man is free. If the uni
verse is grounded in necessity and not in rational freedom, free
agency can never find place in it anywhere.
It follows that God's love, which is his eternal free choice in
harmony with reason, is not the result of the impossibility of his
sinning ; but the impossibility of his sinning is the result of his
eternal free choice in love. And in this eternal free choice we
see the significance of the saying that in God the highest necessity
coincides with the highest freedom.
1 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. ii. Bk. viii. chap. 30, p. 451.
2 Prolegomena zu jeden kiinftigen Metaphysik, § 57, Werke (Leipzig,
1838), vol. iii. p. 282.
3 For a discussion of the will, its functions and freedom, and its relation
to moral character, see " The Philosophical Basis of Theism," chap. xv. pp.
349-407-

GOD IS A SPIRIT:— WILL 189
III. Love. — We come here to the so-called moral attributes
of God.
r. Love is the generic name of God's perfect moral character.
It is so used in the Bible : " God is Love." Love also comprehends
all that is required in God's universal moral law (Matth. xxii.
35-40) ; and that law must be the true exponent of God's moral
perfection. It is to be regretted that writers on theology and
ethics do not commonly use the word love in this generic meaning.
On the contrary, they often treat love as a particular virtue, one
among many. Thus they bring love into antithesis, and even into
antagonism, to righteousness and justice, and so into antagonism
to law itself and its authoritative enforcement. They seem to
forget that the law itself is the law of love ; that its real principle
is its requirement of universal love ; that, according to the
teachings of Christ, and also of the Old Testament, love compre
hends in principle all which the law commands. By using the
word love with this generic meaning we get a concrete reality and
vividness in our ethical conception of God which we miss when
we use the abstract phrases, "moral attributes," "moral perfec
tion," " moral character," which do not specify what his moral
perfection is.
Holiness, on account of its etymological affinity with hale, heal,
and whole, may properly be used to denote God's moral perfection
in its integrity or wholeness, and for convenience I may sometimes
so use it. But it more commonly denotes purity from sin, and
the recoil of a pure soul from it.
Love is the generic name of the attributes of God which have
been called moral in distinction from the natural attributes. It
is not constitutive of personality, as are reason and will, — it is
character. But this character is an essential and eternal attribute
of God. Without it a being, however knowing and mighty, could
not be God, the absolute and all-perfect Spirit. Love is of the
.essence of the idea of God.
2. The love recognized in the law as the essence of moral
character is, psychologically defined, the self-directing determina
tion of a rational free will. It is thus distinguished from natural
or instinctive appetites, desires, and affections, which in popular
usage are often called love, as one loves an apple, he loves money.
God's love is his eternal choice, in which he determines or directs
his energy to the realization, in rational beings in a moral system,

190 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
of all perfection and good possible in accordance with the eternal
principles and laws of reason. God's love is his eternal free
determination of the action of his entire personality, of his abso
lute reason and his almighty power, to the realization of the
ideals and ends of perfect reason in personal beings composing
the moral system and existing in the physical universe which he
has created for their abode and use. This love is his rational
choice, which at once impels and directs him in all his action.
His self-determination to create and govern the universe is his
love. In this love he determines to create the universe for the
abode of personal beings, in his likeness, who can know him and
be the recipients of his gracious influence, and to open to them
all the possibilities of citizens in the kingdom, and of children in
the family, of God. As the absolute Being, he has no needs
which he is dependent on others to supply. His action, therefore,
is never a seeking and getting for himself, but always a forthputting
and imparting to others. In his all- sufficiency, blessedness, and
lordship, he will not be blessed alone, but will create a universe
of being, and in it rational persons to whom he can communicate
of his fulness, and whom he can make participants of his love and
blessedness. Thus his love is totally unselfish and disinterested ;
it is pure, absolute, self-moved love.
It is often objected that love cannot exist unless there exists
some other person as its object ; that, therefore, God could not
have been actuated by love in creating the universe, because no
being other than himself existed as the object of his love. But
love is the choice • of the supreme object of the activity and
energy. God eternally chooses to realize his archetypal ideal of
the universe culminating in the kingdom of God, embracing in
numerable millions of rational beings like himself who will know
God, be developed into his likeness in love and blessed with him
through endless time. Certainly God's character as love is as
really manifested in his eternal self-determination to realize this
grand ideal, including the perfection and blessedness of these
millions, as it is after he has brought them into being. The
objection is frivolous. It is of the same type with the ethics
which teaches that man can feel no good-will toward any
persons or any generation existing after he himself is dead.
3. Love to a person expresses itself in two lines of action, —
trust and service. All human action is included in two lines, —

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — WILL 191
reception and production, taking in and giving out. The
receptive action directed towards a person is trust, the pro
ductive action exerted for a person is service. Love is the free
choice of a person as the object of trust and service. Since God
is independent and unconditioned by any power or reality inde
pendent of himself, his action is ever productive, putting forth.
In creating and evolving the universe he is always acting in the
finite, the highest coming down to the lowest to lift it up. God's
action, therefore, is pre-eminently service. Accordingly when he
revealed himself acting under human limitations and conditions
in Christ, " he took upon him the form of a servant " (Phil. ii. 7).
Service is godlike. God's action in love is also trust. Those
who accept his redeeming grace and begin the life of love he
accepts "as workers together with him," as good soldiers of
Jesus Christ (2 Cor. vi. 1 ; 2 Tim. ii. 3). As such he trusts
them with the responsibility and dignity of being workers for him,
" mighty through God to the casting down of strong holds " of
iniquity, not with carnal but with spiritual weapons (2 Cor. x. 4).
Thus God is receptive of the loving service of those whom he has
redeemed, trusts them with great responsibilities in the advance
ment of his kingdom, rejoices over every sinner who repents,
and admits him to confidential intimacy with himself.
4. God's love presents two aspects, righteousness and bene
volence or good-will. It is righteousness in that it is commanded
by the supreme and inviolable law of Reason and regulated by it
in all its action. God, by his own free self>determination, directs
his energy in harmony with the principles and laws of reason to the
realization of its ideals of perfection and of the good which reason
approves as having true worth to rational beings. Directing his
energy according to these eternal laws, for these rational and
worthy ends, he constitutes the universe according to the same.
When he has brought rational beings into existence, he maintains
and enforces the law of love as the supreme and unchangeable law
to all the spiritual system. As thus directing his own energies
according to the principles and law of reason, and maintaining
and enforcing this law throughout the spiritual system, he is
righteous. His love itself, as his choice in harmony with reason,
is righteousness.
God's love is also benevolence or good-will, because in it he
determines or directs his energy to the realization of perfection

192 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
and good for all his creatures, so far as possible in accordance
with the principles and laws of reason.
Righteousness, and benevolence or good-will, are both included
in love ; they are simply two aspects of it. It is common for
theologians and preachers to speak of righteousness as distinct
and excluded from love ; they habitually put God's righteousness
into antithesis, and even antagonism, to his love. But righteous
ness is love in one of its aspects. It is love required by the
eternal law and freely exercised in willing obedience to it. And
God's righteousness, in enforcing the law throughout the universe
by the punishment of transgressors, is love, maintaining and
enforcing the law which requires love. Therefore love is
universal good-will regulated in its exercise by righteousness.
In God's love " mercy and truth are met together; righteous
ness and peace have vkissed each other" (Psalm lxxxv. 10).
Righteousness, even in maintaining and enforcing the law by
punishment, is exercised in an atmosphere of benevolence.
Christ weeping over Jerusalem, yet not averting the punishment
which by persisting in their wickedness its inhabitants brought on
themselves, is the true exponent to us of the righteousness of
God in punishing transgressors. And benevolence is in harmony
with righteousness, because perfection and good are possible in
this universe only in accordance with the principles and laws of
reason which are the constitution of the universe. A good-will
which seeks to secure to men happiness any other wise than in
conformity with eternal truth and law is a mistaken benevolence
which defeats itself and brings on its object evil instead of good ;
and equally the person exercising this false good-will brings evil
and not good upon himself. The universe is constituted according
to law. Therefore there is no place and no time in all the
universe in which a person can be blessed even for an instant in a
life of selfishness. Blessedness is possible only in a life of love to
God and man. If this could be otherwise, the constitution of the
universe would be broken up and the universe resolved into
chaos. Love in these two aspects is like electricity. In its ordinary
action, coursing silently through all nature, it brings only blessing.
But when interrupted, it smites in the thunderbolt. And its
power to bless depends on its capacity thus to smite. Righteous
ness and good-will are in harmony, like light and heat. They

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — WILL 1 93
give light to all eyes and quicken and sustain all life and growth ;
but when accumulated they dazzle to blindness and consume
with fire. And their power to bless depends on their power
to dazzle and consume. When " God is a consuming fire," it
is his love which is the burning fire.
These two aspects of love, righteousness and benevolence, ex
pressed in acts of trust and service, are the true basis for the
complete classification of duties or virtues in ethical philosophy.
There is now a marked trend of thought to present the Father
hood of God as the name comprehending all his moral attributes,
and to maintain that the revelation that God is our Father is the
great and distinctive revelation of Christianity. But this is not
accordant with the Bible. The name that is above every name
is not God our Father, but God in Christ our Redeemer (Phil.
ii. 9 ; Eph. i. 21). And God was revealed as our Father in the
Old Testament, and his claims as such urged with tenderness and
eloquence. It is but one of many representations of God by
which in various aspects he is revealed in the Bible : father,
mother, husband, shepherd, king, judge, lawgiver. Even our
Aryan ancestors in heathenism knew God as father, as all-father,
and as heaven-father. The designation of father was applied to
the gods by the Greeks and Romans. Epictetus said, God is ever
the father of men. It is not, therefore, peculiar to Christianity.
This type of thought is sometimes presented as throwing into the
background, or even setting aside, the righteousness and law of
God. It is true that the idea of God, our Father, is not incom
patible with the idea of law ; for a father exercises authority over
his family. Some of those who emphasize the fatherhood of God
may have no thought of depreciating his righteousness and law,
but only of presenting the truth that the righteousness of God is
always exercised in an atmosphere of benevolence. God always
exercises good-will to all his creatures. He can exercise malevo
lence or malignity toward none. But the tendency to depreciate
God's righteousness and law is sometimes obtrusive. President
Bascom says : " The ease with which the mind dwarfs a truth as
yet too large for it, is seen in the cunning mechanism of law
which theology has built up between man and God, — a mechan
ism so difficult of management that neither man nor God, nor
both conjointly, can handle it without terrible loss." x But law is
1 The Words of Christ, p. 49.
vol. 1. — 13

194 G0D> THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
eternal and unchangeable in God, the absolute Reason ; it is the
constitution of the universe, whereby alone it is possible for man
to have a scientific knowledge of it, possible that there should be
a moral or spiritual system, or any fundamental distinction of
right and wrong, or any reality in the supreme and universal law
of love. The law itself to all rational beings is the law of love ;
it is the law of reason which is the constitution of the universe.
How, then, is law a mechanism built up by theologians between
man and God ? And what but disaster to every interest of morals
and religion can come from any teaching which disparages or
obscures the righteousness and law of God? Such teaching con
tradicts alike the Holy Scriptures, and the principles of reason
which are the foundation of physical science, of speculative and
ethical philosophy, and of all knowledge and religious worship of
the true God. It is pre-eminently contrary to scientific thought,
which finds,, the whole universe under law. It is true now, as it
was in the days of Richard Hooker : " Of law there can be no
less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her
voice the harmony of the world ; all things in heaven and earth
do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the great
est as not exempted from her power ; both angels and men, and
creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort
and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the
mother of their peace and joy." 1
God's righteousness, therefore, is the harmony of his will with
his eternal reason in his own free and never-changing choice.
His righteousness is essential in his love. A good-will that is
lawless must bring a curse and not a blessing. And the law itself,
which is asserted, maintained, and enforced by all the authority
and power of God as inviolable, is the law of universal love.
Here we see the atoning significance of God's action in Christ
redeeming men from sin. Therein he reveals himself acting
under human limitations and conditions in good-will even to sin
ners to save them from sin. At the same time he reveals himself
also acting in obedience to the law of love, to the utmost extent
possible under human limitations and conditions, even unto death.
Thus he reveals his righteousness not less than his benevolence,
controlling and regulating his benevolence in all its exercise.
Therein he asserts, vindicates, and maintains the supremacy,
1 Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. i. chap. xvi. 8.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: —WILL 1 95
immutability, and inviolable authority of the law of love in the re
demption of men from sin, and in justifying those who accept
his grace and return to conformity with the law in the life of love.
This is the atoning significance of his redemptive action in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself. But in all his action in his
moral government of rational persons, and in constituting and
evolving the universe, he reveals his good-will regulated by right
eousness in strict accordance with the eternal law as really as in
redeeming man from sin. Therefore the atoning significance of
God's action in Christ redeeming men from sin pertains simply
to a peculiar revelation and exercise of God's good-will, regulated
in its exercise by righteousness in strict accordance with the eter
nal principles and laws of reason, which is the essence of God's
moral character as love and is exercised and revealed in all his
moral government and in all his action creating and evolving the
universe.

CHAPTER VI
GOD IS A SPIRIT :  FEELING
This attribute of God corresponds to man's susceptibility to
rational motives and emotions, or the capacity of spiritual feeling.
i . This is an essential attribute of personal spirit, and not
peculiar to the finite personality of man. It is, therefore, consis
tent with the absoluteness of God.
We attribute to God as personal only those powers and capaci
ties which are of the essence of personal spirit. Some deny that
personality is compatible with the absoluteness of God, because
they erroneously assume that finiteness is of the essence of per
sonality. But the limitations of man are not of the essence of
personality ; they are merely incidental to the personality of man
as a finite being.1
This attribute, commonly called the capacity of feeling, is of the
essence of self-conscious life. We have more difficulty in adjust
ing our thought to the idea of God as susceptible of feeling, than
to the conception of him as reason and free will. But this sus
ceptibility does not involve an inadmissible anthropomorphism
any more than do reason and will. It is essential in the idea
of spirit as living and self-conscious. A being without capacity
of feeling or susceptibility of motives and emotions would rest in
entire indifference to everything. It would have no motive to
create. If it should create anything, it would be totally indiffer
ent to the creation and to its own action in creating it. It would
have no interest in its creatures, no motive to action, no end to
be attained by action. It would be the God of Epicurus, not
active in the universe, totally indifferent to everything in it. Right
character and wrong, happiness and misery, would be alike to it.
Plainly such a being cannot be God, the absolute Spirit. There-
1 See "The Self-Revelation of God," pp. 210-216, 334-339.

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — FEELING 1 97
fore, instead of this attribute being incompatible with the abso
luteness of God, it is a perfection essential to his self-conscious
life as the absolute Spirit. As it would be a limitation of God if
he could not act and cause effects in time and space, so it would
be a limitation if he were incapable of feeling, if we could attrib
ute to him no capacity corresponding to man's susceptibility to
motives and emotions. As Archdeacon Hare said of the specu
lative denial of God's susceptibility to feeling as inconsistent with
his absoluteness, " in its recoil from the gross anthropopathy of
the vulgar notions, it falls into the vacuum of absolute apathy."
2. Because God is a Spirit his feelings will be essentially the same
in kind with the spiritual motives and emotions of the ideally per
fect man, excepting only what is incidental to the finiteness of the
man. That is, God's feelings, if exercised under human limita
tions and conditions, would be the same with those of the sinless
and perfect man. Even in man not yet perfected and delivered
completely from the power of sin this may be illustrated. It may
be illustrated from the enthusiasm of scientific and philosophical
investigation. This is exemplified in Kepler's devout rapture in
his discoveries. " What I conjectured two-and-twenty years
ago, as soon as I discovered the five geometrical solids among
the heavenly orbits ; what I was firmly persuaded of in my own
mind before I had seen the " Harmonics " of Ptolemy ; what I had
promised to my friends in the title of this fifth book, named before
I was certain of the thing itself; what, sixteen years ago, I publicly
urged as a matter to be investigated; that for which I have
devoted the best part of my life to astronomical studies, for
which I joined Tycho Brahe, for which I chose Prague as my
residence, — this, God, who inspired my mind and excited my
great desire, having prolonged my life and intellectual vigor, this, I
say, at length I have now brought to light, and established its
truth beyond all I could ever hope. ... It is now eighteen
months since the first gleam of the dawn, three months since the
broad daylight, but a few days since the clear sun burst on me,
most admirable to behold. Nothing restrains me ; I will indulge
the sacred fury ; I will triumph over mankind with the honest
confession that I have stolen the golden vases of the Egyptians
that I may build a tabernacle for my God far from the bound
aries of Egypt. If you forgive me I will rejoice ; if you are
angry I will bear it ; I cast the die ; I write the book, to be read,

198 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
whether now or by posterity I care not. I may well wait a
hundred years for a reader since God himself has waited six
thousand years for an observer." J The likeness of the divine
feeling to the higher feelings of men may be illustrated also from
the interest felt by man in realizing the creations of aesthetic art
or of industrial invention ; in doing duty ; in the self-forgetfulness
of love ; in enthusiasm for humanity and working for its progress
to its highest ends ; in the ecstasy of religious faith and the
strength and joy of its works of love and service. In every line
of the rational and spiritual life the man is lifted above the
lower impulses of his nature and the discontent of never-satisfied
wants, and finds blessedness in himself and in developing his own
spiritual resources and work. And his devotion to rational and
spiritual ends confers dignity on the humblest position and the
lowest surroundings. The light within, like the sun, illumines
and glorifies the lowest sphere and the smallest affairs. Without
this the greatest magnificence of outward condition is ignoble.
And when adherence to truth and duty and persistence in a
noble aim involve resistance to powerful temptations and struggle
with evil impulses, when faithfulness in Christian service involves
self-sacrifice, then the joy takes on the exultation of victory.
One never feels himself more, is never more conscious of fulness
of life and power, than in self-denial in doing duty, and self-sacri
fice in the service of love.
Much more may God, the absolute Spirit, be blessed in him
self in what he is and what he does, realizing the ideals and ends
of perfect reason in the light of perfect truth and in the action
of perfect wisdom and love, and may rejoice in his work with a
joy surpassing all human enthusiasm as much as the absolute
surpasses the finite.
3. This attribute of God implies that God is responsive to the
action of his creatures. As independent of the universe, God is
blessed in himself. His action is giving out, not receiving. But
the universe, after it has been created, has a reality in itself and
objective to God, though always dependent on him. Then God
is receptive from his creatures and responsive to their action.
1 Harmonices Mundi, Lib. v. Procemium, pp. 178, 179. In his reference
to the Egyptians he alludes to the fact that in some mathematical con
clusions in this third book he had been anticipated by Ptolemy ; though he
did not know it till after the book was written.

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — FEELING 1 99
At the successive epochs in creating and evolving the universe,
"God saw that it was very good" (Gen. i. 10, 12, 18, 21, 25,
31) ; he rejoices in the work of his hands; the upright in their
way are his delight ; the wicked are an abomination to the Lord.
He hears the prayers of men, accepts with approval their loving
trust and service, and has that interest in them which he expresses
by calling himself their father, husband, shepherd, judge, king ;
by comparing his love to that of a mother (Isa. xlix. 15) ; and by
all his action redeeming them from sin through Christ and the
Holy Spirit as recorded in the Bible. This receptivity is not the
receptivity of dependence and need, but of love and its over
flowing fulness, receiving trust and service that he may bless,
permitting men to cast their care on him because he cares for
them. This receptivity is not incompatible with God's absolute
ness, but a positive perfection essential to him as the all-perfect
God, the Lord of all.
Plato conceived of the universe as a living being. He wanted
in the universe, not a dead wall of matter, but a life and heart
responsive to his own. Instead of this conception of Plato,
Christ reveals to us the conscious, living God immanent and
active in the universe, as all-pervasive and vitalizing as the
heart's blood in the human body. So in this immanence of the
divine the living heart of the universe responds with living,
conscious interest to the good man's prayer of faith and service of
love, and to the sinner's penitent cry for help, and reacts against
the wicked man's self-sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking and
self-glorifying. 4. God's capacity for feeling is free from all limitations inci
dent to human finiteness.
First, God is not susceptible of any feeling belonging exclus
ively to the physical life of man. God is pure Spirit. He does
not participate in the life of nature, but transcends it. He
exists in no environment on which he is dependent. He is con
scious of no want. He is not the subject of any uneasiness aris
ing from a sense of want, nor of any desire which is the expression
of such uneasiness and impels to seek satisfaction from without.
In the lowest forms of religion, the god is supposed to be par
ticipant in the life of nature, even to the extent of being hungry
and thirsty. The sacrifices and libations are offered to satisfy
the craving of the god. He snuffs the savory odors and is well

200 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
pleased. The writer of the fiftieth Psalm, having probably found
this gross conception lingering among the heathen around him,
rebukes it in sublime and poetical language. But it is as really
heathenish to ascribe to God any participation in the life of
nature, or any desire arising from a sense of want and requiring
satisfaction from without. His whole action would then be a
getting and sucking in, not a giving and putting forth. He
would no longer be acting in freedom as Spirit, but under the
necessity of nature, like a brute. The sense of want acts instinc
tively ; it is above the animal, and impels and rules it ; it must be
satisfied from without ; the uneasiness of the want is the positive
impulse, and the enjoyment attained is merely the removal of an
uneasiness in the satisfaction of the want. This is the life of
nature impelled by impulse from without, not regulating itself in
freedom. To this level God is supposed to be reduced by every
conception of him as having wants and impelled by uneasiness to
supply them. He becomes an infinite receptivity, an abyss of
emptiness, swallowing up everything but never filled ; an infini
tude of desires, forever craving but never satisfied. His whole
existence would reveal to him the truth of pessimism, and force
on him the conviction that life, though everlasting, is not worth
living. Such a being cannot be God. He would be such a
being as is described in the words which Byron attributes to
Satan : — He is great,
But in his greatness is no happier than
We in our conflict . . Let him
Sit on his vast and solitary throne,
Creating worlds to make eternity
Less burdensome to his immense existence
And unparticipated solitude.
Let him crowd orb on orb ; he is alone . . .
Could he but crush himself, 't were the best boon
He ever granted ; but let him reign on,
And multiply himself in misery I
. . . He is so wretched in his height,
So restless in his wretchedness, must still
Create and recreate. — Cain, I. i.
This misconception of God has been prolific of errors in the
ology and of delusions in religion. Underlying it is the false
ethical conception that God's chief end in all he does is his own

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — FEELING 201
happiness ; from which a necessary inference would be that he
punishes sinners solely because he enjoys doing it, and, if he
remits their punishment, must punish Christ in their stead to
satisfy a want, his otherwise insatiable desire to inflict suffering
for the offence given him by sinners. Thus God comes to be
regarded as a Great Nature (Gross Natur, as some German
writers actually call him), necessarily unrolling under the influ
ence of wants, passions, and desires, which can be satisfied only
from without.
Because God can have no sense of want, Strauss infers that he
can have no intelligent aim for action and no motive to act, and
that therefore he cannot cause any effect nor use means to attain
any end. The pantheistic conclusion would necessarily follow,
that the absolute Being is only the Unconscious, blindly and
necessarily evolving into all that is.1 But this conclusion by no
means follows from the true conception of God as above the
limitations of the life of nature. Though God does not partici
pate in the life of nature, and has no wants, yet, as the absolute
Spirit, he acts in the light of reason and has rational ends in his
own wisdom and love. The universe is not an end in itself; it
is the medium in which he is realizing the archetype of per
fection and good eternal in his own reason ; that is, expressing
his own perfection in the action of his own wisdom and love.
And when Strauss says that in any action of God the end would
be the means, and the means would be the end, the truth in the
saying is simply that both the rational ideals and ends to be
realized and the means of realizing them are alike included in
God's archetypal thought, and that neither the means nor the
end has any existence independent of God.
A second limitation excluded from the feeling of God is suffer
ing. It is involved in the idea of God as the absolute Being that he
cannot suffer. The same is involved in the idea of God as the
all-perfect Being. The consciousness of unerring knowledge, of
being in harmony with reason, of possessing all perfection, the
1 Strauss," Glaubenslehre," vol. i. p. 576. K. I. Nitzsch refers to this argu
ment of Strauss as frivolous (" sehr unerheblich,' " System der Christlichen
Lehre," § 75, p. 165). It is not very uncommon to find, both in German
speculative philosophy and in German biblical criticism, momentous con
clusions resting on superficial or fallacious reasoning or on the slightest
basis of fact. They are valuable helpers, but dangerous masters.

202 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
consciousness that all his action is in its true character and
intent promotive of perfection and good, the consciousness of
universal love, must exclude all suffering. And if it were possible
for God, the absolute Being, to suffer, it would necessarily be an
infinite suffering, greater, by the measure of the greatness of the
infinite above the finite, than the sufferings of all finite beings.
It is objected that the knowledge of the sin and sorrow of his
creatures must occasion grief in God. The answer is that it does
occasion that tenderness of compassion which, under human
limitations, would be sorrow. But it is free from all elements of
suffering peculiar to finite beings.
It may be added that even under human limitations love is in
its exercise blessed. It is so even in conflict with sin and under
the disappointments, losses, and suffering incident to mortality.
Christians have gloried in tribulation, and taken joyfully the
spoiling of their goods; and perhaps the sublimest joy ever
experienced by man has been the joy of martyrs going to the
stake for Christ. Love also makes toil and sacrifice for the loved
easy ; and the loving heart rejoices in the opportunity for service.
And there is a power in the service of love to absorb emotion.
This is true of service of any kind. If the horses run, he who
holds the reins is steady, because the energy expended in man
aging the horses absorbs his emotion. The one who sits inactive
at his side is terrified. A mother's grief is absorbed in her active
service of her sick child. The surgeon's hand may tremble ; but
when he begins the critical operation the feeling is absorbed and
every nerve is steady. So, in Christian service, the emotion
excited by the sight of the sinful and suffering is absorbed in the
energy expended in saving them. Paul, carrying to wretched
men the gospel of Christ and setting up his kingdom in the
world lying in wickedness, and in doing this having suffered the
loss of all things, without a home, in journeyings oft, in perils of
every kind by land and sea, defamed, scourged, imprisoned,
stoned, was yet living a life of conscious achievement, of exultant
victory, of triumphant expectation, and was probably the most
sublimely blessed man of his generation. Such facts open lines
of thought whereby we see that God, in the ceaseless energizing
of his love, may have a tenderness of compassion for sinners and
an earnestness of indignation against sin infinitely greater than is
expressed by these words as measured by human feeling, and yet

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — FEELING 203
be blessed in himself and his work of love. Love is the absorb
ent of sorrow. Love is blessedness in itself. Infinite love is
infinite blessedness.
Of the saints in heaven it is said : " God shall wipe away every
tear from their eyes." 1 If it is possible thus for finite beings to
cease from tears and sorrow in the presence and service of God
in heaven, how much more may all sorrow be absorbed in the
intensity of God's infinite love with which he is energizing in the
universe. These considerations may help us to understand the
possibility of God's blessedness in the presence of evil. But we
cannot picture it. It is " the peace of God which passeth all
understanding." 2
A third limitation excluded from the feeling of God is fluctua
tion and passionateness. It does not come and go, flame up and
die away. It does not alternate between excitement and apathy,
passion and indifference.
There is dignity in sorrow when in the deepest woe the man is
master of himself, retains his calmness, and does his work. Such
may be the divine sorrow for man's sin and misery, never inter
rupted by excitement or passion, calm because infinitely deep.
Indignation against injustice, oppression, and all wrong-doing, is
inseparable from true manhood, as well as from true Godhood.
He who cannot feel it lacks the very essence of a right moral
character. It is not a burst of anger, sputtering fire and then
going out. It is inwrought into the character of the man ; it is
always potentially present in his free allegiance to truth and right
and in his love to God and man, as the power to burn is always
present in the sunshine. Much more is indignation against
wrong-doing an essential and unchanging potency in the eternal
love of God. Its calmness and continuity are the hiding of
its power.
In fact, fluctuation and passionateness are proof of weakness
rather than of strength. Tears and crying are characteristics of
infancy, not of maturity. And there is a sorrow too deep for
tears. In the excitement of feeling one may lose his self-
comhrand, and act frantically rather than rationally. One may
be crushed by sorrow so that he cannot do anything. One may
be so agitated at the sight of suffering as to be unable to render
help. Strong souls are not carried away with excitement, but are
1 Rev. vii. 17. 2 Phil. iv. 7.

204 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
calm because they are strong. Their feeling, therefore, is not
less but greater, calm and steady on account of its fulness and
strength. In the lower stages of human development, the in
fancy of the race, men express without restraint the violence of
their feelings. Job's three friends, when they saw him, " lifted
up their voice and wept : and they rent every one his mantle
and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven."1 Aga
memnon and the other Homeric heroes wept and cried aloud. But
as man advances in civilization he learns self-control ; his feelings
do not burst forth in tears and violent gestures and cries. And
this is not a sign of weakness, but of increased self-mastery and
power. So Christ, amid all the sorrows incident to his humanity, always
reveals the self-possession and calmness "of strength. He wept ;
but it was for the sorrows and sins of others whom he came to
save. Eyen in Gethsemane and on the cross his sorrow is self-
possessed, majestic, and divine.
In these possibilities of human feeling we see that God's feel
ing may be without fluctuation, without alternation of excitement
and depression ; that in his eternal love may be all the tenderness
for the weak and humble, all the indignation against the wicked
which human feelings make conceivable, while he is always calm
and strong, absolute in perfection and blessedness. Fluctuation
and passion are absent, not on account of the absence of feeling,
but on account of its infinite fulness and perfection. " The
crackling of thorns under a pot " is no evidence of great heat.
The sun is not less hot because its heat is steady and permanent.
The Bible speaks of God's wrath against sinners, and declares,
"our God is a consuming fire" (Heb. xii. 29). His antagon
ism to sin and indignation against it are eternal and unchange
able. Doubtless in its unchanging steadiness it is as much more
powerful than any righteous indignation of man as the heat of
the sun is greater than that of a flickering taper.
Rev. Edward White says the doctrine that God is impassive
and insensible to real delight or sorrow is the Buddhism of the
West and makes God an infinite Snow-King.2 Yet he has fallen
into serious errors as to what God's feeling is ; and errors of this
type are common in theology. He supposes that the love which'
is required in God's law and is the essence of God's moral per-
1 Job ii. 12. 2 Life in Christ, pp. 255-260.

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — FEELING 205
fection is a feeling, not a rational free choice. Hence he must
interpret all which the Bible says of God's love as said of his
feelings or sensibilities. Thus he confounds God's love and all
spiritual love with natural instinctive affection. And because
brutes have natural affections the same in kind with man's, he
leaves us nothing by which to distinguish God's love, as different
in kind, from a beast's instinctive love of its offspring. It is true
that feeling accompanies the spiritual love, as it does all man's
mental acts ; but the essential and central act of love, which
constitutes its moral character, is rational free choice. And it is
indispensable to all true Christian ethics and to all right concep
tion of the love of God, to recognize this truth. The author also
errs in teaching that the doctrine that God has feeling necessar
ily implies that he suffers not only sorrow but also pain. And his
language implies that fluctuation and passionateness are of the
essence of God's feeling, and that the denial of these is a denial
of the feeling itself. The inference is that if God's feelings do not
fluctuate and are not passionate, if God is not like a weak person
who loses his self-mastery, breaks down, and cries, he has no love
to man. But we have seen that God has feeling, but exempt from
suffering and fluctuation and all limitation and imperfection
peculiar to the sensibility of finite man.
It has been objected that if God has feeling, he must be
changeable ; because, after a sinner has returned to God in faith
and repentance, God cannot have the same feelings toward him
as he had before. But even under human limitations a righteous
man does not change, because he has complacency in a person
so long as he does right and displacency toward him when he
does wrong. The change is in the man who does wrong, not in
the righteous man. On the contrary, the righteous man would
himself be changed into an unrighteous one if he did not feel
displacency toward the person after he had done the wrong.
And there is no change in God because he has complacency in
the penitent, and displacency toward him so long as he persisted
impenitent in his wrong-doing.
5. God is moved to action in creation, providential and moral
government, and redemption, not by any natural instinct or blind
constitutional impulse, but by his own eternal, self-moved, dis
interested love.
God's love is not a feeling, but a rational free choice. This is

206 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
true of the love required of men by God's law, which constitutes
right character. Human love as a natural affection is an instinct
ive, constitutional impulse, common to man with the brutes, and
is properly classed with the feelings. But the love required of
man as a personal spirit by the law of God is his rational free
choice of God as the supreme object of trust and service, and
of his neighbor as equally with himself the object of trust and
service in the moral system under 'the government of God.
Much more the love which we ascribe to God, the absolute
Spirit, cannot be a mere feeling, but must be a choice.1 Thus
God is not moved to action by any natural instinct or blind con
stitutional impulse. He is moved to act by his own eternal and
free determination in the light of absolute reason directing his
energies in harmony with its eternal principles, laws, ideals, and
ends. This choice, eternally luminous with all wisdom and all
knowledge, and eternally free in directing his almighty energies,
is his eternal love.
Therefore God is not to be conceived as ever undetermined
between conflicting motives, making a choice, and so forming a
character in time. This is a necessary limitation of finite per
sons, but not of God. His love is his eternal free choice. In
the order of human thought God's choice is preceded by rational
motives. He is eternally interested in truth, right, perfection,
and good. But in the order of time there is no such precedence.
Both his interest in rational ends and his choice of them in love
are eternal, transcending time. Hence God's love does not
spring from his blessedness nor from his desire to be blessed,
but his blessedness is involved in his love and inseparable from
it. Therefore that which impels God to act is not any blind
impulse or instinct of constitutional feeling, but it is his free
rational choice ; and that choice is love. It is love which moves
God in creating and in all which he does. We see some faint
analogy to this in the finite person, who is perfected in moral
character and acts in the spontaneity of perfect love. That
which moves him to act is no longer the constitutional impulse,
but the perfected character, the free and rational choice in love.
There are no more hesitation and indecision in the balancing of
motives. There is no longer even the thought of law and duty.
1 See Chap. v. III. 2, and " Philosophical Basis of Theism," chap. xv.
PP- 35'-36i ; 390-399-

GOD IS A SPIRIT : — FEELING 207
The motives once so carefully pondered have melted into the
spontaneity and energy of the love. The light of reason and the
heat of love blend indissolubly in the sunshine of the perfect
character. So they are eternally blended in God, whose charac
ter was never formed or perfected in time, but is perfect eternally
in his own free choice in love.
Here we see from a new point of view that God's love is
absolutely disinterested. He has no wants. He does not seek
men in redemption because their salvation is necessary to his own
happiness, for he is eternally blessed in himself. He seeks to
redeem men in pure disinterested love to them unmingled with
any sense of his own need. It is not want which impels him.
And it is not fulness which by any constitutional necessity must
overflow. Absolute disinterested love moves him to forthputting
and blessing in creating and governing the universe ; and still
further in coming into humanity in Christ reconciling the world
unto himself. " Nothing brought him from above,
Nothing but redeeming love."
6. Christ is the exponent, under human limitations and con
ditions, of what God is. As soon as God comes into humanity
revealing his love in Christ, it is a suffering and sacrificial love
even to the extreme of giving up his life for men. The necessary
inference is that there must be in God's love that which cor
responds to human love in suffering and self-sacrifice for those
who are loved ; though, when existing in the absolute Being, it
cannot manifest itself in suffering as it does in humanity. We
know that in its essence it is the same with the love manifested by
Christ, the man of sorrows, suffering in self-sacrifice even unto
death. We can picture it as it would be under human limita
tions and conditions, not as it is in the absolute blessedness of
God. Therefore we properly use the scriptural representations
of God, and speak of his compassion and pity, his mercy and
grace, of his being grieved with our sins, of his patience and long-
suffering, of his indignation and wrath against sin. We may
ascribe to him love, as universal good-will regulated in its exer
cise by righteousness, in all the human forms in which it is mani
fested in Jesus Christ.
God declares that his love exceeds that of a mother for her

208 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
child : " She may forget, yet will not I forget thee." The mother
who has a wayward and wicked son is in anguish on account of
him and so continuously " bears his sin " in her own personal suf
fering for him ; and in compassion and good-will she continually
tries by every means in her power to save him from his wicked
ness and ruin. So God in Christ bears the sins of men while
seeking to save them. Herein Christ is the exponent to us of
God's feelings. The agony of Christ in Gethsemane we must
suppose was the anguish of his spirit in view of the sinfulness of
men made in the likeness of God and sought by him in love, yet
renouncing him and using the divine powers and susceptibilities
with which he has endowed them only to sin against him, to
oppose him in all that he does to realize his grand ideal of the
kingdom of God on earth, and rejecting and crucifying him in
whom God had come as their redeemer to save them from sin.
This anguish of Christ is the true exponent to us of God's feeling
in view of human sin, ever bearing the sin of men on his heart in-
loving sorrow. This divine sorrow, expressed in Christ under
human conditions and limitations, is the agony in Gethsemane.
When Christ wept over Jerusalem, but could not deliver the peo
ple from the inevitable consequences of their persistence in sin,
he expressed what God's sorrow in punishing the wicked would
be if manifested under human conditions and limitations, " reluc
tant wrath," which cannot be changed into approval unless God
should act contrary to the fundamental principles of reason and
to the constitution of the universe, and so crush the universe into
chaos. When Christ looked on the people in a synagogue with
indignation, being grieved at the hardening of their hearts, when
he said, " Woe, unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," it was
the expression of God's eternal and intense antagonism to all sin
as well as of his sorrow for the sinners, as these feelings would be
expressed under human limitations and conditions. When he
wept at the grave of Lazarus he expressed in human tears God's
sympathy with men in bereavement and sorrow. When he healed
the sick, when he attended the wedding in Cana, when he dined
both with Pharisees and with publicans, when he took little chil
dren in his arms and blessed them, when he led a blind man by
the hand through the streets of a village and then in a retired
place restored his sight, when he taught men respecting God and
his kingdom, when he suffered even unto death to save men from

GOD IS A SPIRIT: — FEELING 209
sin, he opened to men's view the very heart of God, he expressed
to them God's eternal and never-changing feelings as they would
be expressed if exercised under human limitations and conditions.
The conclusion is that God is susceptible of feeling, which
under human limitations and conditions would be the feeling of
the human spirit as it is manifested in Christ ; not changed in
essence or lessened in degree by the fact that God is the absolute
Being, but greatened to infinite fulness ; unchanged and unruffled
in eternal peace, because its fulness makes it impossible that it
should be greater, and God's perfection as the absolute Spirit,
whose delight is with the sons of men, makes it impossible it
should be less. And because the spiritual motives and emotions
of men as manifested in Christ are the real exponents of the feel
ing of God, the anthropomorphic representations of it in the
Bible are accordant alike with devout religion, true philosophy
and sound theology. They present a reality essential in every
worthy conception of God ; but in interpreting them we must
clear them of all human weakness, imperfection, and limitation.

vol. i. — 14

CHAPTER VII
THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN.
Theodicy is the justifying of God to man. Especially it is the
vindication of God's love, in answer to objections founded on
the existence of suffering and sin, by showing the harmony of
the universe in its constitution and ongoing with his righteous
ness and benevolence. The Christian is a witness for God rather
than his judge or even his advocate. But it is not presumptu
ous to justify God against objectors who allege that facts both in
the physical and spiritual systems are incompatible with his love.
The ethical principles underlying the evidence that God is love,
and to a considerable extent the evidence itself, have already
been examined.1 I present in this chapter some additional
aspects of the evidence in vindication of his righteousness and
good-will against objections.
I. The Basis of Theodicy. — The basis of all true theodicy
is the supremacy of absolute Reason. The vindication of God's
love in the presence of sin and suffering rests on the facts already
established, that God is the absolute Spirit in whom the princi
ples, laws, and ideals of reason are eternal and immutable ; that
the universe is ultimately grounded in absolute Reason and per
vaded and regulated by it.
i. The skeptic presents his objection in the form of a di
lemma : Either God could have prevented sin and evil but would
not, if so he is not benevolent ; or he would have prevented
them but could not, and if so he is not almighty. It is boasted
that this position is impregnable, " the Gibraltar of unbelief."
1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, chap. ix. pp. 185-226; The Self-Revela-
tion of God, chap. xii. xiii. xiv.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 2 1 1
The fact that God is the absolute Reason completely dissolves
the dilemma proposed by the skeptic, and overthrows his boasted
impregnable fortress. The objection does not establish a com
plete dilemma between a defect either in God's power or his
benevolence. This is evident, because it entirely overlooks the supremacy
of the divine reason regulating all action under unchangeable
law. The objector regards God as arbitrary, capricious, lawless
almightiness. He conceives that if this lawless one should be
come rational and exercise his power in harmony with reason, he
would cease to be almighty. But so 'soon as God is recognized
as absolute Reason, then the universe must be acknowledged as
a scientifically ordered system, there must be a real relation of
means to ends, effects must be commensurate with the agencies
causing them, everything must be subject to law. And when
rational persons appear, a moral system comes into existence in
which must be moral law sanctioned by penalty, probation, dis
cipline, education, progressive development, conflict, temptation,
struggle with difficulties, the risk of failure. The fundamental
fact as to the universe is that from centre to circumference it and
all creatures in it are bound under law, the eternal and un
changing law of the absolute Reason.
Here, then, is a third reality, the most fundamental of all,
which completely dissolves the objector's dilemma. The reason
why God does as he does, and not otherwise, in the prevention of
sin is not necessarily either a defect of power or a defect of
benevolence. It may be an unchangeable truth or law of reason
which would be disregarded, an essential element in some rational
ideal of perfection or good which would fail, if God should do
otherwise than he does. The moment we know that God obeys
the eternal laws and is realizing the ends of reason, the dilemma
is dissolved.
James Mill used to say : " Think of a God who would make a
hell." Here is the bald conception of God as the Lawless One,
arbitrarily making a hell and forcibly putting his creatures into
it. This conception is utterly foreign to theism, and much more
to Christianity. God does not make hell any more than he
makes sin. The persons who refuse to conform to the law of
love make both sin and hell. God has constituted the universe
according to the principles and laws of reason and for the real-

212 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
izing of its ideals. He has constituted rational creatures in a
moral system, to be subject to his law of love, to be brought to
know him, to be trained and disciplined into his likeness, and
thus as always dependent on him to be the recipients of his love,
and blessed therein. Sinners repudiate their dependence as
creatures, set up for themselves in self-sufficiency, self-will, self-
seeking, and self-glorifying ; they refuse obedience to the law of
love, they shut their souls against the reception of God's quick
ening and nourishing grace, they isolate themselves in selfishness.
But the universe being constituted under the law of love, there
is in it no place nor time when any person who wilfully separates
himself from God and isolates himself in self-sufficiency, self-will,
self-seeking, and self-glorifying, can be blessed. The law of love
is not a word issuing on the breath. It is eternal in the consti
tution of God, the absolute Reason ; it is the constitution of the
universe and the most real and fundamental thing in it ; it is
itself the consuming fire of hell to those who isolate themselves
from God and man in selfishness. There is no blessedness to
any person in the universe except in the life of trust in God and
of love to God and man.
It is essential to any moral system that it must consist of finite
personal beings who are rational and free ; that every such finite
being must develop and confirm his own character by his own
free action, since a person cannot be created with a fully devel
oped and perfected moral character ; that, therefore, liability to
sin must be inseparable from the system ; that almighty power
cannot change the choice of a free will. And if any do sin and
live in selfishness instead of love it is essential in any moral sys
tem constituted in perfect wisdom and love that one so living
must fail to attain well-being.
The objector fails also in another respect to establish a real
dilemma. He recognizes in God's. moral character benevolence
only, entirely overlooking his righteousness. The objection, there
fore, rests only on the quagmire of hedonistic ethics. So soon as
we see that God is himself obedient to law, that he is a righteous
God, the dilemma is dissolved. There is no dilemma between a
defect of power and a defect of benevolence, because there is this
third and great reality, the righteousness of God, in which may
be sufficient reasons why he does as he does, aud not otherwise,
in the prevention of sin. The possibility of this may be illustrated

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 213
in the history of martyrdoms. In the persecutions under the
Roman emperors, the Christian, by sprinkling a handful of in
cense on the altar, might have prevented his persecutors from
committing a heinous crime. Why did he not prevent it? Not
through any lack of good-will or of power to prevent it ; but
because in so doing he would himself have done an unrighteous
act. He would have renounced God and set himself in dis
obedience to his law of love. And he would not have accom
plished any good, but only evil ; he would only have aided to
perpetuate the corruption of heathenism and to hinder the
coming in of the benign reign of the God in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself. Good-will unregulated by righteousness
in obedience to law must always defeat itself and bring in evil
instead of good. God's action is always regulated by righteous
ness in obedience to law. Therefore there may be reasons of
righteousness why God does as he does, and not otherwise, in
the prevention of sin, without defect either of benevolence or
power. But we are not shut up to merely human action for illustration.
Christ reveals the thought and heart and action of God, under
human limitations and conditions. He came to save men from
sin, to bring them back to obedience to the law of love. He was
rejected and crucified. The greatest of crimes was about to be
committed. Why did not Christ prevent it? His tears over
Jerusalem show that it was not the lack of compassion and good
will. The whole narrative shows that it was not the lack of
power. The Jews were expecting their Messiah. They would
have received him gladly as the Messiah, would have sustained
him enthusiastically with arms and treasure, if he had conformed
to their wish for a Messiah using his supernatural power as a
conquering king extending by force his reign over the world. In
the wilderness at the beginning of his presentation of himself as
the Messiah, he was tempted to adopt this method. On the
cross they tempted him again : " If he is the king of Israel, let
him now come down from the cross and we will believe on him."
Why did he not do so and prevent their committing the greatest
of sins ? Because he came, obeying the universal law of love, to
save men from their disobedience to it and to bring them back
into harmony with it and with God in the life of love ; because
he came to establish the reign of spiritual influences instead of

214 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the reign of physical force with its selfish ambition, its rapacity,
oppression, violence, and blood. If Christ had yielded to the
wishes of the Jews in order to prevent their crime, he would him
self have repudiated and dishonored the law of self-sacrificing
love which he came to assert, vindicate, and maintain; would
have crushed all hope of the reign of spiritual influence in truth
and love instead of physical force used in self-aggrandizement,
and would have given up the world to the hopeless reign of the
sensual instead of the spiritual, of selfishness instead of self-sacri
ficing love, of the earthly, sensual, and devilish instead of the
divine. He would never have revealed those fundamental reali
ties in the constitution of the universe, that the desire to promote
happiness unregulated by righteousness causes evil, and not good ;
that, instead of its being true that might makes right, the contrary
is true that right makes might ; that he who is greatest is he who
serves in self-sacrificing love ; and that, amid the temptations and
conflicts of the world lying in wickedness, he who findeth his life
shall lose it and he who loseth his life shall find it. Here is
God's own theodicy, his revelation, in redeeming man from sin,
of the universality, supremacy and inviolable authority of the law
of self-sacrificing love, and of his own righteousness in obeying
this law in all his action in reference to sin. Thus he reveals to
us that there are reasons in his own righteousness, in his own
conformity with the eternal law of love, why he does as he does,
and not more or otherwise, in the prevention of sin and the
redemption of sinners from it.
The dilemma of the skeptic being now dissolved, the objection
is nullified and we come to the following conclusions.
In the perfection of God's reason and the invariable conformity
of his action with it in perfect righteousness, there may be reasons
why God does as he does, and not more or otherwise, in the pre
vention of sin and in bringing sinners from sin to the life of love.
This the skeptic cannot deny, unless in omniscience he knows all
which God knows, and thus sees that there is no reason justifying
God in his action or in refraining from acting. And it is not
necessary for us to know and define in detail what the reasons
are. The dilemma is dissolved and the objection nullified when
it is shown that there may be reasons other than defect of power
or benevolence. This objection being set aside, the evidence
that God is love, already adduced, remains in full force. There-

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 21 5
fore there not only may be, but there certainly are, reasons in
God's wisdom and righteousness why he does as he does, and not
otherwise. Here again it is not necessary to be able to say in
detail what the reasons of God's action are. We know that the
judge of all the earth does right, whether we can fathom all the
reasons of his action or not.
We reach this theological position : For the prevention of sin
and the deliverance of sinners from it God does all which perfect
wisdom and love require or permit. He does all that infinite
wisdom and love require ; he refrains from doing more or other
wise, not from defect of power or benevolence, but only because
wisdom and love do not permit.
2. This part of theodicy is commonly confused through failing
to ascertain with precision what the question is. The following
explanations are therefore necessary.
The question is not, how the existence of sin is accounted for.
That is an entirely different question and is easily answered. It
is accounted for as the act of a finite free agent. A free will
cannot be determined by force, but only by influence adapted to
a rational free will. The finite person forms his character by his
own free action ; in his constitution as finite he is accessible to
temptation, and is thus under probation. He is, therefore, liable
to sin. Here is the possibility of sin. And when we find it
existing, its existence is accounted for by the fact that some free
agents in the exercise of their free will ha^e sinned.
The question is not, why the man sinned. It may be said it
was because he was tempted. " Each man is tempted, when he
is drawn away by his own lust and enticed" (James i. 14). But
no temptation compels the will. The fact is accounted for by
man's free will. But the act cannot be justified before the tri
bunal of reason, because it is of the essence of sin that it is a
choice of the will in direct opposition to reason. It is always
foolishness as well as wickedness. It is in its essence unreason
able. It must be forever impossible to give an explanation satis
factory to reason, why the man sinned. This, however, is no
answer to the question of theodicy now before us, though some
times presented as such, and even by so great a man as Neander.
The question is not, Why does man sin? but, Why does not God
do more, or otherwise, to prevent his sinning?
The question is not, why God does not interpose to prevent

2l6 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
sin. This implies in the very statement of the question that
God does not interpose to prevent it. But in fact all God's
action is in opposition to sin and for its prevention. All his
action, being in harmony with the truths and laws of reason and
thus for the realization of perfection and good, is the expression
of perfect wisdom and love. Therefore the moral influence going
forth from all his action is in support of the law of love and in
opposition to the commission of sin.
This statement of the question also assumes that almighty
power can prevent free agents from sinning, and that, therefore,
the existence of sin is proof that God does nothing to prevent it.
This assumption rests on the error that a free will can be de
termined by almightiness. But a free will can be determined only
by itself in its own free choice or volition. It cannot be de
termined by force ; it can be moved from without only by moral
influence. A person's environment may excite in him constitu
tional motives to action, but it cannot determine his will. That
determination must be his own free act. Hence this statement
of the question tacitly assumes that the truths and laws of reason
are not universal and supreme, and that the universe is not
ultimately grounded in reason. Thus it falls back on the old
error that the universe is grounded in and controlled by arbitrary
and capricious almightiness. It involves the nugatory attempt to
retain the conception of a moral system in which arbitrary and
resistless almightiness determines the wills of the free agents in
the system. In other words, it involves the absurdity of a
system of rational free agents under moral government which
is at the same time a mechanism driven by force according to the
laws of mechanics. Then the persons in the moral system are,
as Spinoza called them, spiritual automata. Not a few would
agree with Mr. Huxley in wishing to be made wise and righteous
and blessed by a fiat of the almighty.1 But the conception is
absurd and its realization impossible. Moral character can be
formed only by the person's own free moral action. Every
person must determine his own character and destiny. If he is
to attain wisdom and to realize the beauty and blessedness of the
life of love, if he is to be developed to moral and spiritual per
fection, to the highest possibilities of his being, it can only be by
1 Spinoza, " De Intell. Emend." cap. xi. § 85 ; Huxley, " Lay Sermons,"
P- 373-

THEODICY: —THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 217
his own free and steadfast determination in harmony with reason,
in obedience to the 'law of love, and under the probation and
discipline of the moral system. Hence the will of man may
" resist," " grieve," and " quench " the Spirit of God. Because
it is of the essence of a free will that it can be determined only
by itself under moral influences, it follows that it may resist
any moral influence. Otherwise it would be the moral influence
which determined it, and not the will itself, and we fall into that
doctrine of necessity, denying all freedom of will, which is called
determinism. Therefore, as Professor Forbes of Aberdeen says,
" The creation of a free-will being is the endowment of a creature
with a power that may form a volition contrary to God's holy
will, and may, by its own free act, break off from its normal
condition of creaturely dependence on God's will, and resist, if it
so determines, every effort of God for its recovery and reunion
with him." 1
The question is not why God permits sin. He does not permit
it, but all his action exerts influence against it. Theologians
have discussed the wisdom of God in the permission of sin. The
phrase is false and misleading. We should rather speak of the
non-prevention of sin.
The real question is : Why does God do all he does for the
prevention of sin and evil, and not do more or otherwise ? Why
does he not do what would effectually prevent both ? Man's
sinning is unreasonable ; it admits no justification to reason.
But God's doing as he does, and not otherwise, for their preven
tion must be reasonable. There must be good reasons for it
apparent to God ; and if we knew all, we could declare them
and justify his action and non-action to all reasonable persons.
3. The position of the skeptic rests on two other fundamental
errors. One is the assumption that 'God is almighty power un
regulated by reason, — an almighty caprice. With such a con
ception a theodicy is impossible. There would be no standards
of truth and right, of perfection and worth, by which to judge
God's action. There would be no difference between the reason
able and the absurd, the right and the wrong, the perfect and the
imperfect, the wise and the foolish, and, consequently, none
between the possible and the impossible. There would be no
physical or spiritual system, no reasonable constitution of the
1 " Predestination and Freewill," by John Forbes, D. D., LL.D., p. 12.

2l8 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
universe regulating action on and through all things in it, no
connection of means and ends, no free wift to be respected, no
action under law, no moral government, no progressive develop
ment of the physical universe, no kingdom of God growing like
the corn, by the agency of faithful men, under the quickening
and guidance of the Spirit of God. Whatever the Almighty-
might wish to effect, however absurd it would be if the universe
were rationally constituted, the Almighty has only to will and it
comes to pass. It would not be even a paradise of fools, because
there would be in it neither the wise nor fools.
The other error is that the search for evidence of God's love
proceeds from the standpoint of Hedonism. One issue of this is
that the investigation is merely empirical, an attempt to measure
and weigh in all particular instances the quantity of enjoyment
yielded by virtuous and vicious actions respectively. But man
cannot in this way measure the enjoyment resulting from specific
acts even as the results come under his observation, much less
their issues in the endless future. Another issue of this Hedonis
tic method is that God's love is regarded as benevolence only*
either excluding the righteousness altogether, or at least excluding
it from love. The search in the universe for the revelation of
such a God must be in vain, for such a God does not exist.
When the evidence is no longer obscured by these errors and
is seen in the clear light and estimated by the unchanging norms
or standards of reason, it will be found that the universe is so
constituted that it is more advantageous to do right than to do
wrong, to live the life of love than the life of selfishness ; that the
power that rules in it acts in accordance with the principles and
laws of reason for the realization of rational perfection and good,
and so acts in perfect knowledge and love, which constitute
wisdom. 4. Though we may be unable to see the precise reasons why
in any given case God does as he does, and not otherwise, yet
it is involved in the necessary principles of reason that God as
the absolute Being must be perfect in love and in everv attribute
of Spirit. It is a necessary principle of reason that some abso
lute Being must exist. An imperfect being cannot be the absolute
and unconditioned. A being that is morally imperfect cannot
be the absolute and unconditioned. A morally imperfect being
is in conflict with himself; his will is in antagonism to his

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 219
reason. He chooses ends contradictory to reason, consequently
external to and independent of himself. On these he expends
his energy, and yet must fail of realizing them. Thus he has
wants, — and wants which can never be satisfied in a universe
scientifically intelligible and ordered under the supremacy of
reason. Such a being cannot be self-existent and independent.
His whole action would be foolish and wicked, in antagonism to
truth and love. Such a being would be finite and imperfect.
He could not be God. God would still be above him, the
absolute Spirit, energizing in harmony with rational truth and
law for the realization of all perfection and good. All the
evidence that God is the absolute Spirit is equally evidence that
he is perfect in love and in all wisdom.
That God is morally perfect is a fundamental postulate neces
sary to the trustworthiness of human reason and to the validity of
the conclusions of human thought. If it is not true, we " are
put to permanent intellectual confusion."
That reason, essentially like the reason of man, is universal
and supreme is the fundamental postulate of all science. Other
wise all conclusions of science are invalidated and scientific
knowledge is impossible.1 What is thus true in the intellectual
sphere is equally true in the ethical. It is the fundamental
postulate of all ethics that reason, as practically regulative, is
always and everywhere one and the same. If this is not true,
if there is not one universal and supreme moral law, morality
crumbles into chaos, knowledge in this great sphere of the prac
tical regulation of conduct becomes impossible, human reason is
discredited, and again we are put to permanent intellectual con
fusion. The formal principle of the law by which it is declared
as law, the principle that a rational being ought to obey reason,
rests on the postulate of one universal supreme Reason, the
source of one universal supreme law obligatory on all rational
beings. The real principle of the law rests on the same postu
late. So soon as we know ourselves in a rational system, we
know that no man liveth for himself alone or has a right to live
for himself alone, but for all in their relations to one another in
the system. Thus the law of universal love, the real principle or
the law, rests on the postulate that God, the absolute Reason, is
1 Phil. Basis of Theism, pp. 82, 312-314, 560-564; The Self-Revelation
of God, pp. 45-47, 227, 256^266, 366-375 ; Chap. iv. § V., of this volume.

220 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Love, and has constituted the universe under the law requiring
universal love and bringing on all who disobey and live in selfish
ness the penalty of missing all true good. If we deny this, the
law, both in its formal principle and its real, breaks down, moral
distinctions disappear, the ethical principles and inferences of
reason are invalidated, and human reason is found to be
untrustworthy. Thus the human reason, both in its speculative and its prac
tical activity, finds itself face to face with God. When it looks
in on itself in action, whether scientific or moral, it sees the
universal Reason in the background. Paul says of man in his.
religious life : " We all, with unveiled face, reflecting as a mirror
the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from
glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." 1 So, in the
action of man's mind in science and in morals, the human reason,
if the veil is taken from its face, sees in itself as in a mirror the
image of God, the absolute Reason.
Mr. Spencer objects that the absolute Being, " the Power
manifested through phenomena," cannot be subject to law,
because it would imply " conditions apart from this Power " to
which the Power would be subordinated. This rests on the assump
tion that the absolute is naked causal Power or energy, divested
of reason and unregulated by it. Then, if the Power were sub
jected to law, the law would be external to and independent of the
Power, and thus the Power would be conditioned and dependent.
It is the old error that the absolute is an almighty caprice. The
objection is of no force against the theistic conception of God,
the absolute Spirit, in whom, as perfect Reason, the law is
eternal ; and whose will is in harmony with it in his own eternal
free choice. Against this true conception of God the objection
resolves itself into the absurdity that if God is autonomic, if he is
enlightened by reason and knows what is true and right and per
fect and good, he cannot be free. Whereas this enlightenment
by reason is the essential constituent of all moral freedom of will.
Mr. Spencer argues, further, that the absolute Being cannot be
subject to law because " right and wrong as conceived by us can
exist only in relation to the actions of creatures capable ot
pleasures and pains; seeing that analysis carries us back to
pleasures and pains as the elements out of which the conceptions
1 2 Cor. iii. 18. *

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 221
are formed." But this objection merely demonstrates that hedon
ism, on which Mr. Spencer founds his ethics, is an insufficient
basis for a moral system.
He argues further, that " to ascribe rightness to the acts of the
Power manifested through phenomena, is to assume the possibil
ity that wrong acts may be committed by this Power." 2 If we
regard God merely as the Almighty, he has power to do wrong,
if he should so will. Free will implies power to do wrong or to
do right. But God is not mere almighty power. He is the absolute
Reason acting according to his own eternal self-determination in
universal good-will exercised in harmony with the eternal truths
and laws of Reason. Otherwise he could not be God the abso
lute and perfect Spirit. " It is impossible for God to lie " (Heb.
vi. 1 8). But that which makes it impossible for God to do
wrong is not lack of power, but his eternal free self-determina
tion in love in accordance with the principles and laws of reason.
The fact that this determination is eternal as character does not
make it less free. Analogous is fixedness of character in man
through continued self-determination in love and perpetuated in
the life everlasting. Spencer's objection rests on the error that
man is free only so long as he feels the law as a " code of
restraints ; " that, therefore, " the ideal man among ideal men,"
who no longer is tempted by any impulse to any act causing pain
to others, is no longer subject to law. But the law of God is not
primarily a code of restraints, but the requirement of love.
When a man is perfect in obedience, then love inspires all his
actions, he no longer falls back on the "thou shalt" and "thou
shalt not " of the law ; love gets the start of the sense of duty ;
it brings in moral spontaneity and, as the dominating motive,
sweeps all impulses and desires along with it. But the man is not
exempt from the law, he is perfectly obeying it. Love in this
spontaneity and fulness is what the law requires, the end which it
aims to attain ; in all its commands and prohibitions the law is
" our schoolmaster " to lead us to this freedom of love. This
law of love is eternal in the absolute Reason ; it is revealed in
the constitution of the universe and attested in the reason and
conscience of man. God in his eternal love is in voluntary har
mony with this eternal and all-constitutive law, and all his action
in creation, providence, and moral government, as well as in
1 The Data of Ethics, chap. xv. § 99, chap. xvi. § no, pp. 258, 286.

222 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
redemption, is in free and willing obedience to this law and a
continual revelation and declaration of its universal and inviolable
authority. The fact that God does not feel it as a code of
restrictions does not prove that he is not under law freely acting
in conformity with it in love, but proves, on the contrary, the
perfection of his willing conformity with it. The objection im
plies that moral freedom is possible only in entire indifference ;
and that character, as it becomes formed, is incompatible with
freedom ; a person perfected in love to God and man would no
longer be a free and responsible moral agent.
These errors are of frequent occurrence both in ethics and in
theology. The error is deeply rooted, that all obedience to law
involves struggle and conflict, that God is not subject to law, and
that law and love are in antagonism. There is a strange for
getfulness of the facts that all which the law requires is love,
that " the end of the law for righteousness " is to bring men to
perfect obedience of the law of love, that the end of Christ's
redemptive work is to accomplish the end of the law by bringing
men away from selfishness and sin into perfect conformity with
the law, and that, in the complete love which is perfect obedi
ence to the law, the law is found to be " the perfect law," " the
law of liberty."
A prominent evangelical newspaper, in a recent article, comes
to the conclusion " that there are no duties owed by God to
man." Mr. Spencer holds the same position; and both are
open to the same philosophical objections. It is a position far
removed from the conception of God as revealed in the Bible.
Abraham appealed to God's obligation to deal with men in right
eousness : " To slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the
righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee ; shall
not the judge of all the earth do right ? " Paul argues that if
God should disregard the obligation in righteousness to punish the
wicked, he could not be the righteous judge of the world. God
himself again and again appeals to the reasonable judgment of
men on the rectitude of his dealings with them : " O, house of
Israel, are not my ways equal? are not your ways unequal? ' J
II. Sorrow and Suffering. — We have now ascertained the
fundamental ground of theodicy in the fact that God is the abso-
1 Gen. xviii. 25 ; Rom. iii. 5, 6 ; Ezek. xviii. 25-29.

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 223
lute Reason, and that the exercise of his power is regulated by
the eternal principles and laws of reason for the realization of its
eternal ideal of all perfection and well-being possible in a finite
universe. His power is thus regulated in the double significance
already explained, that God's power, though almighty, cannot give
reality to what is absurd, and, according to his eternal free choice
to act in harmony with reason in love, he will not do anything
which is unreasonable and wrong. We proceed to consider the
particular form of the objection as founded on the privation of
good and the existence of positive pain, sorrow, and suffering.
This objection is sufficiently answered when we show that there
may be reasons known to God why he does not do more or other
wise in conferring good and preventing suffering. But even
within our limited sphere of knowledge we see some reasons why
privation of good and the suffering of pain and sorrow may exist
under the wise and loving government of God. Some of these
we may without unwarranted presumption ascertain and point
out.1 1-. Susceptibility to privation of good, to suffering and sorrow,
is essential to the existence of a moral system consisting of finite
persons under the government of God.
A finite being, as limited, is destitute of good which it is con
ceivable a being of greater capacity might enjoy. By good I
mean here the good which a finite being might attain by right
action and development within the limits of its capacities and in
accordance with its constitution.
The susceptibility to privation of good and to suffering and
sorrow is essential to the existence and maintenance of moral
law. It is essential to law that it be sanctioned by the punish
ment of transgressors. But a being not susceptible of suffering
nor of the privation of good could not be punished for any
transgression. God has so constituted the universe that a finite
person in it can realize good only in conformity with its funda
mental law of love, and that a life of selfishness can issue only
in the loss of all that is really good and in the suffering of evil.
But such a constitution of the universe is possible only if finite
persons exist capable of joy or sorrow, and so capable of experien-
1 See " The Self-Revelation of God," pp. 297-316, where I have considered
some of these reasons. Without repeating what was there said, we may get
further light from the higher point of view which we have now attained.

224 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
cing good or evil. The same is essential to the revelation of God's
character in the universe. If God had constituted it so that no
evil could be incurred by sin and no blessedness attained by the
life of righteousness and good- will, he would not have revealed
any eternal and inviolable law of love sustained and enforced by
all the energies of his own will acting always in harmony with
reason. He would have, revealed himself as entirely indifferent
to moral character and to the distinction of right and wrong.
It must be noticed here that it is only the susceptibility of
finite persons to joy and sorrow which is essential to a moral
system, not the actual experience of loss and suffering. Persons
who always are perfectly conformed to the law of love are always
blessed in their love in harmony with the law. Only it must
always remain true that if any one of them should cease to love
he would lose his blessedness and suffer evil. Thus God,
eternally in harmony with the law of reason, is eternally blessed
in his love.
The susceptibility of finite persons to suffering and loss is
essential also to the possibility of probation, and of discipline,
education, and development, in a moral system. These pre
suppose finite persons subject to various motives, susceptible of
enjoyment and suffering from many and even incompatible
sources, capable of discriminating joys and their sources as
worthy or unworthy, subject to temptation, yet able to resist it.
In thus meeting the various influences of his environment, man is
on probation ; as he determines his action, either in harmony
with the law or in transgression of it, he forms his character,
either right or wrong. And by acting right under all these
influences he is disciplined, educated, and developed in right
character, and advances toward the realization of the highest
possibilities of his rational and spiritual being. But without
susceptibility to pleasure and pain, to joy and sorrow, this pro
bation, discipline, and development would be impossible. It is as
absurd to suppose that God might create a person with a
perfectly holy character, as to suppose his creating one a hun
dred years old. Moral character is possible in a finite person
only as he by his own free action determines, develops, and
confirms it.
Thus human life is a ladder, and its events, opportunities, and
exigencies are the rounds by which the man may climb from

THEODICY: —THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 225
earth to heaven, at every step lifting himself nearer to God.
And it necessarily involves the risk that, yielding to temptation,
he lose his hold and fall to earth again. And even the fall be
comes an occasion of calling forth in others the service of love,
bringing the fallen one to Christ to heal his wounds and set him
forth again on the ascent to the divine from which he fell.
Every stone which falls imparts force enough to throw it back to
the height from which it fell. And there is a sort of analogy in
this in the fall of men into suffering and sin, as calling forth the
loving service of others and so becoming the occasion of their
discipline and development in the spiritual life of love. The
conflict of good with injustice and oppression, the effort to rescue
men from sensuality, ignorance, and vice, the labor to reform
abuses, the seeking the lost and sinful wherever they may be, to
bring them to Christ, are a continual disciplining, strengthening,
and developing of Christ's people into the likeness and power of
Christ. 2. The investigation of the constitution and course of the uni
verse discloses many lines of evidence that it is constituted and
goes on in accordance with the law of love.
History proves not merely that knowledge and intellectual
culture and development are power, but also that love and the
moral and religious culture and development involved in it are
power. Mr. Spencer expects that, according to the law of the
survival of the fittest, it is they who live lives of love who are
destined to be the survivors of all and to fill and possess the
earth. And a survey of the ages shows that the influence of men
of righteousness and good-will survives and widens, while that
of the wicked decays. Paul was a prisoner chained, and
Nero the emperor of the western world. Luther was a monk,
and Charles V. was the emperor of half of Europe. Who in
their day would have thought that the prisoner and the monk
were mightier than the emperors? But what has been the
influence of Nero and Charles during all succeeding ages, com
pared with the influence of Luther and of Paul? Shakespeare
took but a superficial view of history when he said :
" The evil that men do lives after them j
The good is oft interred with their bones."
Maggots breeding in corruption are more prolific than men ; but
we do not expect them to prevail over men. The great powers
vol. i. — 15

226 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
of the universe are the powers of life and growth, not the powers
of corruption and decay. Error and vice contain in themselves
elements of decay. Truth and love are eternal. This truth the
common-sense of mankind has embodied in its proverbs : " The
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church ; " " The martyrs of
one age are the heroes of the next." All ingenuous spirits assent
with enthusiasm to the words of Bryant :
" Truth crushed to earth shall rise again :
The eternal years of God are hers ;
But error, wounded, writhes in pain
And dies among his worshipers."
We must notice also the capacity of righteousness and good
will, if universally prevalent, to make the world blessed. On the
contrary, the universal prevalence of the greed of selfishness,
under the law that might makes right, would make the world
uninhabitable. This shows that God has so constituted the
universe that real good having true worth, as estimated by the
standards of reason, is attainable only by righteousness and good
will, and that love thus illuminated by reason and in harmony
with it is the only wisdom.1
3. In the constitution of man there is further evidence that
God is love. There is no joy purer or more complete than that
which suffuses the soul in the consciousness of doing right, and
all the more when it has cost struggle and self-denial. And there
is no more crushing anguish than remorse in the consciousness of
wrong-doing and guilt, gnawing the soul in self-condemnation and
self-reproach in which the sinner judges himself as shut out from
good and deserving only evil. As Daniel Webster says of the
criminal in his consciousness of guilt : " He feels it beating at his
heart, rising to his throat, and demanding disclosure. He thinks
the whole world sees it in his face, reads it in his eyes, and almost
hears its workings in the very silence of his thoughts." 2 It
sometimes drives the criminal to suicide or self-surrender to the
officers of justice, accepting punishment itself as a sort of satis
faction. It sometimes gives objective reality to its own ex
pectation of retribution ; and he sees all things frowning on him
as if charging him with his crime, like the parricide mentioned by
Plutarch, who destroyed a nest of birds because by their chatter-
1 See " Philosophical Basis of Theism,'' pp. 212-224.
2 Works, vol. vi. p. 54.

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 227
ing they reproached him for the murder ; or he sees the ghost of
his victim : —
" The fiends in his own bosom people air
With kindred fiends that drive him to despair."
Here are the natural sanctions of virtue and proof of the moral
character of God who gave the law and ordained its sanctions.
We find also an intrinsic blessedness in the exercise of benevo
lence, in magnanimity and honor, in protecting the weak in their
rights, in doing justly to all, in the sincerity which has nothing to
hide. On the other hand, in malevolence, in the greed of
covetousness, in intrigue and dishonesty, and many other vices,
there are an uneasiness and restlessness, a rasping of the spirit, a
carking anxiety, which make their very exercise painful and
corroding, a rust eating the soul.
Thus in man's emotional as well as in his rational constitution
we find evidence that God is love, and that his law of love is
universal, supreme, and inviolable. It has been objected that
God may be a wicked being who has given us this constitution on
purpose to deceive us. Various answers have been given. It
has been said that God would have no motive to deceive us.
Thomas Chubb says that God could not be so mean as to do it.1
All such answers present glimpses of the fundamental truth which
underlies them all : that the existence of God, the absolute
Reason, energizing in obedience to the principles and laws of
reason for the realization of its ideals of perfection and good, is
the fundamental postulate of all human science, whether specu
lative or practical, whether of the physical universe or of the
distinctions of right and wrong. If this is not true, then human
reason is untrustworthy, scientific knowledge is impossible, and
moral law, obligations and distinctions, disappear. And it is
equally true that if the law of love is not the supreme and uni
versal law, eternal in the absolute Reason, and if God's own action
is not always in obedience to it in love, then God is not the abso
lute Being, but is himself conditioned and imperfect.
4. It is objected that the blessings of life are distributed with
1 " To be arbitrary in his government and thereby to act the part of a
weak and childish, or of an evil and vicious, being, is so mean and dis
reputable that God, upon that account, will be at the farthest remove from
it." — Thomas Chubb, "A Collection of Tracts on Various Subjects" [A
Vindication of God's Moral Character], p. 253. Ed. London, 1730.

228 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
no regard to moral character ; that the wicked are often in pros
perity and the righteous in adversity.
The first answer is, that the allegation of the objection is true
in reference to wealth, official position, the applause of the world,
and similar acquisitions, which do not constitute spiritual well-being.
God is not so impoverished that he must reward those who live
lives of universal love only with gifts like these which perish in the
using. " Wealth on the vilest often is bestowed
To show its vileness in the sight of God."
It would not have been worth while for God to come in Christ to
men, only to teach them how to provide for their earthly comfort.
It would be the revelation that man's highest good consists in his
condition and surrounding, in what he gets, not in what he is and
does ; that man's highest good is to attain the means of luxurious
living'; that God has come from heaven to earth to intensify
man's eagerness to get wealth and worldly ease and honor ; that
man is of the earth, earthly, with no relation to God and the
spiritual system, and no outlook to the higher and spiritual life.
To those who serve God and their fellow-men in love, God gives
" the durable riches and righteousness." He opens to them their
relation to the spiritual system, the possibility of communing with
him, becoming like him, and being blessed in him. He secures
to them the perfection of their being, harmony with themselves,
with the constitution and course of the universe, with the spiritual
system, and with God. Thus he insures that all things, however
seemingly adverse, shall work together for their good. So life be
comes the continual unfolding to them of our Saviour's secret :
" He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life
shall find it." J
Here we have found the deeper principle on which the answer
to the objection rests. Man's true good consists in the perfection
of his being, in his consequent harmony with himself, with the
universe and with God, and the blessedness ensuing. Then, in
the life and service of love, man is continually attaining his true
well-being. Character is confirmed by action in accordance with
it. Therefore every act of love purifies and strengthens the love,
develops the man toward the perfection of his being, and con
firms him in his harmony with God and the universe, and in the
1 Matth. a. 39.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 229
enjoyment resulting. Every selfish act strengthens the man's
selfishness, disorders and corrupts his being, widens his alienation
from God and all who love God and men, and sinks him deeper
in all evil.
Thus in this life every right act receives at once and inevitably
its reward in insuring to man his true and essential good ; and
every wrong act, every wrong feeling indulged, every hour of self
ish living, receives at once and inevitably its due punishment in
confirming the person in his selfish character, making him more
and more insensible to the higher and spiritual motives and to
God's gracious influences and drawing, and at last sinking him
irrevocably in the bottomless pit of his own selfishness and aliena
tion from God and from all true good.
5 . Man's dissatisfaction with his present condition is incidental
to his being constituted for the progressive realization of a higher
ideal. We have seen that God's revelation of himself must be
made, if at all, in a finite universe, and realized progressively.
Hence at any point of time God's archetypal idea cannot be com
pletely realized, but is ever pointing forwards to something higher
in the future. Any objection to God's goodness founded on this
incompleteness is futile, because this incompleteness is itself inci
dental to progress in the realization of the ideal, and the resources
of the absolute Being can never be exhausted. For example, if it
is asked why God did not come in Christ to redeem men from
sin a thousand years earlier, the question is futile ; for, whenever
he might have come, the question would be equally pertinent,
Why did he not come before? If he had come when the
first rational man appeared, the question would still be, Why was
not man brought into being earlier, and why did not Christ come
immediately on the appearance of the first man? God has been
realizing his archetypal ideal through countless sons in countless
worlds, and doubtless in the evolution of innumerable systems in
space and time. At any point of time or space it is idle to
object that God cannot be all-wise, almighty, and all-good, be
cause the universe is not finished to perfection, and we can
conceive of something higher still to be attained. This objection
carries us back to the Epicurean conception that God created the
universe and finished it, and ever since has been an idle specta
tor of its ongoing.
The same principle applies to the rational individual. God hag

23O GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
constituted every rational person immortal. God is seeking to
realize in every such person the ideal of perfection in endless
development in knowledge, power, and blessedness. Therefore
man's very dissatisfaction with his present condition, with outward
acquisitions, with the gratification of selfish desires, his longing
for what is higher and better, his "noble discontent," is incidental
to his being constituted for the realization of a higher ideal. It
reveals him as too great for his present physical environment,
ever reaching out to transcend it. It shows him to be also con
scious, however dimly, of his divine and spiritual environment.
If he is not seeking to realize his spiritual development, his inca
pacity to be satisfied with sensual joys and earthly acquisitions
attests that he has missed the higher spiritual development in
union with God for which he was designed.
From this point of view death itself, which casts its gloom over
human life, is but a necessary epoch in the development of man
to his higher destiny.
We notice also that a large part of the privation of good and
of the suffering and sorrow incident to humanity results from
man's own sin. If all men had always lived in conformity with
the laws of their being, physical, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and
religious, the greater part, if not all, of human suffering would
have been avoided. And death itself would have been an epoch
in man's normal growth and development, like the opening of the
bud into the flower, or, as Paul illustrated it, like the shooting of
the living germ from the ripened seed.
Since man has sinned, God in Christ has come into humanity
reconciling the world unto himself. He has established his king
dom, and is progressively developing it as a living growth, " first
the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear "
(Markiv. 28).
Thus, both for the individual and for society, we may accept the
privation and suffering of the present time, either as incidental to
man's implicit consciousness of his higher destiny and as neces
sary to his development and education for the realization of the
highest possibilities of his being, or as the result of human sin
vitiating not only the individual sinner but also the race connec
tion. And we may rest in peace, having entire and well-founded
confidence in the good-will and righteousness of God in respect
to all his action or non-action, the reasons for which we do not

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 23 1
understand, and in the assurance of the progress of the kingdom
of God, and of every individual who trusts and serves him, to the
realization of the highest ideal of perfection and well-being, in
glory, honor, and immortality, in the life eternal. In this faith
we may adopt the words of Browning : —
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ;
That, after last, returns the first,
Though a wide compass round be fetched ;
That what began best, can't end worst ;
Nor what God blessed once, prove accursed. Apparent Failure.
III. Sin. — We proceed to consider the form of the objection
as founded on the fact of sin. Theodicy, or the justification of
God in the non-prevention of sin, does not require us to point
out the specific reasons why God does as he does, and not other
wise, in respect to it. In all ages of civilization the question as
to the origin of evil and the reasons of God's action pertaining to
it has oppressed the human mind. In one of the letters attributed
to Plato, the writer speaks of this question as " the travail [ASt's]
of the soul, from which, if it cannot be delivered, it can never
reach real truth." x But we are delivered from this travail, we
rest in mental peace, since we have ascertained that God is the
all-perfect Spirit, and that the reasons of his doing or his not
doing, whether we know them specifically or not, are reasons of
perfect wisdom and love, reasons founded always on his per
fection, never on any defect. But here, also, as to the origin
of sin, as in respect to privation and suffering, we may see,
even within our limited sphere of knowledge, some specific rea
sons why God does not do more or otherwise in the prevention
of sin.
r. The principles established and the reasons of God's action
set forth in the first and second sections of this chapter are appli
cable in answer to the objection as founded on the fact of sin.
If a moral system exists, it must consist of finite, and therefore
fallible persons ; each person must be gradually developed and
form a character ; the revelation of God to men must be pro
gressive, adapted to the character, attainments and development
of the finite persons ; the kingdom which God is developing on
1 Epistle ii. to Dionysius.

232 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
earth must be progressive. The possibility of sin and the lia
bility to commit it are therefore inseparable from a moral system.
Here, however, observe that sin as a fact is not necessary in a
moral system, because it is conceivable that all rational persons in
forming character may always choose right. But the possibility
of sinning, and the consequent liability to sin in finite persons is
inseparable from the moral system. Almighty power cannot
create a moral system of rational persons, each of whom must
develop himself and form and confirm a character by his own free
action, without the possibility of their sinning and their conse
quent liability to sin.
The fundamental reason, by which the objection as founded on
the fact of sin is invalidated, is the fact that all rational beings
created by God in a moral system are free agents and finite. It
is impossible for God by an act of almighty power to determine
the free choice of a rational free agent. A free choice is in its
essence a person's free self-determination. If determined by
another it would no longer be the person's self-determination.
It is no more possible for God by resistless almighty force to
determine a man's free self-determination than it is possible for
him to create a circle with the radii unequal. Each is absurd,
and no power can give reality to that which is absurd. All
rational free agents except God ar _ also finite. Therefore they
must be educated and developed, must form moral characters,
and are liable to err and to sin. Thus, within our own sphere of
knowledge, we can see adequate reasons why God does as he does,
and not otherwise, in the non-prevention of sin. We can rest,
therefore, in the position that God in universal good-will does all
that the principles, laws, and ideals of reason permit or require
for the preventing of sin, and that evermore he " will wait that he
may be gracious" (Isa. xxx. 18) ; will use every divine influence
available to induce sinners to return to him in penitential trust
and loving service, and will rejoice to welcome and receive to
favor every one who will thus return to him. It is only when he
sees that the sinner is so confirmed in sinful character by his own
persistence in sin as to be beyond the reach of all possible moral
influence to induce him to repent, that God may be said to give
him over to his own heart's lusts, and the Holy Spirit is said to
be grieved and quenched. But even then God's good-will remains
unchanged ; he would draw the sinner to himself if he could be

THEODICY: —THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 233
induced to return, and then would gladly welcome him as a
prodigal son returning penitent to his father's house.
2. I proceed to consider some of the false historical theories
proposed in answer to the question, What is the reason in God's
wisdom and love why he does as he does, and not otherwise, in
the prevention of sin? It must be constantly borne in mind that
the failure of any theory to give a satisfactory answer to this
specific question is not, as often supposed, a failure of our theod
icy. On the contrary, as we have seen, the question at this stage
assumes the general answer already found, that the specific
reasons, whatever they may be, are reasons of wisdom and love.
It must also be premised that any theory, purporting to give all
the specific reasons of wisdom and love for all God's acting and
non-acting, presupposes knowledge of all the details of his arche
typal plan and its progressive realization, which, as being omni
science, no finite mind can have. " With whom took he counsel,
and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgment,
and taught him knowledge, and showed to him the way of under
standing? " 1 Speculations of this kind, instead of giving light,
have usually resulted only in making the darkness visible.
One theory is that sin is the necessary means of the greatest
good. The refutation of this theory is decisive and obvious. It
implies that sin, as the necessary means of the greatest good, is
grounded in reason and essential in the constitution of the uni
verse. Then sin ceases to be sin because it is accordant with
the principles of reason and the constitution of the universe ; it
ceases to be evil because it is necessary to the good ; and it
ceases to be conditioned, temporal and finite, as originated and
perpetuated by the action of finite persons, and, like love itself,
has its basis in the principles of reason which are eternal in God.
Such optimism annuls the essential distinction between right and
wrong, between good and evil. On the contrary, finite creatures,
endowed with rational free will, are, in the exercise of their free
agency, the responsible authors of sin. It is not accordant with
any principle or law of reason, but is in its essence the renuncia
tion of dependence on God and of allegiance to him ; it is the
act of a creature of God putting himself in antagonism to all
truth and law, to all perfection and good, and to the constitution
of the universe. Therefore the perfection of the constitution of
1 Isaiah xl. 14.

234 G0D> THE 0NE 0NLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the universe and of the laws of the moral system is independent
of the fact of sin and is not impaired by it. Sin exists, not as
essential in the constitution of things and the requirements of
the eternal and universal Reason, but in direct antagonism to
them. Therefore it is temporal and finite, not eternal and uni
versal ; an evil to be resisted by all the wise and righteous, to be
overpowered by love, or, if persistent in opposition to love, to
be restrained and frustrated by righteous penalty.
Sin, therefore, is neither essential nor relative good. In itself
and in all its distinctive effects it is evil and only evil continually.
It is the only essential evil in the universe. But this evil is not
an abstraction. It is concrete, living, and energizing, in the char
acter and action of rational persons. It is energizing in contra
diction of the truth and in violation and defiance of the law of
reason, in antagonism to the realization of all rational ideals of
perfection and good, in antagonism to the highest interests of
man, and to the realization of the great ends of his education,
discipline, and development in the moral system. Sin is never
better for the universe than love would be in its place. There
fore we must look the fact in the face, that there is essential
evil in the universe ; that there are in it those who are using
their high powers as personal beings in doing evil. God does
not bring it in, but the sinners themselves. We must recognize
the fact that God's whole action is in opposition to sin ; we must
recognize also the aspect of the life of a righteous man, now so
much forgotten, that it is a warfare against sin both in himself
and in all others, that he is to be a worker together with God
to save men from the power of sin, from all injustice, falsity,
covetousness, sensuality, and to bring the world back under the
reign and into the kingdom of God. The optimism which overlooks
this fact is false philosophy and of immoral and dangerous ten
dency. When an event occurs like the assassination of Lincoln,
or of Garfield, or of William of Orange, or the Bartholomew
Massacre, it is false and dangerous to assume that God ordained
it as the necessary means of good, and that it will necessarily
promote the well-being of mankind. Such an event is evil and
diminishes the sum total of human happiness. It hinders the
progress of society and the advancement of the kingdom of God
on earth. All its distinctive effects are evil.
But while man's sinning is never for the good of the universe,

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 235
all God's doing, or not doing, in reference to sin, either before or
after it is committed, is in perfect wisdom and love. Therefore
it is good in itself; and in its distinctive effects and influences it
is productive of good and never of evil. God's action in refer
ence to sin is better for the universe than any different action
would be in its place. When man does wrong God does right ;
when man does evil God does good. Whatever good is done on
occasion of sin is not an effect of the sin, but of the action of
God, or of good persons working with God on occasion of the
sin. It is only in this sense that God brings good out of evil.
Though God has wrought redemption in Christ, the world is not
better nor heaven brighter and more blessed because man sinned
than they would have been if all men had always lived lives of
perfect love. There is, indeed, a peculiar joy of the sinner, re
newed and accepted as a child of God, which can never be
experienced by one who never sinned. But it is unreasonable
to suppose that there is a greater amount of happiness and a
higher blessedness and well-being than there would have been if
all men had realized their full and perfect development without
sin. It cannot be supposed that, if man had never sinned, God
would have sought him with less love or come into less intimate
union with him than he now does in Christ and the Holy Spirit
with sinners who return to him. There is also the dead loss of
all the time spent in selfishness ; there is all the evil then done
which will never be undone even by redemption. For action
done can never be recalled from the past and undone. There
is also all the influence which a wicked man started before his
conversion to Christ, which is not stopped at his conversion, but
continues to spread like circles in the water starting from a falling
stone. And in whatever way God would have come into unity
with man if he had not sinned, it would not have been by Geth
semane and the cross. These and all the unknown anguish of
the Man of sorrows were on account of man's sin. This is
attested, in the peculiar guilt felt in Christian experience and
expressed in Christian worship :
" Where could my trembling soul be hid ?
For I the Lord had slain."
The Missale Romanum, in the Liturgy of the Easter Vigil, has
the following : " O surely necessary sin of Adam, which has been

236 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
blotted out by the death of Christ. O blessed guilt, which has
deserved to have such and so great a redeemer."1 This con
tinued long in the theology and worship of the church. But it is
a false and dangerous conception, resting on the error that sin is
the necessary means of the greatest good. The error is flagrant
in the words themselves. They ascribe to sin and guilt the
praise of man's redemption, and merit so great that they
deserved to have the Son of God as the redeemer. There is
indeed a joy peculiar to the forgiveness of sin. But, as K. I.
Nitzsch illustrates it, the joy is not caused by the sin, but by the
escape from it ; as the joy peculiar to the recovery from disease is
not caused by the disease, but by the escape from it. The joy is
peculiar ; but the man would have had more enjoyment if he had
continued in uninterrupted health and had escaped the suffering
and anxiety of his disease.
It is true that acquaintance with a great sinner awakens abhor
rence, disgust and repugnance in one who is living the life of
Christian love. Thus by contrast it occasions increased joy in
his own higher life and intensifies his zeal to save sinners from
their sins. But this is only in accordance with the principle that
character is developed and confirmed by action and so the whole
influence of the environment is ultimately changed into conform
ity with the character. In the life of love that which once
attracted the person to sin, with temptation seemingly irresistible,
becomes positively repulsive. In accordance with this principle,
the Christian by his character in love determines the influence of
his environment. Thus, little as he seemingly is in contrast with
the universe, he attains the commanding position in which all
things, the sins of other persons not excepted, work together for
his good. The sins of others are not the cause, but only the
occasion of his development in his action in reference to them.
It is the person's own sin which is to him the essential evil,
which cannot work for his good, and which can never be better
for him than love would have been in its place. It is his own
1 " O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est.
O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem." It was
versified by Bishop Ken :
" What Adam did amiss
Turns to our endless bliss ;
O happy sin, which to atone
Drew filial God to leave his throne,"

THEODICY: —THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 237
love to God and man, trusting in the gracious God, which makes
the sins of others the occasion of Christian action and growth in
love. And in the moral system as a whole, if none had ever
sinned the love would have been all the more fully developed.
Sin is the only essential evil. Sin can never be better for the
moral system than love would have been in its stead.
Another form of false theodicy affirms that moral imperfection
is implied in metaphysical imperfection. Metaphysical imper
fection denotes merely the limitations and imperfection of the
constitution of a man inherent in his finiteness. This theodicy
is a mere play upon words, through the use of imperfection with
two different applications. It implies that immaturity or constitu
tional limitation of a finite being is the same with moral imperfec
tion, which is sin. The sufficient answer is that sin is always the
self-determination of a rational being disobeying the law of love
in the exercise of free will, and is totally different from immatu
rity, or constitutional limitation of any kind. Sin is character
formed in the free choice of a rational free agent and manifested
in voluntary action in accordance with and expressing the char
acter. God accepts a man according to that he hath, and not
according to that he hath not. In educating and developing
him God makes allowance for his constitutional limitations. He
deals with him in his ignorance, weakness, and immaturity, with
infinite tenderness and pity, with more than a mother's love for
her child and willingness to excuse its infantile imperfection.
God imputes constitutional defect and immaturity to no person
as sin. The assertion that he does so imputes injustice to God,
annuls the significance and enormity of sin as the essential evil,
sunders moral character and responsibility from rational free will,
and unsettles the foundation of the moral system and the moral
government of God.
This confounding of sin with the metaphysical imperfection or
constitutional limitation of a finite being, this playing on the dif
ferent meanings of a word in the defence of this theory, have led
to various false and even fantastic speculations respecting sin.
It is said that evil cannot exist except as it attaches itself to the
good, as rust can exist only as it attaches itself to a metal.
Hence the conception of Satan as a being wholly sinful and evil is
absurd. For existence is a good. So long, therefore, as Satan
exists he is not wholly evil. Had he become wholly evil, the

238 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
evil that had attached itself to him would have destroyed all the
good in him, therefore his existence, which is a good. So long
as he exists he is in part good. When he becomes wholly evil
he ceases to exist, and with him the evil which had consumed
him ceases to exist.1 And this paltering with the different mean
ings of a word is put forth as profound philosophy. A similar
error lies at the root of those misty speculations which imply
that a man does not become a personal spirit till he is renewed
by the Holy Spirit ; that without that renewal he gradually
loses himself, and at last sinks out of being ; that sin wears
out the powers, and ultimately annihilates the man. These
speculations confound moral character with the constitutional
powers of a personal agent ; they have no foundation in reason,
nor in observed facts, nor in the Bible. The constitutional
powers of man are developed by vigorous exercise in sin as
really, though not as fully and harmoniously, as in righteous
ness. A prize-fighter strengthens his arm by exercise as really
as a blacksmith. Bonaparte developed his great genius by the
enterprises of his selfish ambition as really as Paul did by his
enterprises of love. The Bible speaks of the depths of Satan
as well as of the depths of God (Rev. ii. 24). Thus develop
ing their physical and intellectual powers, sinners only become
more powerful in doing evil.
Another theory is that sin is necessary to the discipline and
development of free moral agents, and so to the perfection of
their being and to the progress of society. We have seen that
the finiteness and free agency of man involve the necessity of his
forming and developing his moral character by his own free self-
determination and his action accordant therewith ; and that this
process, through the limitations and imperfections inseparable
from finiteness, involves liability to temptation and the possibility
of sinning. The theory now to be considered goes much further,
and insists that the person's own actual sin is a factor in his
normal development. It is argued that what we call sin origin
ates in the necessary contrasts of life. In nature all action is the
struggle of opposing forces. So in the moral life evil is necessary
to the activity of the good, and even to the knowledge of it. As
there can be no light without shadow, so there can be no right
1 See Julius Muller, " The Christian Doctrine of Sin," Transl., 3d edition,
vol. i., pp. 305, 306.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 239
without wrong, no good without evil. Without ignorance there
could be no pleasure in knowledge and no incentive to seek it.
" Goodness cannot take place without indigent objects for it to be
exercised upon." 1 Heaven itself would be insipid and weari
some, without action or enjoyment, if there were no evil in it.
Sin is necessary to the discipline and development of man. It is
the great sanctifier of the human soul. It is "good in the
making." " They say best men are moulded out of faults
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad."
It would follow that, whatever a man's crimes and the wicked
ness of his character, he is only passing through the processes
necessary to his discipline and development to realize the perfec
tion and highest blessedness of his being. And this R. W.
Emerson explicitly asserts : "The divine effort is never relaxed ;
the carrion in the sun will convert itself into grass and flowers ;
and man, though in brothels or jails or on gibbets, is on his way
to all that is true and good." 2 One error here is that the theory
entirely overlooks the fact that man is a rational free agent. He
is regarded as a sort of potentialized matter, and the develop
ment is of the nature of a physical process. Hence the theory
entirely misconceives what sin is. And it involves the absurdity
that this impersonal animal is, by a sort of physical process,
developed into a rational, personal spirit.
If, however, the free personality of man is acknowledged, then
the proposed process of discipline and development by sinning is
nothing less than absurd. Rational free will, susceptibility to
motives through innocent propensities, liability to temptation,
and the consequent possibility of sin are essential to the develop
ment of the character of a finite person and to his progress to the
perfection of his being. But the discipline and development are
attained by regulating the impulses and desires, by resisting
temptation, by standing fast in rectitude against all opposition to
it and all enticements to wrong-doing. Thus, by an entirely inno
cent antagonism of the flesh and the spirit, the spiritual in man
may have steadily prevailed, and the man may have advanced
1 Thomas Chubb, " Collection of Tracts," p. 256.
2 Representative Men, p. 133, Works, 1883.

240 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
through an endless gradation to higher and higher development.
But the error in the theory is that it makes actual sin the neces
sary means of discipline and development. If a man rules over
his body and his spirit, if he resists all temptation, if he lives the
life of universal love, and always does right, he remains immature,
weak and undeveloped, he does not attain a right moral char
acter, and makes no progress toward the perfection of his being.
But if he gives the rein to his appetites and desires, if he dis
regards the dictates of reason and conscience, if he lives a life
of sensuality and self-indulgence, if he is supremely selfish and
reckless of the rights of others, then he develops and purifies
himself and realizes all the noblest ends of- his being. A greater
absurdity cannot be imagined. Yet this is propounded as the
only basis of enlightened ethics.
If this theory is true, sin ceases to be sin and becomes a neces
sary but transient disease. It is like the measles. Every person
is born with a constitutional liability to them ; and this imperfec
tion can be eliminated only by having the disease. Every parent
rejoices when a child gets safely through, and can have the loath
some disease no more. So the Father in heaven watches tenderly
over his suffering children through the terrible crises of wicked
ness, and crime in the loathsome but inevitable disease of sin,
and rejoices as one after another they get through it to suffer its
attack no more. If this is so, then what we call sin is essential
in the constitution of the universe, and demanded by the uni
versal reason ; it loses all sinfulness and guilt ; it ceases to be
evil and becomes good. It is good in the germ, good in the
process of development into perfect blessedness. Then all dis
tinction between right and wrong is annulled ; there can be no
free agency, no moral system, moral law, or moral government in
the universe.1
1 Dr. Frederic H. Hedge seems entirely to overlook the distinction be
tween the two questions, What is the cause of the existence of sin? and
Why does not God do more, or otherwise, than he does to prevent it ? He
seems not to recognize man's free agency at all, and to refer everything to
the direct causative efficiency of God. As to the origin of evil, he says :
" There is but one answer to this question. What love proposes and wis
dom plans must needs be good. This fundamental truth of practical reason
is the only solution of the problem. Such a being sees and knows only
what is good. What we call evil, therefore, the evil of our own experience,
when referred to its source, has precisely the same character with that which

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 241
From these vain speculations we come back to the funda
mental position that the universe is the expression of the arche
typal thought of the eternal Reason, and that in the eternal
wisdom and love which that archetype expresses may be reasons
why God does as he does, and not otherwise, in the prevention of
sin. We come back on the eternal thought of God, that ultimate
fact on which all sorrow of heart and all perplexity of intellect at
last repose, that ultimate fact so touchingly recognized by Christ :
" Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight." There is
sublimity in the words of Lord Bacon beginning the " Instauratio
Magna," the great work which opened the new era in the scien
tific knowledge of the universe : " Franciscus de Verulamio sic
cogitavit." But more sublime the Sic Cogitavit of God, the eter
nal thought of the absolute Reason, uttered in the divine and
living Word that creates the universe.
3. These false theories are forms of a false and pernicious
optimism. They deny the existence of any essential evil. Every
thing is either essential or relative good. They tend, therefore, to
a superficial conception of sin as relative good, and a total failure
to estimate aright its terrible character as wilful opposition to
God, to reason, to all that is true, right, perfect, and good, and
to the constitution and evolution of the universe — evil and only
evil continuously in itself and in all its distinctive influences.
Such optimism is often assumed as essential in theodicy ; its
subtle influence often colors religious thinking and enfeebles the
preaching of the gospel. A sermon was recently preached before
an association of ministers and churches on " The Usefulness of
the Outbreaking Sins of Christians." This exemplifies the error
already pointed out, that when a great crime has been committed
we call good. If God is good, and all that is proceeds from him, there is
no evil. Suffering, distress, privation, woe of every kind ; but no evil. All
is good in its origin and purpose, and must eventually prove itself so to
human experience. . To the question, then, how evil consists with the
goodness of God, I answer flatly it does not consist with the goodness of
God. One or the other of these conceptions must be abandoned. Either
there is no God such as we figure him, or there is no evil. Pain and suffer
ing in abundance, but no evil. For only that is really evil which is evil in its
cause and in its effect, in its origin and end — evil in its issues, evil forever-
more. Nothing in God's universe answers to that condition." (" Ways of
the Spirit," Boston, 1877, pp. 243, 245.)
It would follow from this that there is no sin in the world, and that all
which we call sin is not evil but good, and proceeds directly from God.
vol. 1. — 16

242 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
it is necessary for the justification of God to show that the crime
is a means of good — that the world is better off for it. The
necessary influence of this false optimism is to break down rever
ence for the authority and inviolability of law, to deaden the
criminal's own sense of sin, to weaken public indignation against
crime, to stupefy the common conscience, and to make it im
possible to create a conviction of the true sinfulness, guilt, and
enormity of sin, and of its true character as essential evil, evil in
itself and in all its peculiar influence. It conduces to a moral
education which legitimately issues in making a criminal a hero,
the object of admiration rather than of indignation and abhor
rence. John Bradford was one of the martyrs at Smithfield,
" the first preacher of that wonderful age." When a young man,
he was secretary to the paymaster of the army in France. Being
gay, thoughtless, and extravagant, he appropriated some of the
money intrusted to him. But being unable to bear the load of
his guilt, he voluntarily made restitution and resigned. Through
his whole life he was burdened with the sense of guilt on account
of that fraud, and was often found weeping over his great sin.
On one occasion, seeing a criminal led to execution at Tyburn,
he exclaimed : " But for the grace of God, there goes John
Bradford." This famous saying was not cant when Bradford
uttered it, whatever it may have been in the frequent repetition
of it since then. In our own time, outbreaking sins of professing
Christians have not been wanting. It would be a healthful symp
tom if they were followed by a like lifelong contrition on the part
of the transgressors, and if the public mind were pervaded by a
commensurate estimate of sin as evil and only evil continually.
But this cannot be expected so long as men are taught that every
crime is a blessing to the world, that the commission of a crime
does more good in the end than its omission, or even than a
virtuous act in its stead would have done.
It is often said in a revival of religion that the openly wicked
and ungodly are more likely to be awakened and converted than
persons of moral lives who always have attended church and
lived under the influence of the gospel. This error is due in part
to the impression that a religious life can begin only in a moral
convulsion after years of ungodliness. It is also contradicted by
observed facts. Yet it is in harmony with the optimism which
regards sin as a means of good. A sermon on the parable of the

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 243
prodigal son is likely to create sympathy only for him, while the
elder son is regarded as the real reprobate, though he had always
been a dutiful son and his father himself pronounced his appro
bation of him. An evil influence of this false optimism is also
exemplified in the common opinion that the wickedest men
when converted make the most eminent Christians and the most
effective preachers and workers for Christ. John Bunyan, in his
" Jerusalem Sinner Saved," expresses this thought with his usual
vividness of imagination : " Some must be pillars in God's house ;
and if they be pillars of cedar they must stand while they are
stout and sturdy sticks in the forest, before they are cut down
and placed there. No man, when he buildeth a house, maketh
the principal parts thereof of weak or feeble timber; for how
could such bear up the rest ? but of great and able wood. Christ
Jesus also goeth this way to work ; he makes of the biggest sin
ners bearers and supporters of the rest." But the constitutional
powers of a man are not developed any faster in the action and
enterprises of selfishness than in the action and enterprises of
faith and love. And, in respect to moral character and the
Christian life, the life of selfishness is a degeneracy and not a
growth. The sinner is the tree with dry-rot at its heart; the
good timber is the tree which from the seed up has grown sound
and strong in the garden of the Lord. The fact also is over
looked that during all the years of outbreaking wickedness the
sinner had been doing evil and starting evil influences which con
tinue their deadly work after he is converted and after he is
dead. And the investigation of the facts shows that such con
verts do not usually become the most eminent Christians nor
accomplish the most good.
IV. Theodicy and the Revelation of God in Christ. —
After the earthly history of the human race is completed, the
righteousness and benevolence of God in all his dealings with
man will be clearly seen in the history itself and its final issues.
This is in precise accord with the Christian revelation of the final
judgment. Then all secret things will be brought to light ; there
is nothing covered which shall not be revealed, and hid which
shall not be known. Then the books of life and death, in which
the whole history of man is recorded, will be opened, and men
will be judged out of the things written in the books, according

244 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
to their works. This day of consummation will be the great day
which will justify the ways of God and reveal to every mind God's
perfect righteousness and benevolence in all his dealings with
man. At every antecedent period the realization of God's arche
typal plan respecting man is incomplete and some of the data
are wanting for a complete theodicy founded on observed facts.
But God's revelation of himself in Christ reveals to us his char
acter, the principles and law of his government, the fact of
redemption, the existence and growth of the kingdom of his
redeemed, and the promise of its glorious consummation. Thus
by faith in the God in Christ we are put by anticipation forward
to the consummation of his kingdom and can see the archetype
of truth and love which he is progressively realizing. Thus,
though many questions yet remain unanswered, God is revealed
as the God of love, and we have given to our faith a complete
justification of his ways with men.
In this revelation as recorded in the Bible we have reiterated
assertions that God is love, that he is perfect in righteousness and
benevolence. We have his revelation of himself in the giving of
his law and in the proclaiming and enforcing of it by his prophets.
In the Old Testament we find the beginning of the kingdom of
God gathered out of the world; the history of his care of his
people in educating them in the knowledge and love of God and
in all righteousness ; and the ever-brightening outlook to its
development into a spiritual and universal kingdom in the Messi
anic days.
In Christ, when he has come, we have the great revelation of
God's righteousness and good-will in the face of sin and suffering.
In him is the great revelation of God's law and righteousness.
The law requires love ; and the spirit of self-renunciation and
self-sacrifice in the service of others is of the essence of love.
Christ coming to redeem the world from sin, in his humiliation,
in his human life of perfect love, in his suffering and death,
obeyed that law to its utmost requirement, and proclaimed and
maintained, in the face of the opposition and assaults of the
wicked, its universality, authority, and inviolability. The right
eousness and law of God were proclaimed on Sinai. They were
more grandly and more fully proclaimed from the lips of the
Man of sorrows in the sermon on the mount, and in all the teach
ings of his ministry among men, and in his life of love, holy,

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 245
harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners; But they had their
most sublime proclamation on Calvary. The cross of the divine
Saviour, suffering and dying under the assaults of the wicked to
redeem men from their selfishness to the life of love, proclaims
with sublime significance to all ages the universality, the unchange-
ableness, the inviolable authority of God's law of love, and the
righteousness of God as himself obedient to that law, enforcing it,
throughout all the universe, and redeeming men, not from his
law, but to it, in their willing conformity to it in heart and life.
And that unchangeable law, proclaimed and maintained at this
cost, is simply the law of self-sacrificing love. The law is further
proclaimed by Christ in his offer of forgiveness to the sinner and
his invitation to all to come to him. The indispensable condition
of justification is that the sinner come to Christ in faith. But in
thus putting his trust in Christ he necessarily renounces his self-
sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking, and self-glorifying, returns from
his wilful alienation of himself from God, and chooses God in
Christ as his supreme object of trust and service. The faith
which is the condition of justification is itself the beginning ofthe
love in which all right character consists ; it is itself the renunci
ation of self as the supreme object of trust and service, and
the return to willing conformity with the eternal law of God.
Even through the blood of Christ, no sinner is accepted till he
renounces his sin and returns in willing obedience to God. Thus
by losing his life he finds it ; by renouncing himself he finds God
as his redeemer ; therein he finds himself, no longer a castaway,
a spiritual dead-beat, but his true self, realizing the higher possi
bilities of his being in the life of faith, which is in its essence the
renunciation of self, and works by love.
Christ reveals also God's good-will, his mercifulness toward
sinners, his sympathy with men in suffering and sorrow, his grace
in redeeming them from the power of evil. He reveals also sin
as the real and only essential evil. He can bless men only as he
saves them from sin. In the infinite wealth of God's resources
there is nothing which can be a blessing to one persisting in sin.
Christ also reveals the reality of the moral system with its inviol
able free agency, the impossibility of changing a free will by
almightiness, and the existence of sinners who stand immovable
in resistance of God in the highest exercise of his redeeming
grace.

246 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Therefore, before the cross of Christ, whatever speculative
questions remain unanswered, we see God clearly revealing him
self as love, acting always to bring men away from their selfish
ness and its inevitable misery to the life of love and its heavenly
bliss, away from the world that lieth in wickedness into participa-
pation in his kingdom of righteousness and peace. Many of the
ethnic religions recognize a god sharing the sufferings of men for
their help. The revelation of God in Christ gives the divine
reality of which man has so deeply felt the need. It shows us
God's love to man, when revealed in Christ under human limita
tions and conditions, as a suffering and self-sacrificing love even
unto death to save men from sin. Through this revelation of
God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, and of man in
his immeasurable worth as a child of God and in his hope full of
immortality, man attains — " that blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened, .
While, with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."
The law of love seems to arise into human consciousness on
occasion of the same condition of man which is also the occasion
of suffering and the liability to sin. So soon as a man knows
himself as a rational free person in a moral system, he knows that
he ought not to live for himself exclusively, but must respect the
rights of others in the common system. Thus he becomes aware
of the law of love. But there must be constant interaction of
persons in a moral system ; therefore they cannot escape being
dependent on one another. They crowd and jostle each other,
and, as in every conflict of forces, the law of the survival of the
fittest prevails and the strong overpower the weak. Here, then, is
a source of privation, suffering, and sorrow. Precisely here is the
occasion on which the law of love asserts itself in the rational
consciousness ; no man liveth by or for himself alone. Men are
also dependent on the forces of nature ; these hinder or over
power them ; and this, again, is a source of privation and suffering.
And no man alone can contend successfully against the powers of

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 247
nature, civilize the savage earth and compel it to yield its powers
and resources to his service. It is only by their combined skill
and strength that men subdue the earth and take possession of
its resources. Here, again, in man's dependence on nature and
his conflict with its forces, which are sources of privation and
suffering, is an occasion on which man may see the necessity,
authority, and obligation of the law of self-renouncing love. As
no man liveth for himself, so it is equally true that no man can
live by himself alone.
This fact — that men are environed by the universe with all its
mighty cosmic forces, obliged to acquire the mastery of its
powers and resources as essential to their own development, and
even to their continued existence, and so are subject to privation
and suffering and obliged to put forth their energies in wisely-
directed and vigorous action — is the most effective stimulus to
human progress. If, however, this issues only in selfish competi
tion, each trying to crowd out his fellow-men and to appropriate
their acquisitions and powers to the service of himself, disinte
gration and degeneration necessarily ensue. The very condition
of man, obliged to assert his mastery of the cosmic forces and
resources of his environment, legitimately compels him to see
his dependence on his fellow- men, and thus to seek to co-operate
with them for their common well-being. This is the necessity
emphasized in the revelation of God in Christ, that man can
realize his normal development and well-being, alike of the indi
vidual and of society, only by conformity with the law of self-
sacrificing love, each man rendering loving service to his
neighbor as to himself in supreme love to the common God and
Father of all. In this universal love is the stimulus which calls
into action man's highest powers and promotes effectively his
intellectual and physical, not less than his moral and spiritual,
development and progress.
" When each man finds his own in others' good,
And all men live in noble brotherhood,
Then shall the reign of mind commence on earth,
And, starting fresh as from a second birth,
Man, in the sunshine of the world's new spring,
Shall walk abroad o'er earth as some new glorious thing."
V. Pessimism. — The argument that there is no God, founded
on the existence of sin and suffering, is also refuted by the fact

248 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
that it necessarily involves pessimism. In this form it has of
late been urged upon us. Pessimism is the doctrine that the
universe in its essential constitution and its necessary evolution
is productive of more evil than good ; that, therefore, in it non
existence is preferable to sensitive or conscious existence in any
form. The examination of this doctrine will show that it is not
sustained by facts : it will expose the false principles assumed in
its defence, and its deadly practical tendencies ; it will show that
pessimism is itself a refutation of the argument against theism
founded on the existence of sin and suffering, by, showing that,
if valid, it necessarily issues in absurdity. For pessimism is
possible only on the basis of atheism. It necessarily rests on the
assumption that the universe is not grounded in reason nor con
stituted and evolved in accordance with rational principles and
laws and for the progressive realization of rational ideals of per
fection and well-being, and thus leaves no basis for the reality
or possibility of human knowledge ; it rests also on the assump
tion that the universe is not constituted and evolved in accord
ance with the law of love as supreme, and thus leaves no basis for
moral distinctions or aesthetic ideals.
As a temporary mood of feeling, called forth usually by great
and long-continued distress, it has always been familiar. As a
philosophical theory of life and the universe it has been familiar
to oriental thought in Buddhism, which is the great and original
representative of pessimism. Till recently, as a philosophy, it
has been foreign to the thinking of the western nations. The
philosophers of Greece and Rome speculated profoundly on life
and its highest good ; but they have taken it for granted that it
is good. A school of pessimists has now arisen in Germany,
who proclaim and defend as the true philosophy of life and of
the universe the pessimism which before, among the western
peoples, had been only the unreasoned and transient cry of
weariness, perplexity, and distress. Human thought in its circuits
often comes round to ancient and exploded errors, and propounds
and defends them with eagerness as new discoveries solving some
great problem of life. The present century has been prolific
in bringing forth old theories as new, and pessimism, as a sort
of Buddhism transplanted in Europe, is an instance of it. Of
its supporters, Schopenhauer and Hartmann are the most widely
known. The former teaches that this is the worst possible world.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 249
The latter agrees with the optimism of Leibnitz that this is the
best possible world ; but teaches that " pain greatly preponderates
over pleasure, not merely as a general fact, but also in the case
of every individual, even of the person who lives under the most
favorable conditions." They and their less known followers differ
from Buddhism and from one another as to particular phases of
the philosophical basis of pessimism ; but they all agree in the
practical conclusion that, to any finite being, sensitive or conscious
life, from its lowest to its highest forms, is dissatisfying, pitiable,
worthless. It is the conclusion expressed in the bitter words of
Byron : " Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'T is something better not to be." *
Because, of late, pessimistic theories have been thus thrust upon
us, the theodicy of the present day must notice them.
1. The testimony to which pessimism appeals is untrustworthy.
The pessimist argues that the common testimony of men, reflect
ing on the jjast, is that life has been unsatisfactory. No one,
he says, would be willing to go back and live his life over again.
This certainly rests on no arithmetical count, on no careful inves
tigation and cross-questioning of testimony, on no tables of
statistics prepared with scientific accuracy. This utterance of
dissatisfaction is usually an expression of a transitory feeling
rather than of a deliberate judgment. The feeling itself is not
a disgust with life, but is the undying impulse of the instinctive
and never-resting movement of the soul forward to higher
development and attainments. Hence the going back from
maturity to immaturity, to the repetition of work already done
and of joys already experienced to satiety, is repelled by the
soul ever seeking to surpass itself and its past conditions, to
transcend its physical environment and to attain a larger and
higher life, of which it always dimly feels itself capable. Probably,
if the choice were distinctly between living life over again and
total annihilation, most men would choose the former.
The pessimist appeals also to the testimony of the poets.
Such testimony is easily found in the poetry of all ages and
civilizations. 1 Euthanasia, Works, vol. i. p. 268, Little & Brown's ed.

250 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
" Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about ; but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went.
" With them the seed of wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the harvest which I reaped —
I came like water and like wind I go."
Homer makes Zeus say : —
" The race of mortal men,
Of all that breathe and crawl upon the earth,
Is the most wretched."
Elysium does not better the case, for he makes the shade of
Achilles say : " I would be
A laborer on earth and serve for hire
Some man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer,
Rather than reign o'er all who have gone down to death."
The chorus, contemplating the fate of QCdipus and his race, is
made by Sophocles to say : —
" The happiest fate of man is not to be ;
And next in bliss is he who, soon as born,
From the vain world and all its sorrows free,
Shall whence he came with speediest foot return ;
For youth is full of folly, toils, and woes,
Of war, sedition, pain, and strife,
With all the busy ills of life,
Till helpless age comes creeping on,
Deserted, friendless and alone,
Which neither power, nor joy nor pleasure knows."
We find similar strains in modern poets, some of whom, like
Byron, Shelley, Leopardi, and Heine, seem to be distinctively
poets of cynicism and despair : —
" The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies ;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world's delight ?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright." 1
1 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, p. 40; Iliad, Bk. xvii. 447; Odyssey
xi. 489-491; CEdipus Coloneus, 1225-1238; Shelley, "Mutability," Works,
vol. iii. p. 178, Little & Brown's ed.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 25 I
Similar sentiments might be greatly multiplied. But they are not
testimonies ofthe poets to the truth of pessimism as a philosophi
cal theory of life. The poet pictures the passing moods of his
own mind and all the varying aspects and moods of human life.
It does not belong to him to strike the balance of moral forces,
or, in delineating one passion or scene of life, to stop and explain
that there are other and modifying feelings, thoughts, and con
ditions. - These sad strains are simply the poetical expression of
the darker feelings and conditions which are realities in human
life. It would be easy, on the other hand, to multiply poetical
quotations picturing the bright side of life, inspiring man with
courage and enthusiasm, kindling hope, and rousing him to the
consciousness of his greatness, his power and his capacity for all
that is perfect, ennobling, and good, and animating him with
joy- It is remarkable that pessimistic sentiments abound in voluptu
ous poets. This is because their thought is concentrated on the
gratification of sensual desires. They experience the transitori
ness and emptiness of sensual pleasure ; they are blind to the
higher and spiritual life, and know nothing of the dignity, serenity,
and strength which belong to it. The very shortness of life and
the transitoriness of its sensual pleasures madden them to a more
furious pursuit of them. " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die." The principle of this is illustrated, in Mr. Browning's
" Pippa Passes," by Pippa's miserly care for every moment of her
one holiday : —
O Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,
A mite of my twelve hours' treasure,
The least of thy gazes or glances,
(Be they grants thou art bound to, or gifts above measure)
One of thy choices, or one of thy chances,
(Be they tasks God imposed thee, or freaks at thy pleasure)
— My Day, if I squander such labor or leisure,
Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me !
Pippa Passes. — Robert Browning, Poetical Works,
vol. ii. pp. 221, 222, London ed. 1882.
Wordsworth penetrated through all seemings of sense to the
greater and higher realities of man's being. The voluptuous
poet never sees the true significance of life nor knows its hidden
treasures. Disappointment may be the means of opening the
eyes to the secret of life, and suffering may be the occasion of

252 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
developing the highest power. By regulating the desires, by
restraining and directing them with motives from the higher
and spiritual life, one finds the true worth and discovers and
possesses the true treasures of his being; as, in the story-books,
one touches a hidden spring and opens a hidden door through
which he enters the vaulted rooms filled with treasure. Words
worth is a poet who reveals to us these hidden treasures. And
is there a pessimistic line in all his writings?
The testimony cited in favor of pessimism is offset also by the
facts that all men love life, and, with very few exceptions, cling to
it under whatever disappointments, anxiety and sorrow.
" For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind ? "
Hartmann sets this testimony aside as untrustworthy, because
men are necessarily driven ' to overrate the worth of life through
the ineradicable impulse of the unconscious will. So Jean Paul
says : " We do not love life because it is beautiful, but because we
must love it, and hence it happens that we draw the inverse con
clusion, — that is, because we love life it is beautiful." But here
is the gross inconsistency, in attempting to ascertain what estimate
men have made of the worth of life, of rejecting all testimony
that life is esteemed as good, and considering only the comparatively
infrequent testimony, wrung from men usually in extraordinary
trials, that life is evil. Hartmann avoids this inconsistency by
making no appeal to testimony, differing in this from Schopen
hauer. But he only falls into another inconsistency, perhaps
quite as glaring. He proposes to establish his doctrine on the
observed facts of life, and excludes human testimony as to the
worth of life, which is probably the surest and most important
source of the knowledge of the facts.
2. Pessimism is not established by the observation of facts,
but rests on speculative deductions from erroneous premises.
Hartmann, considering the question whether happiness is
attainable by the individual, attempts to establish the negative by
observation of facts. He groups the sources of pleasure and suf
fering under eleven heads : — Health, youth, freedom, means of
comfortable subsistence ; Hunger and love ; Sympathy, friendship,
domestic happiness ; Vanity, ambition, desire of fame and domin-

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 253
ion ; Religious edification ; Immorality ; Enjoyment of science and
art ; Sleep and dreams ; Pursuit of wealth ; Envy, ill-will, vexa
tion, lamenting over the past, repentance, hate, revenge, anger ;
Hope.1 This classification evidently rests on no scientific prin
ciple and is the result of no scientific investigation. It must have
been a tumbling together of human feelings and conditions as
they happened to occur to the writer. It is both defective and
repetitious. And under each head no exact statistical results are
attained. He omits, for example, sports of all kinds, wit, humor,
fun, and laughter. He omits, also, all the pleasures of memory,
real and soothing both in the memory of past joys, of past sor
rows, and of departed friends. He has no glimpse of the signifi
cance of Tennyson's lines :
¦' 'T is better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
His evidence that it is an illusion to expect a preponderance of
happiness through the progress of mankind in the future is open
to similar criticism. He overlooks the evidence, which Mr. Spen
cer finds in evolution, of the progress of mankind to a happier
life insured through the universal prevalence of love. It is need
less to dwell on these details. His whole investigation is vitiated
by the false pessimistic conception of man and human life
already exposed, and the consequent omission of the most im
portant facts bearing on the question, or a failure to apprehend
their real significance.
3. Pessimism is founded on false assumptions as to the nature
and sources of human happiness and well-being. As Schopenhauer
presents it, it assumes that pain alone is positive ; man feels his
life chiefly in uneasiness, pain, and sorrow. Pleasure is nothing
positive ; it is the mere absence of pain ; in it man is scarcely
conscious of himself. The utmost good attainable by any finite
being is the absence of suffering. " We feel pain, but not pain
lessness ; we feel care, but not freedom from care ; fear, but not
security. We feel the wish as we feel hunger and thirst ; but as
soon as it is fulfilled, it is the same as with the agreeable morsel,
which, the very moment it is swallowed, ceases to be tasted. . . .
Only pain and want can be felt positively and so announce them
selves. Happiness, on the contrary, is merely negative. Accord-
1 Philosophie des Unbewussten, Part C, xii. pp. 549-595.

254 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
ingly we do not appreciate the three greatest goods of life, —
health, youth, and freedom — so long as we possess them ; but
only after they are lost ; for these also are negations. We do
not perceive that certain days of our lives were happy till they
have given place to unhappy ones. . . . Our happiness lies ever
in the future or in the past. The present is like a small dark
cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain. Before it
and behind it all is bright ; beneath it the shadow which itself
always casts. Therefore the present is always unsatisfying ; the
future is uncertain and the past gone beyond recovery. Life,
with its hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly, little, great, and greater
adversities, with its disappointed hopes and its misfortunes baf
fling all calculation, bears so plainly the stamp of something
made to be disgusting to us, that it is difficult to conceive how
any one could mistake it and convince himself that it was designed
to be thankfully enjoyed, and man to be happy. . . . If there were
a hundredfold less evil in the world than there is, yet the mere
existence of evil is sufficient to establish the truth that the exis
tence of the world is not an occasion for rejoicing but of grief;
that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence ; that
in its fundamental ground it is something which ought not
to be."1
Hartmann rejects Schopenhauer's doctrine that pleasure is
merely negative ; but with concessions and explanations which
bring him practically to essentially the same result.2 Both practi
cally concur in Petrarch's saying, that a thousand pleasures .are
not worth one pain. Hence, the more a being is developed and
the more and greater its powers and susceptibilities, the more are
its desires, and, therefore, the more and greater its uneasiness in
the sense of want and the greater its misery. The brute is hap
pier, that is, less miserable, than man, the savage than the civilized,
the uneducated than the educated man.3
Another false assumption is that man's life is solely a life of
desire and that the sole object of desire is pleasure. Desire is
merely an uneasiness in the sense of want, and pleasure is only
1 Schopenhauer, " Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," vol ii. chap. 46,
pp. 571-574-
2 Phil, des Unbewussten, Part C, xii., 1, pp. 540-549. Ed. Berlin, 1869.
3 See Hartmann, "Phil, des Unbewuss." Part C, xii. pp. 616, 624, 598;
Part B, xi. p. 314.

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 255
the absence of pain ; and this negation called pleasure is the sole
object of human desire, and this desire is the radical impulse of
all human action. Even as Hartmann modifies this, the uneasi
ness, the want, the pain, are in intensity and duration far greater
than the pleasure and assert themselves far more powerfully in
the consciousness. Man feels himself only in pain and the sense
of want. Then the life of desire must involve a vast preponder
ance of suffering. And, further, the desire of pleasure is in its
nature insatiable ; the pessimist assumes that it is the radical im
pulse of life ; thus it makes the person always restless in a sense
of want. Hence, whatever a man gains, he only throws it into a
bottomless abyss which always yawns for more. Nothing can
close it till the man throws himself in and exists no more. And
besides, desires commonly grow by what they feed on. Acqui
sition is but the fuel to the flame. This is true, to some extent,
even of the appetites, though they are temporarily satisfied by
indulgence ; as, for example, the appetite for opium, tobacco, and
alcoholic stimulants. So covetousness, ambition, and other de
sires, are strengthened by the pursuit and acquisition of their
objects. Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to
conquer. Thus it is impossible by any acquisitions to satiate
desire. Man is doomed, by the very constitution of his being, to
continuous dissatisfaction, want, and misery. And to add to his
wretchedness he is always illuded with successive hopes that he
may escape from his misery and be blessed, and is always disap
pointed. If these assumptions and the conception of man necessarily
involved in them are correct, pessimism is the inevitable inference.
But they are false. The exposure of their falsity is the complete
refutation of pessimism.
It is to be noticed that the foregoing argument of the pessimist
does not consist in the presentation of observed facts, but is a
deduction from false assumptions as to the nature and sources of
human happiness. Even Hartmann, while attempting to rest his
pessimism on observed facts, starts with essentially the same
assumptions, and therefore overlooks important facts and misses
the significance of others. Pessimism, as resting on these
assumptions, reveals itself as founded on the lowest form of
hedonism. But this is a false philosophy of life. It is a sort of
reductio ad absurdujn of this egoistic hedonism or Epicureanism

256 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
that it issues naturally and logically in pessimism. I proceed to
consider the real facts as to the constitution of man which annul
the premises of the pessimist's deduction.
In the first place, it is not true that pleasure is the mere
negation of pain. Desire implies, indeed, an uneasiness in the
sense of want. But it is also an impulse to action, and so gives
zest and interest to life. And in its gratification there is more
than the removal of uneasiness ; there is positive, often intense,
pleasure. This is true of the gratification even of the appetites
of sense.
In the second place, man is the subject of many desires, and
not of one only, the desire of pleasure or enjoyment. He desires
specific objects. A desire for the object must exist before there
can be any pleasure in possessing the object, or any motive to
seek it. One cannot enjoy eating who has no appetite for food.
The desires are as numerous and varied as the specific objects on
which they fasten. They are the points of sensibility through
which a person is conscious of his environment. They are a part
of the many-sidedness of man, by which he comes into contact
with his environment at many points, and is susceptible of
receiving many and varied influences from every point of his
environment in contact with him. He can see, hear, taste, smell,
handle. He can look at it in the light of reason and find its
significance and place in science, its law, its perfection or beauty,
its bearing on the practical work and uses of life. He finds in it
steps up to God. A botanist spent eleven years investigating the
green substance growing on stagnant ponds. The lowest thing
may call forth the highest rational and spiritual powers. One
might spend a lifetime in learning all which may be known about
a pebble or a blade of grass. A few old ruins, a few ancient
carvings on stones, arouse the interest of intelligent people all
over the world, and reveal the history of ancient ages. Man is so
many-sided that any point of his environment touches many
susceptibilities and awakens interest in many directions ; and, con
versely, in the interest peculiar to any one of his susceptibilities,
man passes out through any point of his environment to explore
the riches of the universe as related to that one point and that
one susceptibility. This is something very different from the
dreary and weary monotony of life actuated by only one never-
changing motive.

THEODICY :— THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 257
In the third place, human life is not a life of desire only,
whether the desires be one or many. Schopenhauer assumes that
the fundamental impelling force of life is will. By will he does
not mean the power of rational self-determinalion. He seems to
mean a blind instinct or impulse to seek pleasure, — an impulse
which must always drive a man on to seek some enjoyment other
than he has, and so can never permit him to rest, or at any moment
of pleasure to cry to it to stay because it is satisfying. On the
contrary, true psychology recognizes in the constitution of man a
radical impulse to exert all his faculties and to find scope for all
his energies which makes him capable of joy in work, in over
coming difficulties, in achievement. This is the play-impulse in
the young. Through life it impels to action and makes it a joy,
while life with nothing to do is full of ennui and weariness. Thus
man, by virtue of his constitution, is a worker and an energizer ;
in the conscious fulness of life and power he finds himself im
pelled to put forth, to give out ; he forgets pleasure in enterprise,
work, and service. Pessimism, on the contrary, conceives of man
as by his constitution a mere recipient ; it conceives of service to
others as so much dead loss to self, to be submitted to only
with pain ; of work and achievement as only evil, under which
men must always whine ; of man as conscious only of want, — a
beggar reaching out empty hands for some one else to fill. It
recognizes blessedness only in inaction and repose, in the life of self-
indulgence and receptivity, in being ministered unto, never in
ministering to others. It can conceive of no heaven except the
deliverance from all exertion and all motives to exertion, so that
not even a desire shall ever interrupt the lubberly inaction.
4. This brings to light a more fundamental error at the basis
of pessimism. It does not recognize man's personality, his exis
tence as a rational and morally responsible free agent in a moral
system, under the government of the absolute Reason, energizing
in perfect wisdom and love, whom we call God. It has no con
ception of the moral system in which every man's destiny is put
in his own power ; in which every person who lives the life of
universal love in faith in God finds the universe so constituted
that he is sure to realize the highest and only true good in the
perfection of his being, in his harmony with God and the consti
tution of the universe, and in the blessedness inseparable there
from ; and in which every one who lives the life of selfishness can
vol. 1. — 17

258 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
realize only evil in missing the perfection of his own being, in
living in disharmony with God and the constitution of the uni
verse, and in the unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and suffering in
separable therefrom. Hence the pessimist has no thought of the
education and discipline of men in the moral system, and of
the uses of disappointment, sorrow, and suffering for subduing the
power of sin, strengthening the character in righteousness, and
developing benevolence in helping those who need. It recognizes
man as a mere creature of blind necessity, with no capacity but
to long for pleasure and to seek it in vain, and to weep and cry
because he cannot receive without work all the pleasure he wants.
To the pessimist man is only a conscious negation, an embodied
greed, a living misery.
Here, in the personality of man, opens a sphere of rational,
moral, and spiritual acting and receiving, hidden from the pessimist
behind his false assumptions. Here we find the true good of man
and his capacity to attain it, for the conception of which the
pessimist has no data. Man is blessed both in achieving and
in receiving. And the scope and range of the achieving and the
receiving is above the range of vision in which the pessimist, by
his assumptions, arbitrarily confines himself. Man lives in a
spiritual environment as real as the physical, and touches it as
really in its affluence of influence, and in his own many-sidedness.
Schopenhauer recognizes this higher sphere of enjoyment, but
only in the assthetic emotions. And of this he says that, in per
ceiving the beautiful, man is simply a seer, contemplating it apart
from all personal desires and action ; it is an emergence of the
mind " out of the endless stream of willing." This desireless,
motiveless rest in contemplation is the blessedness of the gods as
conceived by the Epicureans. It is possible to but few ; to them
it is transient, and the culture prerequisite insures a more than
commensurate susceptibility to suffering. Hartmann includes
immorality in his classification of the sources of pleasure, but he
does not include virtue, nor recognize the satisfaction of fulfilling
the obligations and doing the duties of daily life. He alludes to
benevolence, but only as self-sacrifice, and therefore to be counted
as suffering. This is all in striking contrast with Christianity.
The man who lives to make the world wiser and better, not to
get the most possible out of it for his own enjoyment, is not likely
to raise the question, Is life worth living? It is the greedy

THEODICY: —THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 259
life, always sucking in, which is conscious of its own emptiness.
It is the life of love, always flowing out, which is blessed in the
consciousness of satisfying fulness. The pessimist has never dis
covered Christ's secret : " He that findeth his life shall lose it,
and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." He has
never discovered that love, even in its self-sacrifice, is the power
that develops the man, the power that survives, that renews and
blesses. He knows nothing of our Lord's teaching : Greatness
for service, therefore greatness by service.1
Immortality, involved in man's personality and his relations as a
personal and spiritual being to God, is an element, in the investi
gation of the worth of life, of which the pessimist, in accordance
with his false assumptions, can take no notice. Professor Bowne
says : " We do not agree with the pessimist, but our chief reason
is our faith in a future life." 2 But before we can appeal to
immortality a prior question must be settled. It is the question,
Is life worth living ? If life is worthless in itself, if
" To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,"
then its prolongation would be the prolongation of evil. We
must find that the life of man, estimated by the standard of per
fect reason, has worth in itself, or at least is capable of being
developed into a worthy life, a life having real worth, before we
can argue that its continuance would be a blessing. If that is
shown, then life is a good, and worth living, though it continues
but for a day ; then its endless duration with endless progress is
a blessing, and silences all the objections of the pessimist. The
essential worth of man's life is evident so soon as we discover
his higher powers and capacities as a rational personal being. It
becomes more evident when we know him as related to God in
the universal moral system. It is made luminous with the light
of heaven in the revelation of God in Christ. Man is a worker
with God in establishing and advancing his kingdom of righteous
ness and good-will and in transforming human society into it;
and thus in introducing all who come into the world in succes
sive generations to the eternal life, energy, and blessedness of
heaven. And all that life, on earth or in heaven, is love ; this is
1 Matth. xx. 25-28. 2 Studies in Theism, p. 374.

260 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the moving force of all spiritual energy in man and God, in this
life and in the life to come. " A recent German writer says that
both Jesus and Schopenhauer taught the true doctrine of self-
renouncement ; but that Schopenhauer faced the pessimism which
is the doctrine's natural accompaniment, whereas Jesus sought to
escape it by the dream of a paradise to come." : But Jesus in
his life, his death, and his teachings revealed the universality, the
supreme authority, the unchangeableness and inviolability of the
law of love ; the inevitable blessedness of every person in this
universe who lives in harmony with God in conformity with this
law; the inevitable missing of all blessedness by every person
who lives the life of selfishness in opposition to this law. He
did not teach that the self-renunciation essential in love is the loss
of good, the abrading and final extinction of the individual person
ality. It is merely the voluntary change in the direction of the
man's energies, the renunciation of self in the free choice of God and
our neighbor as the supreme object of trust and service, instead
of self. And by this life of universal love, and by it alone, does
man realize his true greatness, do his proper work, attain the
true development and perfection of his being, and therein his
true and highest good. Jesus makes us know that the eternal
life of God is the life of love, and that man by the trust and
service of love participates even on earth in that divine and eter
nal life. Thus he breaks through the limiting, defective, and
false conception of life which hides from the pessimist the true
significance of man and his life and reveals the spiritual powers
and capacities, the higher possibilities of his being by which man,
if he will, may participate in the life which is rational and spirit
ual, which is divine and eternal. In revealing God Jesus also
reveals man. In the light of this revelation all pessimistic views
of man and his life vanish like shadows when flooded with sun
shine. Christianity is the religion of promise, of hope, and of
courage. In revealing the love of God in Christ it reveals also
in him the ideal of man, the highest possibilities of his being, the
great work which is given him to do. It calls him to exercise
the Christlike love which is the essence of the divine character,
and to be a worker together with God in transforming human
society into the kingdom of God on earth under the reign of
1 Matthew Arnold, " Last Essays on the Church and Religion," pp. xxvi.
xxvii.

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 261
universal love, from which men in successive generations are to
pass at death into the same kingdom to be perfected in love,
developed in all their powers, and glorified in the life eternal.
Inspired with this Christlike love, glowing with enthusiasm for
humanity, made fearless through faith in God and the expectation
of achievement according to his promise, Christians are, like Paul,
only attracted to more energetic work by the fact that " there are
many adversaries;" they take joyfully all incidental privation
and suffering, and rejoice in exerting all their energies in extend
ing over all the earth the reign of righteousness, good-will, and
peace, and preparing men for glory, honor, and immortality. These
are the actual possibilities and the true aims of humanity, which
pessimism entirely overlooks. Thus it shuts every door of hope,
quenches all enthusiasm, suppresses all enterprise for human
well-being, and limits the possibilities of human life to the dismal
and despairing wail, Life is not worth living.
5. The pessimistic error strikes its roots still deeper. It is
founded on a fundamentally erroneous conception of the universe
itself. It assumes that the universe is in itself a contradiction ;
that in all its ongoing it is an abortive attempt to realize an
absurdity. First, it assumes that the universe has its ultimate ground in
unreason, in something unconscious, unintelligent, impersonal,
irrational. It is thus in direct contradiction of modern science,
which rests on the fundamental assumption that the universe is
intelligible, amenable to reason ; and that it and all the realities
in it are capable of being rationally apprehended and accounted
for, of being scientifically known by minds having opportunity
and powers to observe all the facts.
The philosophy of J. G. Fichte and Hegel did much to
weaken the influence of Kant's theory of the unknowable "thing
in itself." Schopenhauer, who claims to be a faithful though
discriminating disciple of Kant, made prominent again this
unknowable noumenon. With Kant, the pessimists generally
recognize a thing in itself, " the unexplored remainder " behind
all phenomena and manifesting itself in them. Schopenhauer
calls it Will. He thus differs from Kant, and from his followers,
Hamilton and Spencer, who call it the Unknowable. Instead of
considering will a manifestation of force, he considers force a
manifestation of will. He thus seems to distinguish his theory

262 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
of the universe from materialism. But will, as he defines it, is
not the power that freely determines in the light of reason the
ends to which it will direct its energy and the exertion of its
energy for the end chosen. On the contrary, he explicitly
teaches that " we must think away the co-operation of the intel
lect if we would comprehend the nature of will in itself." In
itself it is purposeless. But, as the fundamental reality manifested
in the phenomenal world, it is " the will to live." " Everything
urges and presses to existence — where possible, to organic exis
tence, that is, to life, and then to the greatest possible augmen
tation of life."1 This is the keynote (Grundton) of all life. In
man it is the fundamental but blind impulse of his nature which
always urges him to seek something which he does not possess
and makes him incapable of satisfaction in any attainment.
Potential energy is at the basis of will, but it is not a peculiarity
distinctive of it. Schopenhauer gains nothing by giving to this
potential energy, which pervades all things animate and inani
mate, the name of will, while denying of it the rational intelli
gence which is distinctive of it as will. Science teaches the
persistence of force. Schopenhauer represents this persistent
force anthropomorphically and fantastically by calling the force
will, ascribing to it restlessness and impulse, and finally resolving
it into desire, while inconsistently insisting that in its essence it is
unconscious and purposeless. Thus the universe is ultimately
grounded in unconscious force, acting in necessity without intelli
gence, guidance, or purpose, and yet always uneasy and restless
with blind desire and impelling itself to seek what it can never
attain. Hartmann returns, in respect to this point, to the philosophy
of Hegel. He holds that a rational element must be united with
the will at the basis of all reality. The world-process thus be
comes identified with the logic-process, because the idea is the
essence of the world.2 He regards causality " as logical necessity
which receives actuality through the will." He regards the ulti
mate ground of the universe as the one identical subject exercising
the functions both of will and intellect. In some of his writings
he presents the evidence of a directing and regulating mind in
1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii., chap. 28, p. 351.
2 Phil, des Unbewussten, p. 648 f.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 263
nature with such clearness and force that one might take him for
a theist.1 But he nullifies all this by his primal assumption that
the ground of the universe, notwithstanding its reason and will,
is the Unconscious. Thus his theory also falls back on the
conception of the universe as grounded in blind necessity and
unreason. Secondly, as the ultimate ground of the universe is Unreason,
so its essence is illusion. Pessimism teaches that the finite has no
real existence. Schopenhauer teaches that the world which we
perceive is merely our own perception. The subject of the per
ception and the object of it are merely two aspects of one and
the same phenomenon, namely, our presentation or perception
(Vorstellung) . Hence the world is wholly an illusion. The
finite, with its individuation, is a veil through which we must look
to see the reality. Therefore man's entire life is the pursuit of
illusions. The whole past history of man is " humanity's dream,
long, heavy, and confused." Hartmann sums it up under three
heads. First, the illusion that the individual can obtain hap
piness in this life : the illusion of the Greeks, Romans, and
Hebrews. The second, that the individual may find happiness
in the life after death : the illusion of Christians. The third, that
happiness may be found for the race in its progress toward per
fection : illusion of the noblest minds. But the more cultivated
and developed man becomes, the greater his misery.2 Thus all
human knowledge is unreal ; man is but a shadow in a world
of shadows ; all which he thinks he knows is delusion. Such a
theory of the universe contradicts reason. And it carries in it
the additional absurdity that the pessimist uses his reason to dis
prove rationality ; he sets up his own illusions as the standard by
which to criticise the universe and to prove that it is an illusion ;
thus he also demonstrates that, if the principles of pessimism are
true, its conclusions are illusive and false.
Thirdly, because, as the pessimist assumes, the ground of the
universe is unreason and its essence is illusion, its whole existence
must be evil. Buddhism teaches that individuation is the essen-
1 Hartmann published in 1872 an anonymous refutation of his own prin
ciples and hypotheses : — " Das Unbewusstes vom Standpunkt der Physi-
ologie und Descendenz-Theorie." — Professor Flint, Antitheistic Theo
ries, p. 534.
2 Phil, des Unbewussten, pp. 540-627.

264 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
tial evil ; that in the universe the absolute is individuated into the
finite, and therefore the existence ofthe universe is essential evil;
that the evil can be removed only when all individuated existence
is reabsorbed into the absolute, and all individuals and all indi
vidual consciousness shall have ceased to exist. This assumption,
on which this vast oriental philosophy of despair rests, is the same
which appears in occidental philosophy in the assumption that
metaphysical imperfection, which is only another name for finite
ness, is in itself essential evil. It necessarily follows that the non
existence of the universe and of all in it would be better than its
existence; that it is disappointing and unsatisfying in all its
issues and results ; that it is productive of ever-increasing evil, —
" One desert,
Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break ;
But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks,
Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness."
According to the theory of pessimism, the universe must be in
dreadful reality what, as represented by Carlyle, it was to the
Wanderer in the depth of his despair : " It seemed as if all things
in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me ; as
if the heavens and the earth were but. the jaws of a devouring
monster wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured." x And
Schopenhauer, as the true description of the world according to
his philosophy, gives these lines of Byron : —
" Our life is a false nature ; 't is not in
The harmony of things, this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies, which rain their plagues on men like dew,
Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see,
And worse, the woes we see not, which throb through
The immedicable soul with heart-aches ever new."'2
And with every advance to a higher order of life, with every
advance in education, culture, and civilization, comes only an
increase of misery. The theory that this wonderful and magnifi
cent universe issues only in this result is certainly absurd.
1 Sartor Resartus, pp. 170, 171.
8 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii. p. 574, chap. 46.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 265
Fourthly, pessimists are wont to speak of the redemption of the
universe. But because the ground of the universe is unreason, its
essence illusion, and its existence evil, it necessarily follows that
the only redemption possible, either for the individual or the uni
verse, is the extinction of its finite and individuated existence and
its reabsorption into the infinite ; then the will to live sinks back
to final rest. Schopenhauer proposes the denying of the will,
issuing in suicide ; this, he thinks, would be most effectually done
by voluntary starvation. Hartmann criticises this as insufficient,
because at the utmost it is only the redemption of single indi
viduals. He says : " The end of the conflict between the con
sciousness and the will, between the logical arid the illogical, can
be only at the goal of the development, the conclusion of the
world- process, ... the abolition of all willing in absolute non-
willing." Therefore the redemption can be consummated only
in the extinction of the human race and of the entire fabric of the
finite universe. A method for accomplishing this he proposes,
" not as an apocalypse of the end of the world, but merely td
indicate that the thing is not so unthinkable as at first sight it
appears." It is to be done, first, by the concentration of such a
mass of will (capitalized in man) that the balance of will in the
molecular, molar, and other forces in the universe will be com
paratively insignificant. Then the will of humanity to annihilate
itself will annihilate the whole fabric. Secondly, all mankind must
become so thoroughly alive to the folly of life that the yearning
for an end of existence must be the prime motive of every act.
The third condition necessary for this gigantic suicide is such
facility of communication that the inhabitants of the world may
simultaneously execute the common resolution.1 But even this
does not insure the end. For why may not the unconscious will
break out again in the will to live, and go through the same round
of folly, misery, and extinction ? Hartmann cannot say that this
is impossible. He concludes, however, that the probability that
it would make the repetition an infinite number of times is reduced
to a vanishing point, and therefore we may be confident that it
will at some time stop. This is indeed the philosophy of despair.
The whole history of man and of the universe is the history only
of illusion and failure. It is summed up by Edgar A. Poe, in his
1 Hartmann, " Phil, des Unbewuss.,'" Part C, chap, xiii., pp. 635-643.

266 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
conception of a company of angels watching the performance of
a drama : — " The play was the tragedy Man ;
And the hero, the conqueror Worm." 1
According to the Hindu philosophy, the redemption of man is
by his entrance into Nirvana. Max Muller says that, in the Brah-
manic conception of it, it is a state of peaceful and satisfying
existence. But if so, it is only a state of quiescence in which all
desire, all action, and all motive to action have ceased. In Nir
vana the soul has become bed-rid forever and is contented in its
quiescence and inaction. But, according to the same authority,
Buddhism recognizes no absolute Being ; it is the philosophy of
nothingness ; there is no reality anywhere, either in the past, the
present, or the future. The Nirvana, then, as the end of al]
illusions is the end of all conscious existence.2 The latter would
seem to be the logical conception. Because consciousness is
assumed to belong only to the finite and the individuated, the
cessation of these would be the cessation of all consciousness and
therefore of all satisfaction and conscious peace. But, in the
popular religion of the Buddhists, the God worshiped is the
Buddha, the man who has become God, and Nirvana is a life of
endless blessedness after the trials of all successive births are
ended. 6. It follows, of course, that pessimism, as a philosophy, in its
practical character and influence, is fatally evil. It is needless,
however, to dwell on the obvious fact that the pessimistic philos
ophy in itself comes down upon the soul like a mephitic air,
smothering all hope, aspiration, and virtuous endeavor and extin
guishing all moral and spiritual life.
But the objection is urged that Buddhism teaches the ethics of
1 Ludwig Noire, in " Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes," says that a
gentleman in Florence, Italy, determined to commit suicide. He an
nounced his determination to some of his friends and invited them to dine
with him on the day appointed for his suicide. When they arrived, a sar
cophagus was in the hall. They had a right merry time at dinner. Then
they went to the hall, the gentleman killed himself, they laid the body in
the sarcophagus and buried it. Atheism naturally issues in pessimism.
Pessimism logically issues in suicide, as Schopenhauer and Hartmann ex
plicitly teach. The decay of religious faith naturally tends to a justification
of suicide and an increase in the number of persons who kill themselves.
2 Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. pp. 226, 231, 232.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 267
universal love side by side with its atheism, nihilism, and extreme
pessimism. To this it may be replied that ethical ideas and
principles have their foundation in the constitution of man. A
change of a man's speculative opinion respecting God and the
human soul makes no change in his spiritual and moral constitu
tion. His reason, his conscience, his constitutional moral and
spiritual susceptibilities remain and in their development awaken
him to moral and spiritual ideas, motives, and sentiments. Hence,
in all tribes and races of men, moral and spiritual ideas and senti
ments are found. And in all nations, sufficiently advanced to
have a literature, we find more or less distinct recognitions of the
law of love. This is sufficient to account for the fact that the
Buddhists recognize this law and many of the precepts implied in
it. A more specific answer would require a statement of what
Buddhism is. This can be only indicated here and with the
utmost brevity.
Rhys Davids says : " Nirvana has been supposed by some
European scholars to mean a blissful state in which the soul still
exists in an everlasting trance. There can, however, now be
no longer any doubt on the point. . . . Buddhism does not
ackhowledge the existence of a soul as a thing distinct from the
parts and powers of man which are dissolved at death, and the
Nirvana of Buddhism is simply Extinction." Buddhism teaches
a doctrine analogous to that of the transmigration of souls, but
modified by its denial that any soul or spirit exists in man. It
teaches that the influence or product of every one's life, accord
ing to the universal law of cause and effect, is transmitted beyond
the death of the individual, and appears in a new life of some
sort. This transmitted product is called Karma. As the man at
death transmits the Karma of his own life into another life, so he
himself was but the Karma of a previous life. Whence the
Karma originated Buddhism does not say. It does not concern
itself with the origin of the universe or of life. It concerns itself
only with the perpetual succession and change, which are all that
is ; no being really is ; there are only change and succession ;
" nothing is, every thing becomes," exists only in transition.
Rhys Davids says : " Karma is the sum of merit and demerit,
which, as each one's demerit is the greater of the two, often
comes practically to much the same thing as sin or error." Thus
we go back of every individual life to Karma as " the seed of

268 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
existence." And because in the sum of life there is more
demerit than merit, this and the life into which it issues is itself
always evil. The "enlightenment" which Buddhism aims to
impart to man is the discovery of the worthlessness and the
illusiveness of all existence. In this enlightenment all desire to
live, all cleaving to existence will cease ; and through successive
stages the' Buddhist saint gets free from all sensuality, from all
revengeful feelings, and from all ' evil desires, from ignorance,
doubt, and heresy, and from all unkindliness, and exercises good
will without measure towards all beings ; thus he attains to
universal charity. He who has attained this state passes at death
immediately into Nirvana. The Karma, the seed of existence in
him, is rooted out, he transmits no new life to the future, he
escapes all the desires and miseries of existence in the extinction
of his being. And in proportion as any one approximates to this
highest state, he at death transmits less of the evil seed of existence
to the future ; and in the new life, beginning on this higher plane,
the person may attain the highest state, or at least advance nearer
to it. And the hope which Buddhism holds out to men is that
the whole human race will thus be eventually redeemed from
existence and its inevitable evils into Nirvana, the extinction of
their being. Thus the aim of the Buddhism of the East is the
same with that of the pessimism of the West, the extinction of
all conscious existence, though it expresses its aim in different
terms and proposes its realization by less violent and fantastical
means. Therefore, while the morality taught by Buddhism has a striking
resemblance in forms of expression to that of Christianity, the two
in their significance and application are in striking contrast.
Buddhism rests on a philosophy of negation and nihilism.
Christianity recognizes the real being of the material world, of
man, and of God, and reveals the vast possibilities which may be
realized by man. The outcome of Buddhism is universal despair ;
that of Christianity is promise, progress, and hope, the future to
be ever better than the past. Both require loving service to
men. The only service which Buddhism can render is to en
lighten man to see the illusiveness and worthlessness of life, and
to teach him how to escape its miseries by attaining the extinction
of his own, and ultimately of all, conscious existence. Christianity
renders to man the service of disclosing to him the greatness and

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 269
worth of his being and endowments as related to God and in his
likeness, presenting to him the ideal of human perfection, stimu
lating him to realize it, and showing him the way to his fullest
development and his true well-being on earth, and to the spiritual
power, perfection, blessedness, and glory of the life immortal.
Buddhism teaches man that all which seems to him real is
transitive and unreal, the ever-shifting scenes of a vast illusion.
Christianity teaches him in the transient life of sense to realize
the life of the spirit, which is everlasting. Buddhism has no
recognition of faith in God and of quickening and help for man
from above himself ; it leaves the man unaided and alone to bear
the destiny that is crushing him, with the only hope that by
extreme self-denial, self-suppression, and self-sacrifice he may
some time in the future reach the extinction of his being and so
escape the miseries inseparable from conscious existence.
Christianity teaches man that all right character begins and
is developed, and all right work is done, in trust in God ;
that God compasses him with immeasurable love, and dwells
by his Spirit in the heart of every one who will receive him,
'enlightening, quickening, strengthening, and constraining him
with God's own grace. On the contrary, all the paths to
enlightenment which Buddhism points out are in the way of
self-suppression and self-extinction. It requires the suppression
and eradication of all constitutional desires and instincts instead
of their purification and regulation, the extinction of the being
instead of its development ; even the universal kindliness which it
enjoins is the expression of the placidity of despair rather than of
the energy of positive love. It misinterprets the self-sacrifice of
love as the consent to and the desire for the extinction of the
being, a seeking to crush and annihilate one's self; it makes
the sacrifice of self primary, positive, and dominant in the love.1
Christianity recognizes self-sacrifice as essential in all love. But
it is merely the negative side of love, the renunciation of self as
the supreme object of trust and service, which is necessarily
involved in the positive act of love to God with all the heart and
1 It is a Buddhist legend that a Buddha, or enlightened one, seeing a
lame tigress starving with her whelps, freely gave himself to her to be
devoured. This, certainly, in a country infested by tigers as India is, was
not a self-sacrifice springing from rational love to man ; but rather an act
of insanity resulting from long-continued self-maceration and intense fixing
of the thoughts on the one subject of the worthlessness of life.

270 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
to one's neighbor as himself. It requires love to God and man
in its positive energy as primary and dominant in the love, and
the self-sacrifice as incidental to the love and inseparable from it.
And therein is attained, not self-extinction, but the true and
highest self- development, perfection and well-being.i In ac
cordance with its essential pessimism, the methods by which, as
Buddhism teaches, man is to attain enlightenment and redemption
are withdrawal from the world and seclusion from its business and
pleasures, extreme asceticism and self-mortification, solitary and
protracted meditation; not prayer, because it knows no God;
not contributing to the supply of human needs by honest
industry and diligence in business, but living in idleness by beg
ging ; not an active and honorable discharge of the duties and
bearing the burdens of life in society, a warm interest in human
affairs ; not the active work and service of love for the improve
ment of individuals, the progress of society, and the advancement
of the kingdom of God and the reign of righteousness and good
will on earth, because the only service which can be rendered to
man is to enlighten him to see the worthlessness and misery of
existence and the way to the final cessation of all conscious life.
A legitimate result has been that civilization under the influence
of Buddhism has remained stagnant ; on the contrary, the great
modern progress of enlightenment in science, in industrial in
ventions, in political constitutions, institutions, and laws, in
sociological knowledge and conditions, has been among the
Christian nations.
A similar contrast appears between the founders of Christianity
and of Buddhism. Kuenen says of Siddhartha Gautama : " This
Buddha, a man of colossal proportions indeed, but yet of like
passions and motives with ourselves, is a creation of the European
scholars." 2 But in what critics have accepted as his actual
history these characteristics appear. He was born heir to the
sovereign of a small principality. After he left the palace of his
1 That which doth set thee free from self shall bring
Nighness to God ! This is a subtle thing
The selfless only know. Not self-possessing
Art thou thine own, but self-abandoning. — Book iii. of the
" Bustan," or " Fruit-Garden " of the Persian Sufi poet
Sa'di, as translated by Edwin Arnold in " With Sa'di
in the Garden," p. 194.
2 National Religions and Universal Religions, pp. 276, 277.

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 271
father he retired to solitude and subjected himself to the severest
asceticism. Though after his enlightenment under the Bo tree he
abated the rigor of his asceticism and mingled more with men,
yet he lived by begging and as an ascetic till his death at four
score. The society which he founded was an order of mendicants.
Each member carried a brown bowl and begged his food from
house to house. They wore clothing made of cast-off rags sewed
together. Even their orange-colored robes were made of cloth
first torn into rags and then sewed together. This society
received from Gautama the doctrines and usages of primitive
Buddhism and many minute rules for the regulation of conduct
in accordance therewith. On the contrary, Christ came revealing
the personal God perfect in wisdom and love, and revealing man
in his likeness to God, in his privilege of intimate communion
with him, in his immortal destiny and his possible development
in power, wisdom, love and blessedness forever. Christ came
" eating and drinking," mingling with men in all the common
affairs of life, sympathizing with them in their joys and then-
sorrows, weeping over their suffering and their sin, healing the
sick, going about doing good, establishing the kingdom of God
into which human society is to be transformed on earth and in
which it is to be continued after death in everlasting glory.
Everything in Buddhism is negative, suppressing, despairing,
annihilating ; everything in Christianity is positive, it is promise
and hope, development and progress.
Here a difficulty suggests itself, " that a religion, which ignores
God and denies the existence of the soul, should be the very
religion which has found most acceptance among men." This is
founded on a misconception of the facts. The Buddhist doc
trine, denying God and the soul and asserting nihilism and pes
simism, cannot be the basis of a religion in any true sense of the
word. There is no evidence that its founder ever intended it to
be a religion. In fact, it has not been the philosophical doctrines
of Buddhism which have gained belief among the people, but a
religious worship of divinities which has grown up outside of the
doctrines. The spread of Buddhism was not due to its philosophy
of nihilism and pessimism, but to its practical ethical teaching,
its inculcation of kindliness and good-will, its recognition of the
misery of the poor, the wretched, and the oppressed ; and also to
the popular conception of its founder, glorified by many legends

272 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
and myths. The language used in Buddhist writings and teaching
respecting continued existence in the Karma, the experience of
the enlightened, and the blessedness of Nirvana, would naturally
be understood by the popular mind to declare the conscious ex
istence of the soul after death and to describe the Nirvana as an
abode of conscious and everlasting blessedness ; and it has led
Western scholars to the same mistake.' Thus, to the popular
mind, unable to take up the abstruse and repulsive philosophy of
nihilism, Buddhism became a religion with the worship of divini
ties and the expectation of blessedness after death. The Buddhas,
or enlightened ones, themselves have been regarded as saints or
even as gods. Professor Martin, of Pekin, says : " In China the
Nirvana was found to be too subtle an idea for popular contem
plation ; and, in order to furnish the people with a more attractive
object of worship, the Buddhists brought forward a goddess of
mercy, whose highest merit was, that having reached the verge of
Nirvana, she declined to enter, preferring to remain where she
could hear the cries and succor the calamities of those who were
struggling with the manifold evils of a world of change." 1
7. Pessimism is proof of the existence of God by a reduction
to absurdity of atheistic theories of the universe. I do not say
that if we deny the existence of God the facts of the universe
would prove the truth of pessimism ; for our denial would make
no change in the facts; and those facts, clearly and fully ob
served, would show the reasonableness of the universe. Pessi
mism is the theory that the universe is contradictory to reason in
its ground, its constitution, its action, and its end ; and that, there
fore, human reason and knowledge are untrustworthy, unreal, and
illusive. This doctrine is of the essence of atheism, and is logic
ally involved in it in all its forms. Theism, and it alone, delivers
us from this absurdity. It is the doctrine that the universe is
grounded in reason, is constituted according to its rational prin
ciples and laws, and is progressively realizing a rational archetype
and rational ends ; and it involves the personality of man as a
rational free agent, the authority of human reason, the reality and
trustworthiness of human knowledge, and all those higher powers
1 Rhys Davids says of the history of Buddhism in India that " in the
eighth and ninth centuries of the Christian era a great persecution arose,
and the Buddhists were so utterly exterminated that there is not now a
Buddhist in all India."

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 273
and susceptibilities which are implied in the knowledge and ser
vice of God, and which atheism, if logical, must deny. Pessimism
is therefore a proof of theism by reducing to absurdity atheism in
all its forms.
And we find that the facts ¦ in the universe correspond with the
theistic conception of it ; and that this conception gives a reason
able explanation of facts which at first sight seem to contradict it.
There is a moral system in the universe to which the physical sys
tem is subordinate. Sin exists through the free choice of finite
free agents. Every rational being in it who lives wisely in obe
dience to the law of love is sure of Ihe true good ; and even sin
ners who repent may be restored to the right life and be blessed.
But by its constitution, every person in it who lives the life o'f
selfishness must miss all real good and incur evil and only evil
continually. The action of God in constituting and administering
it exhausts all the resources of wisdom and love to prevent sin, to
rescue sinners from it, and to bring all to live the life of love, and
to realize all perfection and good. The dissatisfaction of man,
the staple argument of the pessimist, is simply the noble discon
tent of a personal and spiritual being with his physical environ
ment, and reveals the higher capacities of his spiritual being.
The man seeks his spiritual environment, and in God and the
moral system under God's law and pervaded by his love, he finds
it. Then privation of good and liability to suffering are inherent
in finiteness ; and privation and suffering become the means of
education, discipline, and training under moral influences, and so
of attaining the highest perfection and good.
Mr. James Sully, in his valuable work entitled " Pessimism,"
confines his investigation to what he calls " accessible facts," ex
cluding God, immortality, and all in man which is involved in the
knowledge and service of God. "The answer must be sought
within the limits of experience." " The worth of human life, so
far from being made dependent on theological propositions, is
itself one of the facts on which the propositions of theology have to
establish themselves, or to which at least they have to accommodate
themselves." x He seems here to reject the Newtonian method
of hypothesis, deduction, and verification, now called induction,
and to confine himself to the method of observing and classifying
facts. His objection would have forbidden Newton to start with
1 Pessimism, a History and a Criticism, pp. 156, 161.
VOL. 1. — 18

274 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the hypothesis that the law of gravitation extends to the moon ;
for it was not a fact accessible within experience. With equal
propriety we may start with the theory of the universe that it is
grounded in reason and acts under rational laws for rational ends,
and reveals the directing agency of wisdom and love, and may
examine the facts to see if they correspond with this theory.
And if, on other grounds than the empirical comparison of happi
ness and suffering, we find evidence of the truth of this theory, we
may use it to account for what seems to be evil in life. It must
also be noticed that the knowledge of God begins in experience
and rests on it ; and this includes not merely motives and emo
tions known as distinctively religious, but all mental acts and
susceptibilities which have no significance except as they pre
suppose Reason as universal and supreme.
In fact pessimism, as a theory of life, both in the East and the
West, has been founded on the denial of personality both in God
and in man. As a philosophy and as a mood of feeling it has
never been concomitant with a clear and practically dominant
belief in God ruling by the law of love in a moral system. It
has been a common accompaniment of a decay of religious faith.
It marks a period of exhausted life, when faith and its energy
working by love have decayed, a period of questioning and
criticism " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," rather
than occupied with " noble deeds and daring high." In such a
period a common manifestation of it has been a decay of rever
ence for man and of regard for the sacredness of human life.
This appeared in the Reign of Terror in France. What, it was
asked, is killing a man but turning a few ounces of blood from
one channel into another? It appears in the justification and
practice of suicide in connection with the skepticism in the time
of the Roman empire. Similar are the manifestations of it in
our own day. As a mood of feeling it is a cynicism incompatible
with the law of love and the Spirit of Christ. This is expressed
by Leopardi ; in a letter to Giordani he writes : " I rejoice to
discover more and more the misery of men and things, to touch
them with the hand, and to be seized with a cold shudder as I
search through the unblessed and terrible secret of life." 1 The
same was the cynicism of Diderot ; " The world, viewed from the
aesthetic side, appears a cabinet of caricatures ; from the intellect-
1 Sully, " Pessimism," p. 27.

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 275
ual side, a mad-house ; from the moral side, a harboring place for
rascals. . . . The few wide, profound, and real observers of
human life have all known, and known often, this fantastic con
sciousness of living in a strange, distorted, and grotesque universe
of lunatics, knaves, and grotesques." An incidental result and
manifestation of this type of thought and mood of feeling is the
prevalent realism of novels and poetry; no longer quickening
and inspiring by the presentation of ideals, but harrowing, dis
gusting, and disheartening by presenting the lowest and worst
sides of humanity and justifying it simply because they are real.
But Christianity shows that the ideal is the deepest reality and is
destined to realization and permanence, while the sin and evil are
to pass away.
The conclusion is that pessimism is a legitimate development
of atheism, but is entirely incompatible with theism and espe- !
daily with Christianity. It is the reduction of atheism to absurd
ity. It is a confirmation of theism by showing that theism is
essential to avoid this absurdity and to any reasonable conception
of man and of the universe. And this is a decisive answer to the
argument against the existence of God from the existence of
suffering and sin.
VI. Mystery. — We are justified in trusting that God is love,
in the face of questions which we cannot answer and difficulties
which we cannot remove. It is a false assumption that candor and
fairness in investigation forbid our believing any religious doctrine
and directing our action by it until we have definitely refuted all
objections and solved all difficulties. Almost all human knowl
edge is held in the face of unanswered objections and unex
plained difficulties. This is true of physical science. But the
scientist does not give up the knowledge which he has attained,
nor his confidence that the universe is constituted in accordance
with reason and is in all its parts susceptible of being scientifically
known.1 The energies of practical life would be paralyzed if we
l In a letter to the late Dean of Wells, Ap. 27, 1877, Mr. Huxley says:
" I have not the slightest objection to offer a priori to all the propositions
in the three creeds. The mysteries of the church are child's play compared
with the mysteries of nature. The doctrine of the Trinity is not more
puzzling than the necessary antinomies of physical speculation ; virgin pro
creation and resuscitation from apparent death are ordinary phenomena for
the naturalist. It would be a great error, therefore, to suppose that the

276 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
waited till all objections were answered. We trust to what we do
know and go forward. The same is true in the moral and
spiritual sphere. The theodicy sublimely set forth in the book of
Job rests on God's transcendent greatness and the consequent
imperfection of human knowledge of him. Therefore there may
always be in his wisdom and love reasons for his action not yet
known to us. Thus our faith in him is justified and "when we
do not know the reasons of his doing, we trust the reasonableness
of the doer." We have already reached a position which justi
fies this faith in God. And we reasonably expect that the future,
as it unrolls to our view, will be a progressive revelation of the
reasons of God's doings and a progressive vindication of his per
fections ; that what we know not now "we shall know hereafter
(John xiii. 7). This hope is poetically expressed by James
Blanco White :
" Mysterious Night, when our first parent knew
Thee by report divine and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue ?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo, creation widened to man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun ? Or who could find,
While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ?
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife ?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life ? "
Because God is the absolute Being, agnostics affirm that he is
unknowable. Others, because God is personal Spirit, affirm that
Christianity should not be represented as full of mysteries, and
assume that they can present a doctrine of God plain to all
minds. They thus stop in anthropomorphism and incur the
divine rebuke, " Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one
as thyself" (Ps. 1. 21). Each of these parties presents one
aspect of what God reveals himself to be, which, held as the
comprehensive whole, becomes fatal error. Theism affirms the
knowledge of God in both these aspects as the absolute Spirit,
agnostic rejects theology because of its puzzles and wonders. He rejects it
simply because in his judgment there would be no evidence sufficient to
warrant theological propositions."

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 277
"with whom we have to do" (Heb. iv. 13). Yet it affirms that
our knowledge of him is always incomplete. We say, with Paul,
"we know in part." We say, with Job, of the grandest revela
tions of God in nature, " Lo, these are but the outskirts of his
ways; how small a whisper do we hear of him ! " (1 Cor. xiii. 9 ;
Job xxvi. 14).
We have seen that God, considered in the aspect of his being
as the absolute One, must always be mysterious to finite minds.
The following explanations will answer some common objections
and correct some common misapprehensions or misrepresenta
tions. 1. The mysteriousness of God as the absolute Being does not
require belief of the absurd, self-contradictory, or impossible.
A mystery is not an absurdity or self-contradiction. That two
and two make five, that a circle exists with the radii unequal, that
anything can be and not be at the same time, are not mysteries,
but are clearly known in all human intelligence as absurdities.
The discoveries of science and the inventions of art have
made us familiar with believing what had been contrary to uni
versal experience and all men had believed to be impossible.
When the earth was regarded as flat, and the law of gravitation
was not known, the existence of antipodes was necessarily regarded
as impossible. But with the progress of science the existence of
antipodes, which had been universally believed to be impossible,
came to be universally and familiarly known. After steam navi
gation had begun, it was still believed to be impossible for a ship
to be propelled by steam across the ocean. One writer pub
lished an essay demonstrating mathematically, as he supposed,
this impossibility. But in the very week in which it was pub
lished the first steamship steamed into New York harbor, having
completed its voyage across the Atlantic. So discovery and
invention in their continued progress have been continually com
pelling men to believe what had been contrary to universal expe
rience and all men had regarded as impossible. We have become
so familiar with this that, when a new discovery or invention is
suggested, we are almost ready to believe it because it seems
impossible. So, in the evolution of the universe from epoch to
epoch, God brings in new and higher orders of beings, such as
before were unknown and seemingly impossible. Therefore it is
not strange nor improbable that in his action among men in

278 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
redemption he should from epoch to epoch manifest himself in
higher and higher forms of revelation, and that there should be
epochs marked by what we call the miraculous, until he comes in
Christ, the revelation transcending all that had preceded it. This
is not impossible, because we know that the universe is grounded
in the absolute reason eternal in God, who reveals himself by
progressively realizing in it the archetype of all perfection and
well-being possible in a finite universe in accordance with the
eternal principles and laws of reason. Therefore, that which
transcends previous human experience is possible ; but that
which true reason clearly sees to be absurd, that which cannot be
realized without annulling the eternal principles of reason, is im
possible. An absurdity, clearly seen as such in the light of reason,
is not a mystery.
TertuUian said : " The Son of God was crucified ; this awakens
no shame, because it is shameful, as all men must see. The Son
of God died ; this is by all means to be believed, because it is
absurd (ineptum). He was buried and rose again; this is cer
tain because it is impossible." 1 This is mere extravagant rhetoric.
Yet in the course of theological thought through the ages this
rhetoric has sometimes been propounded by Christian teachers as
an axiom in theology. And to this day some authors quietly take
it for granted that Christian theology accepts this as a fundamental
maxim on which the truth of Christianity depends, and teaches
that the more glaring the apparent contradiction in any alleged
revelation of God, and the greater the difficulty of reconciling it
with reason, the stronger and more commendable is the faith in
believing it. Mr. Mallock, in his "Is Life Worth Living?" is a
notable example. Another writer has recently said, " The strong
est and subtlest difficulty that meets the Christian preacher . . .
is the common idea that Christianity involves absurdities or vio
lates our native sense of right."
But it is of the essence of theism that the absolute Being is the
absolute Reason; that the universe is grounded ultimately in
Reason, and in all its ongoing is the revelation of the absolute
Reason energizing in it. Theism, therefore, is accordant with
true science in holding that whatever is real is rationally explica
ble and intelligible ; that an absurdity is as impossible in reality
as it is in thought — as impossible to be made real by causal en-
1 De Carne Christi, chap. v.

THEODICY :— THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 279
ergy even though almighty, as it is to be assented to as true by the
rational intellect. Theism, in fact, discloses the only basis on
which science, empirical or philosophical, can rest in holding this
maxim. Theism, therefore, in its essence, is in irreconcilable
contradiction to the assertion, We believe because it is impossible.
The same is the essence of Christianity. In Christ, the Logos,
the eternal Reason, the Light that lighteth every man, is come
into the world. In him is Truth and no lie. In him the abso
lute and perfect Reason is energizing to reconcile the world to
himself — that is, to perfect reason. It is energizing to establish
his kingdom, the reign of righteousness and good-will on earth,
thereby progressively revealing, in the action of perfect love, all
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hid in him. Therefore
there cannot be anything absurd or self-contradictory in Christian
theism rightly understood. But as, in the progress of civilization,
we have become familiar with discoveries in science and inven
tions in art which had been unprecedented and seemingly impos
sible, but now are known to be real and scientifically accordant
with the principles, laws, and ideals of reason, so in theology we
may be assured that, while no revelation of God can annul or
contradict any principle or law of reason, God's revelation of
himself may be expected to disclose reality which had been pre
viously unknown and seemingly impossible, and which, when
revealed is found to be accordant with reason and of practical
worth in promoting the spiritual and moral progress of individuals
and of society.
2. The mysteriousness of God as the absolute Being does not
justify agnosticism.
A mystery is not something entirely unknown and unintelligi
ble. Mr. Lewes, speaking of the possible ultimate reconciliation
of science and religion, says : " But to do this, in the coming
ages it (religion) must occupy a position similar to the one it
occupied in the past, and express the highest thought of the time,
as that thought widens with the ever-growing experience. ... It
must no longer put forward principles which are unintelligible
and incredible, nor make this very unintelligibility a source of
glory, and a belief in them a higher virtue than a belief in demon
stration." 1 Here is a complete misapprehension. The mysteries
disclosed in theism and Christianity are not totally unintelligible
1 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. i. pp. 2,. 3. . .

28o GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
and incredible ; theology asserts no merit in believing them as
such. A mystery is not our subjective feeling — our sense of the myste
rious. It is the object or reality which awakens this feeling.' But
if the object is entirely unknown it cannot present itself in con
sciousness nor awaken the sense of the mysterious. In fact, a
mystery, in its very essence as such, implies knowledge of the
mysterious object. It implies knowledge of the object as ex
isting, and some knowledge of what it is, and the knowledge
of limitations which at present the person cannot transcend.
The fact that I ask questions which I cannot answer implies posi
tive knowledge of the object. I cannot ask questions about that
of which I have no knowledge. Ignorance itself implies knowl
edge. I can be conscious of ignorance only as I am conscious ot
knowledge arid conscious that the knowledge is limited. Accord
ingly all the reasoning of Spencerian agnostics about the Un
knowable implicitly assumes a knowledge of the Unknowable.
In the solar spectrum there is always an invisible actinic ray be
yond the visible light. . The knowledge of the mysterious and
incomprehensible is the actinic ray in all knowledge. I must
know something of a being in order to know that it is incompre
hensible.1 While we have positive knowledge of the mysterious
object, we are conscious of limits to our knowledge beyond
which at present we cannot pass.
An object is not a mystery because it is inconceivable, that is,
not capable of being pictured in the imagination, provided it can
be apprehended in thought. Such, for example, are abstract
general notions, as humanity, virtue, color. They are clearly
apprehended in thought, but they are inconceivable in the sense
that they cannot be pictured in the imagination as abstract, but
only as some quality, power, or other mode of existence of a
being. A large part of the reasoning of agnostics is fallacious
through overlooking this simple distinction and confounding the
inconceivable with the unknowable.
The consciousness of mere ignorance or limitation of knowl-
1 In the Unitarian controversy a mystery was often defined as a proposi
tion stated in unintelligible terms. It was said, " A mystery is a proposition
stated in terms to which no distinct ideas are annexed." This is simply
saying that a mystery is jargon. But jargon cannot be a mystery, for the
very reason that it conveys no idea to the mind. — " Yates' Reply to Ward-
law," pp. 45, 142-145.

THEODICY: —THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 28 1
edge does not necessarily imply a mystery. I may be ignorant
who lives in a house across the street. But it is not a mystery,
because I can find out by looking in the directory. A mystery
implies a consciousness of limitation of knowledge which, in the
use of all accessible means of knowledge, cannot be removed.
An object may be a mystery in this sense because it can be but
partially observed, or because, while known as a fact by observa
tion, it is inexplicable, — that is, it cannot be accounted for by
ascertaining its cause, or its rational significance, law, or end.
Thus, realities known indisputably as facts may present apparent
contradictions. The ancients, supposing the earth to be flat and
the tendency of all things to be downward, believed the existence
of antipodes to be absurd and impossible. A child, as it rides
along, wonders that the rising moon accompanies it. The axis
of the earth, while never changing its inclination, always points
to the North Star, though at the summer solstice it is more than
180,000,000 of miles from its position six months before. These
are not only mysteries but absurdities, the facts being as supposed.
The more complete knowledge of the facts removes both the
apparent absurdity and the mystery. The mystery of one gener
ation is removed by the science of the next. In the progress of
knowledge the line of the mysterious recedes and the area of
clear knowledge becomes larger. Science rests on the axiom
that whatever is real in the finite universe which science investi
gates is intelligible and explicable to the reason. It only needs
further opportunity for observation, or greater intellectual resources
and powers to know and explain them. In the night the whole
world seems buried in darkness. But the darkness is but the
conical shadow of the earth projected into the all-encompassing
light. God, as the absolute Being, must always transcend human
knowledge ; yet, as the absolute Spirit, he is knowable, and finite
minds may be always advancing in the knowledge of him. A mys
tery, therefore, is always an object known, but with the conscious
ness of limits which, with our present opportunities, resources, and
powers, we cannot transcend. Both of these elements of the
mysterious in our knowledge of God are expressed in lines of the
Russian poet Derzhavin, translated by Sir John Bowring. It is
said that they have been translated also into Chinese, Japanese,
Persian, Arabic, Greek, Italian, and German.

282 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
" O Thou Eternal One, whose presence bright
All space doth occupy, all motions guide,
Unchanged through time's all-devastating flight !
Thou only God ; there is no God beside !
Being above all beings ! Mighty One,
Whom none can comprehend and none explore,
Who fill'st existence with thyself alone,
Embracing all, supporting, ruling o'er,
Being whom we call God, and know no more . . .
God ! thus alone my lowly thoughts can soar,
Midst thy vast works admire, obey, adore ;
And when the tongue is eloquent no more,
The soul shall speak in tears of gratitude."
3. Because God is the absolute Being, every true revelation of
him as Spirit must reveal also the mystery of his being as the
absolute. Agnosticism fancies that because God is a mystery he
cannot be known ; anthropomorphism fancies that because God
is known he cannot be a mystery. But a revelation without
mystery would be a God revealed away, and therefore no God.
To every finite mind the knowledge of God shines on a back
ground of mystery, like lightning on the blackness of a cloud.
This is true of God's revelation of himself in nature and in man.
The lily is clothed with mystery not less than with beauty. Every
pebble, every blade of grass, every insect, brings us, as we investi
gate it, to questions which man cannot answer, which carry our
thought to the absolute and the infinite. Consciousness can take
no cognizance of its own origin, and thought can give no proof
of the ultimate principles by which all thinking is regulated.
Both the beginning and the end of the thread of man's conscious
ness are beyond his grasp. Thus all things go out into mystery,
and therein all things reveal the absolute Being, and this is God.
And no enlargement of the revelation can clear away the
mystery. Because it is the absolute Being that is revealed, the
more fully he is revealed the more fully must we see the mystery
pf the absolute Being. Because it is the finite in which he
reveals himself, the finite can never be commensurate with the
infinite and the completed revelation of it. Because it is finite
minds to whom God reveals himself, the revelation must be com
mensurate with the capacity of the recipient, and the apprehen
sion of God by a finite mind can never be the full comprehension
of him. Therefore no enlargement of the revelation can clear it
of mystery. God's progressive revelation of himself, however far

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 283
it may be advanced, must always be the revelation of himself as
the absolute Being transcending all finite media of revelation and
the largest capacity of a finite mind. " Canst thou by searching
find out God ? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection ?
It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than Sheol;
what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the
earth, and broader than the sea" (Job xi. 7-9).
On the contrary, the greater the revelation, the greater the
consciousness of the mystery revealed. Science aims to clear
from obscurity an area of knowledge. But the larger the clear
area, the larger the horizon of the unknown which bounds it.
The telescope penetrates the depths of space and reveals to
scientific knowledge innumerable suns and systems. But the
extension of knowledge multiplies the questions which we must
ask but cannot answer — questions which could not have been
asked when the firmament was only an expanse dotted with shining
spangles. The microscope reveals the invisible ; chemistry dis
closes the molecular constitution of bodies. But the unanswered
questions are multiplied, questions which could not have been
asked when there were supposed to be but four elements, fire,
air, earth, and water. It is like entering a spacious hall with
locked doors on every side which we long to enter. If one is
opened we find another more spacious hall with its locked doors.
As the ancients imagined the earth to be flat and surrounded by
an ocean overhung with everlasting darkness, the sphere of human
knowledge is encircled on every side by the unknowable, whose
waves we hear rolling beneath the impenetrable night. And
human knowledge is thus encompassed by the darkness visi
ble of conscious ignorance, because the universe is embosomed
in the absolute Reason, whose eternal light, broken and reflected
in the finite universe, reveals him to us, but, in its infinite, un
broken, and all-encompassing brightness, blinds us with excess
of light.
The same principle is exemplified in the revelation of God in
Christ. A recent writer carries his anthropomorphism so far that
he says Christ never presented truth transcending the limits of
the human mind. He quotes our Lord's words on the new birth,
in the third chapter of John, as exemplifying this transparent
simplicity. But this very declaration of Jesus was a mystery
to Nicodemus. And Jesus, as if laying the foundation of the

284 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Baconian philosophy, rebukes Nicodemus because he does not
first ascertain the fact before objecting to it that he does not see
the how, the why, and the wherefore of it ; and he enforces his
rebuke by referring to the undisputed fact of the changes ofthe
wind, which at that day were entirely inexplicable. While no
revealer of God ever disclosed to human view vistas opening so
widely and so far into the grandeur and glory of the divine as are
disclosed in the life and teaching of Jesus, certainly no one has
revealed more of the mystery of God which encompasses and
transcends those opening vistas. His revelations awaken innu
merable questions which a fetichist or a polytheist could never
have asked.
In this sense it is always true that the more a man knows the
more conscious he is of his ignorance. It is not that he believes
that he has less knowledge, for he knows that his knowledge is
increased. It means only that by the increase of his knowledge
the horizon of the visible unknown is enlarged, and the points of
as yet unsatisfied inquiry and investigation multiplied.
It follows that any alleged revelation of God or any system of
theology which makes its boast that it is free from mystery is
thereby proved not to be true. If revelation is a chain let down
from the throne of God, it must ascend beyond my reach and
sight. If I can see and handle it up to the staple in the beam
on which it hangs, I know it does not descend from the throne
of God. If I can dip up the whole of a quantity of water in a
tea-cup, it proves that the water is not the ocean. If I can fully
comprehend in my finite mind a God revealed, it proves that it is
not a revelation of the true God. Any professed revelation of God
which boasts that it prunes away all mystery, and teaches only
what is level to human capacity and transparent to the human
mind, is by that fact proved to be not a revelation of the true
God. It is a God whom I can handle and turn over in my own
mind and look at on every side, as I might a statue of Apollo.
It is an idol, an image created by my mind, if not graven by my
hand. In this sense, and not in the sense of agnosticism, are the say
ings true : " A God understood would be no God " ; " To think
that God is as I can think him to be is blasphemy"; "The last
and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar to
The Unknown God."

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 285
4. While God as the absolute Being is the greatest of ail mys
teries, as the absolute Spirit in whom reason is eternal he is the
solution of all. God cannot be accounted for by reference to
any cause, nor explained by relation to any being or to any
rational principle, law, or end, independent of himself. He is
utterly inexplicable. But he is himself the absolute Spirit, the
eternal Reason, the source of all causal energy and of all prin
ciples, laws, perfection, and good. Thus he accounts for and
explains all things. God is light, and in him is no darkness at
all. Light cannot be illuminated, but it illuminates all things.
Physical science, as it pushes its investigations to the utmost,
finds itself confronted with questions which it cannot answer,
with breaks in the law of continuity which it cannot bridge, and
even with seeming contradictions which it cannot resolve. It is
only as it recognizes that the universe is grounded in the abso
lute Reason, ever immanent and energizing in it, that its ultimate
questions can be answered, its law of continuity preserved, its
fundamental axioms justified, and its seeming contradictions
resolved. Philosophical science also issues in contradictions or
antinomies if there is no God. Here, also, if God, the absolute
Reason, is immanent and active in the universe, the contradic
tions are resolved into complemental truths. Thus the very
existence of empirical and philosophical science rests on the
existence of God, the absolute Reason, and his progressive revela
tion of his eternal and archetypal thought in it. " The earth was
without form, and void ; and darkness was on the face of the deep."
And God said, Let light be, and light was. And it is only be
cause he speaks his all-creating and all-ordering word that light
and order have appeared, that the universe is the expression of
the thought of perfect reason, and so is capable of being com
prehended in science, and that thus, instead of chaos, we have a
cosmos. Clouds and darkness are round about him, but they
are gathered up from the face of the universe, leaving it in light.
5. The revelation of the mystery of the divine Being is essen
tial to the religious or spiritual life and its practical efficiency in
renovating mankind.
The revelation of this mystery is itself the revelation of God as
the absolute Being. An essential element of religion is a con
sciousness, however inadequate, of the absolute Being and of
having to do with him. It is a consciousness of the mystery

286 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
behind all phenomena, and revealing itself in them. The object
of religious faith is not the material world, it is not man, it is not
the universe. It is the Power behind them all, and revealed in
them all. It is the absolute Power, revealed also as the absolute
Reason, as the absolute and eternal Life, Wisdom, and Love.
And because the absolute transcends the finite it must always be
a mystery to a finite mind. If man's knowledge cannot reach
above the finite, if there is no Power, no rational Spirit, no Wis
dom and Love, above the fixed course of nature and the finite
ness of man, then man is incapable of religion. Then there is
nothing by which he can lift himself above the finite and the trans
itory and connect himself and his destiny with the Absolute, the
All-perfect, and the Eternal. Then he cannot know himself in
his true greatness as a rational and free child of God. He can
not know the true ideal of his own perfection and well-being, and
must forever fail to realize it. It is of the essence of religion
that the man recognize his connection with that which transcends
the finite ; that he know his life, his duty, and his privilege, as in
communication with God and participating in the Life, the
Light, and the Love which are in him, and from him are im
parted to men. Otherwise the man, in the world but without
hope, finds himself, as Hegel says, stranded "on the sand-bank
of the temporal." L And whatever is substituted as the object of
a proposed religion without God, the absolute Being, is itself
finite, and cannot lift the soul on the waters of eternal life, which
flow only from the sanctuary of God.
The revelation of the mystery of God brings home to our
consciousness the fact that, however near to us God may be,
however gracious, to whatever intimacy with himself he may
admit us, he is not altogether such a one as ourselves, but is
the absolute Being, transcending us and the universe in his
incomprehensible greatness. The revelation of mystery keeps
fresh within us the consciousness that we are related to some
thing above the earthly, the material and the finite, that our
lives are lifted above sense into fellowship with the eternal, the
infinite, the divine. It is often said that ignorance is the mother
of devotion. But the wonder of knowledge is greater than the
wonder of ignorance. It is the presence of mystery, ever
greatening in the background of our ever greatening knowledge
1 Phil, der Religion, Einleitung.

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 287
which keeps the religious consciousness alive, nourishes peren
nially the awe and reverence which are essential elements of
religion, and makes men always aware of their relations and
obligations to God. Great mysteries are like the great moun
tains, so high that the foot of man never trod their shining
summits and the very attempt to climb their precipitous and
icy sides is full of peril. But for the very reason that they are
so high they condense the moisture of the heavens and pour it
forth in springs and streams which make the earth inhabitable by
man. So the springs of religious and spiritual influences, which
with living water flow forth in humanity to everlasting life, arise
in the mountain mystery of God, whose summit speculative
thought strives in vain and with peril to surmount. The com
plaint that the revelation of God is full of mystery is analogous
to the complaint that so large a part of the earth is occupied by
barren and uninhabitable mountains. If the mountains and
hills were all sunk to a plain the earth would become one vast
uninhabitable swamp. And if there were no mystery towering
above the finite to the eternal and the absolute, human life,
unable to lift itself to the divine, would sink into a morass of
sensuousness and bestiality.
6. It is possible for man to be forever advancing in the knowl
edge of God and receptive of his progressive revelation of
himself. While the knowledge of God as the absolute by a
finite person must always be bounded by a horizon of mystery,
God's revelation of himself as the absolute Spirit and man's
knowledge of him thereby may be always progressive. A finite
man can never comprehend the infinite God to perfection. But
God is continually revealing himself more and more in nature
and in man, in Christ, his Spirit, and his kingdom ; and man
is evermore in the process of education and development to a
larger capacity and a more full acquaintance with God. And
this progressive revelation and knowledge may go on forever.
Humboldt describes the delight with which he first saw the
Southern Cross rising above the horizon. Archimedes shouted
with exultation when he discovered the method of ascertaining
specific gravity. Kepler uttered the solemn ecstasy with which
in his discoveries he read God's thoughts after him. Luther
leaped with joy when, climbing on his knees Pilate's stairs, the
saving truth of justification by faith flashed on him. So, through

288 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
all the future, new truths may be rising above the horizon and
taking their places in the firmament of thought ; new discoveries
of God's wisdom in the physical system may thrill the soul ; and
new insight may be given into the breadth and length and
height and depth of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.
In walking or riding one receives continually a gentle stimulus
and pleasure from the new scenes as they are continuously
coming into view. So, in the future life, joy may be perpetually
welling up as new glories successively present themselves in our
endless progress. And we may anticipate a higher strain of life
there. Ecstasy, experienced here only on rare and great occa
sions, and which the human body could not continuously support,
may be the common tone of the blessedness of that life, and
the ecstasy of its sublimer epochs such as we cannot now
conceive. 7. We may, therefore, maintain equanimity and peace of mind
in the presence of the mystery inseparable from our knowledge
of God in his transcendence as absolute Being, and may use
the clear knowledge of him, which we have through his revela
tion of himself as Spirit, in the practical work of the life of
Christlike love, seeking to advance the kingdom of God both in
extent throughout the world and in intensity in the more full
development of the spiritual life of universal love both in the
individual and in society.
This does not mean that we are to cease from all endeavor to
increase our knowledge of God or to correct prevalent errors.
On the contrary, we have seen that the fact that God always
transcends the limits of our finite knowledge opens to us the
prospect of endless progress in the knowledge of him and of his
revelation of himself in his never-ceasing action in the universe.
It meets us always with our Saviour's words, " What I do thou
knowest not now, but thou shalt understand hereafter. I have
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.
Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you
into all the truth." Therefore in the face of questions which
we cannot answer, and doubts and difficulties which as yet
we cannot resolve, we may retain cur equanimity in the assur
ance of truth to be discovered as well as of truth already known.
Here we meet the error that the progressiveness of theological
belief is incompatible with the reality of knowledge. The open

THEODICY: — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 289
mind seeking truth and welcoming every new discovery of it is
often so described as to imply that all belief is uncertain, and
that real knowledge is impossible. Even Christian writers,
defending the progressiveness of theology, sometimes use lan
guage implying that no questions can ever be finally settled,
and that any fixed belief is unjustifiable and real knowledge
impossible. For example, a prominent religious journal, in a
recent number, says : " If there is to be no dead line in life,
there must be no closing of the mind, no day when we shall stop
and say of any position which we have taken or any method
which we have adopted, This is final ; nothing shall induce me
to change it." We ask with astonishment, May we not say it is
finally settled that two and two make four, that the three angles of
a triangle are equal to two right angles, that the laws of con
tinuity, uniformity, and non-contradiction on which all science
rests are true, that the law of gravitation is established, that the
law of love will never be annulled? And yet all this is certainly
implied in the sentence quoted. It plainly teaches universal
skepticism. The progress of knowledge does not annul our
knowledge ; it only clarifies and enlarges it. x
But when once it is admitted that real knowledge is possible
to man, then no limits can be assigned a priori to the amount of
knowledge attainable by him in the progressive acquisitions of
successive generations, or by the individual in his progress in the
life immortal. And we may reasonably suppose that the Chris
tian has attained real knowledge of the God in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself; that in the life, the intellectual activity,
and the practical experience and work of the church through the
ages, guided and quickened by the continuous influence of God's
Spirit, the Christian may consider some truths established on
which he can rest his whole character, conduct, and destiny, to
the propagation of which and their application to life he gladly
and undoubtingly consecrates all his energies, in faith in which
he expects to die in peace and to enter the life eternal, and for
the maintenance of which, if necessary, he would willingly give
up his life. And to the Christian such a faith is not merely the
result of testimony or of reasoning, but of experience in com
munion with God. So John teaches : " And as for you, the
anointing which ye received from him abideth in you, and ye
1 See " Philosophical Basis of Theism," pp. 36-43.
vol. I. — 19

290 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
need not that any one teach you ; but as his anointing teacheth
you concerning all things, and is true, and is no lie, and even as
it taught you, ye abide in him" (i John ii. 27). But a per
son who is living in supreme selfishness, closes his soul against
God's Spirit, and refuses and shuts out the divine influence. He
therefore cannot be " taught of God." He even " cannot see
the kingdom of God."
Therefore, in the progress of Christian knowledge the change
is not in our belief in the existence of God perfect in wisdom
and love, in the facts of sin and of God's redeeming grace in
Christ, the forgiveness of sin, the continued presence and influence
of God's Spirit, the kingdom of Christ on earth, and other facts
and truths essential to the Christian life. The change is in the
clearness and fulness of the apprehension of these facts and
truths in their real significance, in the formulating of them in
words, in the attempts to account for and explain them philo
sophically, in the relative emphasis put upon them, in the per
ception of their harmony and unity in a system, in the application
of them to the varying conditions of society and the advance of
civilization, in the enlargement of scientific, historical, and philo
sophical knowledge, opening new aspects of the significance of
God's revelation of himself and of his relations to man and to
the universe ; and all this under the continued illumination and
quickening by the Holy Spirit. God is the same. But both his
revelation of himself and man's understanding of it are progressive.
Skepticism in its better meaning is simply the spirit of inquiry.
This is always active in the right-minded Christian eager to in
crease his knowledge of God. But it must not displace, it must
brighten and intensify, that fixed faith in the God in Christ which
is the only true spring of Christian hope, enthusiasm and energy.
Skepticism criticises, questions, and doubts. Faith believes, em
boldens, inspires, enkindles to energy. All great epochs are
epochs, not of criticism, doubt, and negation, but of overcom
ing faith. But when energy is enfeebled, when eagerness for
knowledge has ceased, when utterance has degenerated into cant
and service into formalism, when the Christian life has sunk
into " the muddy pools of tradition and conformity," already
mantling with the greenness of stagnation, then it is the function
of skepticism, the spirit of inquiry, to search for what has
stopped the flow of living water, to seek anew for its hidden

THEODICY: —THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 29 1
springs and to open them that from them it may spring up anew
unto eternal life (John iv. 14) ; as Isaac opened the wells of his
father Abraham, which the Philistines had filled up with earth.
Therefore it is evident that there is no force in the common
objection that because God has made a revelation of himself,
that revelation must be an impassable barrier against all progress in
theological knowledge. The progress is in ascertaining more and
more what God is as thus revealed, and what are his real relations
to the universe, and especially to man. The sun, the planets, the
stars, and the earth have been revealing themselves to man from
the beginning. But his progress in apprehending what they are
as revealed has been exceedingly slow. Much more may his
knowledge of what God is as revealed be progressive. And not
only is man's knowledge progressive in comprehending the sig
nificance and applications of God's revelation after it is made,
but also God's revelation of himself is itself progressive in his
action in the course of human history redeeming man from sin
and establishing his kingdom of righteousness and good-will, —
action culminating in Christ and continued through all subsequent
generations of men in the Holy Spirit abiding with men as a
power of illumination, renovation, and spiritual development. The
significance of such a revelation may well be studied from genera
tion to generation without exhausting all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge which are hid in Christ. It must be added that God's
peculiar and pre-eminent revelation of himself, in bringing in
the Christ and the redemption of men, and perpetuated in the Holy
Spirit, was accompanied throughout, and, as it were, encompassed
by his broader but less clear and full revelation of himself in the
constitution and evolution of the universe and in the constitution
of man and his history outside of that recorded in the Bible.
Nor did this revelation cease when Christ came, but it went on as
it had done from the beginning. But since Christ came it has
attracted less attention, as the moon and stars shine, though
little noticed, in the daylight of the sun. Therefore it is not
surprising that the increasing knowledge of the constitution and
evolution of the physical system and of the constitution and his
tory of man adds to our knowledge of God and his relation to
the universe, and helps us better to understand the significance
of God's revelation of himself in Christ. Of this a striking
exemplification is found in reading the Hexaeraeron of Basil the

292 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Great — homilies on the account of the creation of the universe
in the first chapter of Genesis, written in accordance with the
best science of the time — and the treatment of the same subject
in the light of modern science.
Since we have positive though incomplete knowledge of God,
we should use that knowledge in the practical work of life ; we
should not waste our strength in fruitless speculation about
mysteries which we are unable to solve. We can use the daylight
though we cannot gaze on the sun. It is useless to stand pre
cariously on the slippery rocks of the sea-shore, straining our eyes
upon the misty ocean and lamenting that the continent is hemmed
in by surging waters, while inland are the fertile fields and the
happy homes of men. Equally futile is it to neglect the practical
work and blessedness of the Christian life and waste our strength
in waiting till by speculative thinking we can penetrate the
mysteries of God which encompass us, and answer every per
plexing question. This restlessness under the essential limits of
our being are not marks of greatness of mind. The real strength
is shown when before the mystery of God we have learned to be
ignorant with equanimity. And it is by using our knowledge in
the, practical work of Christian love and service, that we gain
larger and clearer knowledge of God. " If any man willeth to do
his will, he shall know of the teaching whether it be of God."
" He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love." We
study most effectively when we turn truth into life. We advance
most rapidly and broadly in the knowledge of God when we seek
it as the guide of life and the revelation of the divine and gracious
power which is to renovate the world and to transform society
into the kingdom of Christ. Then we discover the hidden
treasures of wisdom and knowledge which we are to use in our
Christian work in advancing his kingdom, and find ourselves able
to "do all things through Christ who strengtheneth us." Then in
the presence of the impenetrable mystery, where we cannot know,
we trust and adore, assured that the mystery is but the covering
of wisdom and love which are to be revealed in their season.
Thus restlessness, impatience and despair, in view of our limi
tations, cease, and we rest and are at peace in the consciousness
of God's all-encompassing love, knowing —
" That every cloud that spreads above
And veileth love, itself is love."

THEODICY : — THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN 293
According!)- Richard Baxter says : " Avoid disputes about
lesser truths and a religion that lies only in opinions. They are
usually least acquainted with a heavenly life who are violent dis-
puters about the circumstantials of religion. He whose religion
is all in his opinions will be most frequently and zealously speak
ing his opinions; and he whose religion lies in his knowl
edge and love of Christ will be most delightfully speaking of
that happy time when he shall enjoy them. He is a rare and
precious Christian who is skilful to improve well-known truths.
Therefore, let me advise you who aspire after a heavenly life, not
to spend too much of your thoughts, your time, your zeal, or your
speech upon disputes that less concern your souls ; but when
hypocrites are feeding on husks and shells, do you feed on the
joys above. I would have the chief truths to be chiefly studied,
and none to cast out your thought of eternity."
The conclusion must be that objections founded on ignorance
are of no validity against evidence founded on knowledge ; objec
tions founded on the limitation of knowledge are of no validity
against the knowledge. If we study a blade of grass or a grain
of sand, we come to questions which we cannot answer, to reali
ties which we cannot explore. All human knowledge abuts on
the unknown ; knowledge of the unknown can be attained only
as we reach it from reality already known. Often a doubt or
objection may be removed by ceasing to think about it and
attending to the work of the life of Christian love. Then, in the
enlargement of knowledge, and in the process of intellectual and
spiritual growth and development, you outgrow it ; when you look
for it again you see beyond and around it, and the doubt or diffi
culty is gone. The habit of dwelling on doubts, objections, and
negations in any sphere of knowledge closes the shutters of the
mind, excludes the light of truth, checks intellectual, moral and
spiritual growth, and tends to universal skepticism as its legitimate
issue. A small coin held close to the eye, shuts out the whole
landscape, and a petty objection continuously dwelt on may shut
out the vision of God.

CHAPTER VIII
THE TRINITY : — THE BIBLICAL REPRESENTATION IN THE REVELATION
OF GOD IN CHRIST
Attempts to define and formulate the doctrines of the person
of Christ and of the Trinity began very early in the Christian
churches ; and from that time till now controversies on questions
pertaining to these subjects have been of frequent occurrence
and long continuance. Usually, however, these have not been
discussions of the elements of these doctrines as set forth by
Christ and his apostles in their practical bearing on the religious
and spiritual life, but of attempted metaphysical and ontological
definitions of the internal constitution of God and of the union of
the divine and human in the person of Christ. In marked con
trast with this we find that, through it all, the Christian faith in the
God in Christ and in the Trinity as revealed in the Bible to the re
ligious consciousness, is constant, persistent, and effective, quicken
ing and inspiring the highest spiritual life. These contrasted facts
force on us several important practical conclusions which we must
note in the outset and accept as guides in all our investigations.
The conception of God and of his relation to man and the
universe involved in the Trinity and in the God in Christ recon
ciling the world unto himself, as presented in the Bible and
received in the religious consciousness of men, carries in it
peculiar elements of truth and spiritual power. During all the
centuries since Christ, God as thus revealed has been the com
mon object of Christian faith, worship and service and the
vitalizing and sustaining power of the Christian life. This con
ception of God and of his relations to man is distinctive of
Christianity. As Neander says of the Trinity, as presupposed in
the fundamental fact that God was in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself: "We recognize therein the essential con
tents of Christianity summed up in brief." x It is a necessary
1 History of the Christian Religion and Church ; Torrey's trans., vol. i.
p. 572.

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 295
conclusion that, whatever may be the speculative difficulties in
formulating the doctrine, there are in it elements of truth and
reality indispensable to the distinctive and pre-eminent spiritual
power of Christianity and thus essential in the conception of God,
the most worthy in itself and the most effective in renovating
man and in quickening and developing the spiritual life of faith
and love, which the human mind has ever attained.
It is equally necessary to conclude that it is a waste of intel
lect to attempt to pass beyond the line which divides the finite
from the absolute and infinite, and from that transcendent posi
tion to define metaphysically the exact mode of God's eternal
and absolute being within himself, further than he has made him
self known to us in his action. It is an attempt to transcend
ourselves. The controversies incident to such attempts have
sometimes been marked with great bitterness and have often
degenerated into logomachy. John C. Doederlein, as he opens
this topic in his " Institutio Theologiae Christianse " [A. D. 1780],
says : " We have reached a field which we have long been
dreading, ample for crops, yet sown and tangled with briers the
seeds of which have been sown broadcast by the fruitful ingenuity
of theologians and nourished by the heats of councils and synods
mingled with the tempests of anathemas; crops which many
good men seem to think ought to be cut down, or, if the sacred
thicket must be spared, abandoned to theologians to cultivate
it." He says the metaphysical refinements as to the constitution
of the person of Christ were fit machinations to create heresies,
and felicitates antiquity, when " the fowlers after heresies were
not yet on the watch to shoot the unwary." x It is reasonable to
suppose it settled by the long and weary history of these con
troversies, that it transcends the powers of the human mind to
construct, beyond God's clear revelation of himself, an exact and
all-comprehending formula of his internal constitution, of the
mode of his existence therein, or of the union of the divine and
the human in the God in Christ, the Word that became flesh and
tabernacled among us. The witty Dr. Robert South says, in a
sermon on the Trinity: "As he that denies it may lose his
soul; so he that too much strives to understand it may lose his
' wits." a 1 Vol. ii. pp. 333, 332, 240.
2 Works, vol. ii. p. 184, Ed. Philadelphia, 1844.

296 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Theologians are not to be blamed for entering on these
investigations. Man as a rational being must use his reason.
He must think and try to attain clear ideas ; he must examine in
the light of reason whatever he is asked to believe, and test it by
rational truths, laws, ideals, and ends ; he must ascertain the
limits of the human mind, learn what is revealed of God and
where are the impassable barriers beyond which it is useless to
attempt to pass. When God had made his great revelation of
himself in Christ, neglect to study it and to learn all which can
be known of God through it would have been dishonoring both
God and his revelation, and man and the reason with which God
has endowed him. Rightly, therefore, the searchers after God
"went sounding on their dim and perilous way" among the nar
rows and the shallows of the finite to find channels through which
they could safely navigate out into the ocean of God's infinitude.
They have thus indicated as on a chart the reefs barring all pas
sage and the seemingly open straits which end without an outlet.
If their successors have erred,' it has been in not noting their
discoveries, and in trying anew the reefs and inlets which again
and again have been found impassable. Mystery must always lie
all along the line at which the absolute and infinite reveals itself
in the finite.
From the history of thought on this subject we learn another
principle to guide in our investigations : that in seeking to know
God in Christ and as the Trinity we must follow the order of his
revelation of himself in Christ as recorded in the Bible. We
must begin with the elements of these doctrines not reduced to
formulas and system ; we must receive them in their practical,
moral, and spiritual significance ; we must know them by expe
riencing their light, warmth, and vitalizing power in our own
hearts and lives. Then as rational beings we should trace them
back as far as we can into the heart and mind of God and thus
ascertain all that God in them has revealed himself to be in him
self and in his relation to man. This is the way in which God
historically revealed himself in Christ and as the Trinity. This
is the way in which the Church first studied the revelation and
learned its significance — the only way in which we can know all
that can be known of God as thus revealed.
The history of Christian thought shows also that the great
objection urged against these doctrines is not that they are

THE TRINITY : — REVELATION OF GOD IN* CHRIST 297
unscriptural, but that they are unreasonable. Certainly we cannot
accept, on the authority of a supposed revelation of God, any
doctrine which contradicts the necessary principles and laws of
reason, or which is incompatible with the universal law of love.
We therefore remove the most important objections against these
doctrines when we show that speculative opinions on which these
objections rest are not essential to the doctrines, and that there is
nothing in the doctrines, rightly understood, which is either
absurd or contrary to the moral law. In fact, it is the revelation
of God set forth in these doctrines which gives us the deepest,
clearest, and largest insight into his being, and his relations to
man and the universe. For this very reason it, more than any
other revelation, enlarges the horizon of the unknowable which
bounds our vision, and opens to our view the grandeur and
mystery of God as the absolute Being.
The history also establishes the fact that the Christian church
has always embraced in its fellowship theologians, preachers, and
other thinkers differing in the formulation of their answers to
speculative questions pertaining to the Trinity and the God in
Christ, and in the reasons in support of the answers. Similar
comprehensiveness is essential in all ages to the growth, harmony,
and efficiency of the Christian church.
God is most clearly revealed as the Trinity in Christ and the
redemption of men from sin through him. Therefore, in systems
of theology the consideration of the doctrine is sometimes made
introductory to the part treating distinctively of redemption.
But the conception of God in Christ and as the Trinity is the
Christian conception as distinguished from all polytheistic, pan
theistic, deistic, and Mohammedan conceptions of him and of his
relations to the universe. It necessarily modifies all theological
doctrines. Therefore, it must be considered in the First Part of
Doctrinal Theology, which presents the doctrine of God. This is
necessary also, because in this Christian conception we have the
most complete knowledge of God.
I shall first ascertain the scriptural elements of these doctrines
and combine them into a unity of thought ; then I shall consider
their reasonableness and their practical significance.1
1 The plan of this work does not permit a complete exhibition of the
scriptural evidence, nor of the detailed processes of interpretation. This
would require a volume entirely devoted to the subject. For the same

298 GOD,* THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
In Christ and his work of redemption God makes the clearest
and fullest revelation of himself as the Trinity. We must begin
with answering the question, "What think ye of Christ?" in
order to answer intelligently what we think of God.
I. The Son of Man. — In the four gospels the phrase, " Son
of man," used by Jesus to designate himself, appears seventy-
eight times.1 In the gospels there is no record of the application
of this title to him by any disciple ; and in the other apostolic
writings it is found only in the words of Stephen immediately
before his martyrdom, and in two passages in the Revelation.
These remarkable facts indicate that the disciples were so im
pressed with something above humanity in Jesus while he lived,
and with his heavenly majesty after his ascension, that they could
not call him by this name ; and that Jesus used it so freely to
emphasize his real humanity, and perhaps also to intimate that he
is by pre-eminence the man, — the Head of the new humanity,
of men who, being born anew in a spiritual birth, become sons of
God, are united in his kingdom, and realize the ideal perfection
of their being.
In his life and death, as recorded in the gospels, he manifests all
the common qualities of human nature, " yet without sin." Even
after his ascension he is called man emphatically with reference to
his redemptive work : " One mediator between God and man,
himself man, Christ Jesus " ; " God will judge the world in
righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained " ; " In all
things made like unto his brethren ; tempted in all points like as

II. Pre-Existence and Humiliation. — A being is revealed
in the Christ who had existed before his appearance in human
form on earth. Jesus asserts that he had existed " before the
world was." He says : " Before Abraham was, I am." His
history shows that he was intimately acquainted with the Old
reason, in presenting the scriptural evidence, I adopt the topical method of
systematic theology which concentrates on each topic the light from all
sources, rather than the historical method of biblical theology which follows
the historical progress of the revelation. And I shall not attempt a full pre
sentation and exposition of the biblical teaching on the subject.
1 See Thayer's " Grimm's Lexicon of the New Testament."
2 1 Tim. ii. 5; Acts xvii. 31 ; Heb. ii. 17, and iv. 15.

THE TRINITY : — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 299
Testament, and deeply imbued with its spirit of reverence for
God. Yet here he appropriates to himself the sublime name, I
AM, by which Jehovah revealed himself to Moses. In this state
preceding his earthly life he existed in glory with the Father. In
prayer to God, Jesus himself speaks of " the glory which I had
with thee before the world was." From this state of glory he
humbled himself, and in Christ was revealed as the Son of man.
Jesus said : " He that descended out of heaven, even the son of
man who is in heaven." John says that the Word which was in
the beginning with God, and which was God, " became flesh and
dwelt (or tabernacled) among us." Paul describes it more fully :
" Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, counted it not a
prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking
the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men ; and
being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming
obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross." Here, in
coming into humanity, he emptied himself; and after becoming
man he humbled himself still further in obedience to God, even
unto the death of the cross. Every man must die. Jesus is the
only man who ever lived of whom it could be properly said that
he humbled himself in becoming man and being obedient unto
death. In allusion to this same emptying and humbling of him
self Paul also says : " Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he
became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich." x
III. God in Christ. — The being who, in Christ, was mani
fested in the flesh, is God.
1. Names and titles of God are ascribed to him. In the first
chapter of his gospel John declares that the Word, who became
flesh, was in the beginning, was with God and was God. He
emphasizes this by affirming, positively, that all things were made
by him, and, negatively, that without him was not anything made
that has been made ; that in him was life, and the life was the
light of men ; and that in him of whom John the Baptist testified,
the true light which lighteth every man was coming into the
world. In the beginning of his first epistle he announces as his
subject the Word of life. He proceeds to unfold the divine life
and light and love flowing forth from him into humanity, and par-
1 John viii. 58 ; xvii. 5 ; iii. 13 ; i. 1, 14 ; Phil. ii. 5-8; 2 Cor. viii. 9 ; also
John vi. 62 ; viii. 14, 23 ; xvi. 28 ; xvii. 24.

300 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
ticipated in by men, whereby their fellowship is with the father,
and with his son, Jesus Christ. Then he closes with the declara
tion : " This is the true God and eternal life." Years before
writing his gospel, John, in apocalyptic vision, had seen the Lord
Christ issuing from the open heaven with the hosts of his
redeemed, and records that " his name is called the Word of
God." This proves that 'John did not derive his idea of the
Logos, or Word of God, after going to Ephesus, from the Greek
philosophy of Alexandria. And in the first chapter of the Reve
lation he gives us the words of the glorified Christ : " I am the
Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the
Lord, who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty."
And Paul says of Christ : " who is over all God blessed forever " ;
and he declares that the essence of the gospel to be preached by
those to whom God has given the ministry of reconciliation is,
" that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." x
To these may be added the words of Paul : " The blessed
hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour
Jesus Christ." This rendering in the version of 1881 is required
by Greek usage ; and is accordant with the apostle's use of the
word " appearing," which he uses elsewhere to denote the ex
pected second coming of the Lord. In like manner Peter speaks
of " the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ." 2
That God is in Christ, is implied also in his own expressions of
intimacy and union with the Father : " I and the Father are
one " ; "I am in the Father, and the Father in me." s
2. That God was in Christ, manifested, in the flesh, is evi
dent from the fact that works distinctive of God are ascribed
to him.
Remarkable are Christ's own assertion and his reiteration and
vindication of it against the Jews, recorded in the fifth chapter of
John. At Bethesda, on the Sabbath, Jesus had healed a man who
had been diseased thirty-eight years. Therefore the Jews perse
cuted him, declaring that he had violated the law. But Jesus
justified his doing it by saying : " My Father worketh even until
now, and I work." That is, my Father does not suspend his
working on the Sabbath ; no more do I. The Jews then charged
1 Rev. xix. 13; Rom. ix. 5 ; 2 Cor. v. 19.
2 Titus ii. 13 ; 2 Peter i. 1.
3 John x. 30 and xiv. 10. See also xvii. 7, 8, 10, 21.

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 301
him with " making himself equal with God," and therefore sought
the more to kill him. If they had misunderstood him, then, as
an honest man, he would have disclaimed the meaning attributed
to his words. On the contrary, he reasserts and vindicates it.
He asserts the closest intimacy with the Father and participation
in all that he does : " The Son can do nothing of himself, but
what he seeth the Father doing ; for what things soever he doeth,
these the Son also doeth in like manner." He proceeds to
specify works of the Father in which he participates ; in him is
the divine and life-giving power of redemption ; he is to be the
judge of all men. And he affirms that these powers are exercised
by him for the end " that all may honor the Son, even as they
honor the Father." He then unfolds his meaning more fully.
The hour is already come in which the redemptive energy, quick
ening to spiritual life, has in him come into the world ; and he
who brings in this power of life will execute judgment, " because
he is the Son of Man." Then he adds : " Marvel not at this, for
the hour cometh in which all who are in the tombs shall hear his
voice and shall come forth ; they who have done good unto the
resurrection of life, and they who have done evil unto the resur
rection of judgment." In the remainder of the chapter he
reasserts his intimacy with the Father and participation in his
working. He appeals to the witness borne of him by John the
Baptist, and to the greater witness which the Father was bearing
of him in the divine works which he had given him to do. He
appeals also to their own Scriptures, which bear witness of him,
and rebukes them for not receiving him as their predicted and
expected Messianic king. It seems incontrovertible that Christ
here claimed to participate in the distinctive works of God, and
therefore, as the Jews understood him, made himself equal with
God. This claim could hardly have been asserted and vindicated
more decisively. On other occasions, also, the Jews charged
him with blasphemy, or took up stones to stone him, because, as
they on one occasion expressed it, " thou, being a man, makest
thyself God" (John x. 30-39). Jesus never denied that he
made this claim, nor explained that they misunderstood him.
In all these cases we are confronted with the alternative — either
Jesus believed himself to be divine and one with God, that God
was acting in and through him under all his human limitations
and conditions, or else he was not a sincere and honest man.

302 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
The New Testament ascribes the creating of the world to the
God who was manifested in Christ. The strong assertions of
John, both positive and negative, have been already cited: "All
things were made by him, and without him was not anything
made that was made." Paul asserts the same: "There is one
God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him ; and
one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we
through him." He says also : " The kingdom of the Son of his
love ; in whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our
sins ; who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all
creation ; for in him were all things created, in the heavens and
upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones,
or dominions, or principalities, or powers ; all things have been
created through him and unto him ; and he is before all things,
and in him all things consist." x In this magnificent passage we
must note the development of " all things " by the specification
of all places, " the heavens and the earth," and of all orders of
beings, from the lowest to the highest ; so that the " Son of his
love " cannot be included among the created beings. We must
note, also, that all things were created, not only through him, but
also unto him ; and this is true only of God. And, lastly, he is
before all things, and in him all things consist, or are constituted
and perpetuated in the unity of a system. It is objected that in
describing him as the first-born of all creation of God, Paul in
cludes him among created. But the Greek word translated first
may mean one previous to the series, and not included in it. Milton
wrote : — " Adam, the noblest of his sons since born,
The fairest of her daughters, Eve."
Milton did not mean to include Adam among his own sons, nor
Eve among her daughters. This may have accorded with good
usage in his day. And similar is the Greek idiom in the use of
first. Of this we have examples in the New Testament. In
John i. 15, " for he was before me " is, in Greek, " he was the first
of me " ; in John xv. 18, " it hated me before you " is, in Greek,
" the first of you." Since this is a Greek idiom, we must interpret
" the first-born " here as an instance of it ; because, as we have
seen, the remainder of the sentence entirely precludes the inter
pretation that the Son of his love is included with the things
1 John i. 3, 10 ; I Cor. viii. 6; Col. i. 13-17.

THE TRINITY : — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 303
created. In the first sentence of the Epistle to the Hebrews we
read : " God hath spoken to us in his Son, whom he appointed
heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds ; who,
being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his
person, and upholding all things by the word of his power,
when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right
hand of the Majesty on high."
It is objected that in all the texts in which creation is ascribed
to the God in Christ, the preposition translated through necessar
ily means instrumental agency. But there are instances in the
New Testament in which the agency of the supreme God is in
like manner denoted by the same preposition (Rom. xi. 36 ; 1
Cor. i. 9 ; Heb. ii. 10 and vii. 21). In these cases God is repre
sented as acting through himself. This way of describing God's
action, through himself or through the Son of his love, is exactly
accordant with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
It has also been objected that Christ says : " For as the Father
has life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in
himself" (John v. 26) ; and that this implies that he derived his
powers from the Father. This is the paradox that the Father
has given self-existence to the Son. This necessarily implies
that the life in himself, which comes from the Father to the Son,
is self-existence ; of the very essence of the divine Being ; that,
therefore, the Son is not a finite, created, or dependent being.
This paradox is totally incompatible with the Mohammedan, or
the Deistic, or the Unitarian conception of God. But it is
exactly accordant with the Christian conception of God as a
Trinity or Three in One. As God opens out the absoluteness of
his being in creating and evolving the finite universe and ever
energizing in it, and thus progressively realizes his archetypal
ideal, it is in and through the eternal Son, Logos, or Word of
God, that he does it. Therefore the energy, light, and life, which
the Son brings into the world, come from the Father through
the Son. The Father thus giveth to the Son to have life in him
self. It is the one God, the absolute, indivisible Spirit, revealing
himself in his three eternal modes of being. God the Father, the
absolute and unconditioned source of all that is ; God the Son, in
whom he is acting out from his absoluteness in creating and
evolving the universe, physical, moral and spiritual; God the
Spirit of holiness, proceeding from the Father and the Son, ever

304 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
present among all rational and moral persons in the moral system
with divine influence to draw them to union with God in the life
of love and so to develop them to the perfection of their being in
moral likeness to God.
The redemption of man from condemnation and sin is a dis
tinctive work of God, but it is ascribed to Christ. He is pre
eminently the redeemer and saviour ; he came to seek and to
save the lost. He is the mediator between God and man. God,
then, must be in him. If in him alone man can come to God,
in him God must come to man. And so Paul declares that it is
the very essence of the gospel, which the ambassadors of Christ
are to preach, " that God was in Christ reconciling the world
unto himself." 1 As such Christ proclaims himself through all his
ministry on earth. He declares himself to be the light and life
of men. " All things have been delivered unto me of my Father ;
and no one knoweth the Son save the Father ; neither doth any
know the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son
willeth to reveal him." 2 With full knowledge of the ignorance,
the sorrows, the weakness and the sinfulness of man, he proclaims :
" Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I
will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me."
He thus places himself in the centre of the moral system and,
with consciousness of his own sufficiency to meet their wants,
calls all men to come unto him for rest, and, with the conscious
ness of rightful and universal authority, commands them to take
his yoke and learn of him. Just before his crucifixion he said :
" I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me."
Here, again, he is in the spiritual system the centre from which
flows forth the universal divine attraction drawing all men to God.
His claim is : " Every one that hath heard and learned of the
Father cometh unto me." He presents love for himself as the
distinctive and prevailing motive of the righteous life and work :
" He that loseth his life for my sake " ; " Every one that hath
left houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or
children, or lands for my name's sake." He forgives sin; he
sends the Spirit ; he opens heaven. He claims to be the king of
the kingdom of God on earth 3 ; he is the being from whom, by
1 2 Cor. v. 19. 2 Matth. xi. 27.
8 Matth. xi. 28-30; John xii. 32 and vi. 45; Matth. x. 39 and xix. 29;
Mark ii. 5-12 ; John xv. 26 and xiv. 1-3.

THE TRINITY : — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 305
whom, and for whom it exists and is perpetuated and extended.
And because he is the redeemer of men he is also their judge.1
And because, in so many ways and at so many times, Jesus, by
word and deed, asserted or implied that he exercised divine
prerogatives, the rulers of the Jews had repeatedly sought to
procure his death. When at last he was arrested and brought
before the Sanhedrim, he was convicted of blasphemy and judged
worthy of death. The high priest said unto him : " I adjure
thee by the living God that thou tell us whether thou be the
Christ, the Son of God." Thus under oath Jesus answered,
affirmatively : " Thou hast said ; hereafter ye shall see the Son of
man sitting at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds
of heaven." In the morning they brought him before Pilate,
charging that he was attempting to make himself king. But
when Pilate found that he claimed kingship only in a kingdom
not of this world, and wished to release him, they avowed their
real charge — that under the Jewish law he ought to die, because
he made himself the Son of God. And when Pilate sought still
more to release him they returned to their first accusation and
intimated to the governor that it would be dangerous to him if he
released one who was seeking to make himself king : " If thou let
this man go thou art not Caesar's friend." 2
3. The New Testament teaches that Jesus rose from the dead
and returned to the glory which he had with the Father before the
world was, where he ever liveth, making intercession for us and
administering the kingdom of God's redeemed in earth and
heaven. There John sees him in the visions of the Apocalypse,
exalted to divine glory. The Christology of this book is worthy
of attentive study. It ascribes to the glorified Christ the names
and attributes of God ; it represents him as participating in the
divine works of God and receiving the worship of heaven. This
is the more interesting because the book was written about the
time of the destruction of Jerusalem.3 At that date John desig
nated Christ as the Word of God and presented as exalted a con
ception of the divine in him as, at a later date and in very
different form, he had set forth in his gospel and epistles. As
1 Phil. ii. 9-1 1 ; Col. i. 15-17; Matth. xxv. 1-46; John v. 22, 23, 27; 2
Cor. v. 10; 2 Tim. iv. i.
2 Matth. xxvi. 63-67 ; Mark xiv. 60-64; John xix. 6-12.
3 Gebhardt, " The Doctrine of the Apocalypse," Transl. p. 11; Reuss,
"History of the Scriptures of the New Testament," Transl. pp. 159-163.
vol. 1. — 20

306 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Reuss says, "We must recognize without hesitation that Christ
in the Apocalypse is exalted to the level of God." " And
Ritschl says : " Like Paul and James, the Seer recognizes the full
divinity of the exalted Christ, to which idea the Jewish-Christian
representation of the pre-existence of Jesus as the original man
and archangel does not reach." 2 Baur himself admits that the
Apocalypse gives names of Jehovah to the glorified Christ; but he
attempts to explain away its force : " The Christology of the
Apocalypse has the peculiarity of ascribing to Jesus as the Messiah
the highest predicates, but they are only names borne outwardly
by him, and are not associated with his person in any inner unity
of nature." 3 He attributes it to the writer's great eschatological
hopes, which led him thus to glorify the Messiah. This is
essentially the same with the mythical theory of Strauss, and is
open to all the objections which have so often and so effectually
been urged against it. Certainly on this theory such a glorifica
tion of a man is impossible by a writer who had lived with Jesus
and had seen him die on the cross. For, according to the theory,
such a one would have known that he never rose from the dead,
that he wrought no miracles, that he made no claim to the powers
with which his disciples afterward glorified him, and that, therefore,
his life furnished no material nor reason for their glorifying -him.
Representations of the glorified Christ, of similar significance,
but in a different form, are found in the didactic and practical
writings of the other apostles.
4. The New Testament teaches that worship is properly offered
to the glorified Christ as to God.
The Christians at first were commonly designated from the fact
that they were worshipers of Christ as Lord : " All that call upon
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place." 4 The Chris
tians were at first regarded as Jews having some peculiarity of
belief and worship, and this was one of the appellations by which
they were distinguished. After they began to be called Christians
among the Gentiles at Antioch, this continued to be a distinctive
appellation. So Pliny, in his well-known letter, describes them as
meeting and singing hymns to Christ as to a God.
1 Histoire de la Theologie Chretienne, I., p. 346.
2 Entstehung der Altkatholischen Kirche, p. 120.
8 Vorlesungen iiber neutestamentliche Theologie, p. 244.
4 r Cor. i. 2; Acts ix. 14, 21 ; xxii. 16.

THE TRINITY : — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 307
The first recorded instance of prayer to the glorified Christ is
at the election of Matthias to the apostleship. Another instance
is the prayer of Stephen at his martyrdom : " They stoned Stephen
calling upon the Lord, and saying, ' Lord Jesus, receive my
spirit.' " Paul declares him to be in his exaltation the object
of universal homage : " Wherefore also God highly exalted him
and gave him a name, the name which is above every name ; that
in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven
and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every
tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of
God the Father." J In the Apocalypse we find visions of the
worship of Christ and of ascriptions to him proper only to God.
Paul and Peter offer to him similar ascriptions. In the apostolic
benediction the name of the Lord Jesus Christ is joined with the
name of God and of the Holy Spirit ; or with the- name of the
Father; or sometimes it stands alone.2 In the baptismal formula
the name of the Son is joined with that of the Father and the
Spirit. And when the shorter form was used, the baptism was in
the name of Jesus Christ alone. The Lord's supper, the other
solemn sacrament of the church, was instituted, and is celebrated in
remembrance of him. Finally, faith in Christ is the indispensable
beginning and support of all Christian character and work, and
the one indispensable condition of justification. " In none other
is there salvation ; for neither is there any other name under
heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved."
This certainly is worship to be rendered to God alone. For wor
ship is only the expression of faith or trust in God. And here
the whole Christian life and work, with all its promise, its hope,
its power of renovation, rests on faith in Christ. And by the
prophet Jeremiah, " thus saith the Lord : Cursed is the man that
trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart de-
parteth from the Lord. Blessed is he that trusteth in the Lord
and whose hope the Lord is." s Christ himself while on earth
presented himself as the being whom all men must trust and serve
in order to be saved. It has already been shown that he pro
claimed himself as the predicted Messianic king, the king of the
1 Acts i. 24; vii. 59, 60; Phil. ii. 9-1 1 ; Eph. i. 19-23.
2 Rev. v. 8-14; vii. 9-13; 2 Tim. iv. 18; 2 Peter iii. 18; Rev. i. 5, 6; 2
Cor. xiii. 14; 1 Cor. i. 3; Gal. vi. 18; 2 Thess. iii. 18.
8 Acts iv. 12 ; Jerem. xvii. 5-8. See also Acts xvi. 31.

308 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
kingdom of God, the redeemer of men from sin, the central object
of trust and source of hope for the whole moral system. This
implies that he is always, and to all men, the object of worship.
Accordingly he says : " Where two or three are gathered together
in my name, there am I in the midst of them." 1
5. God, who is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself,
is also revealed in the history recorded in the Old Testament, in
his action among men in the same work of redemption in its pre
paratory stages ; establishing among men in its germinal condition
the same kingdom of God on earth which, in its maturer develop
ment, Christ proclaimed ; and opening with gradually increasing
clearness and fulness, through prophecy and promise, an outlook
to his future revelation of himself in the Messiah, through whom
he will develop the kingdom into a spiritual, universal, and ever
lasting kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy
Spirit. The Old Testament is the record of God's historical action in
the redemption of men, preparatory to and issuing in the coming
of the God in Christ. By redemptive action I mean all which
God does to reconcile men to himself, and thus to bring them
back from sin to their normal state of union with him in loving
trust and service. According to the representation in Genesis,
God's redemptive action began as soon as man had sinned. This
appears in the fact that when Adam and Eve had sinned and were
hiding from God in shame and fear, God sought them, recalled
them to himself, and, while condemning them for their sin, re
ceived them again as worshipers. This is plainly implied in the
narrative ; and also in the fact that, from that time on, some ot
their sons and later descendants walked with God and were his
accepted worshipers ; others lived wickedly and brought divine
judgments on themselves. And thenceforward through all the
history of Abraham and Israel, God reveals himself among them
in redemptive action, accessible to their worship, and bringing in
fluences upon them to draw them away from wickedness to trust
and serve him in ways of righteousness. It is sometimes asserted
that the Jews had the idea of God only as shut up within his own
rigid oneness and absoluteness, and thus precluded from coming
into any intimate communion with men, — the idea of God, like
that of the ancient Epicurean, the Mohammedan, the deist. But
1 Matth. xviii. 20.

THE TRINITY : — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 309
if this was the rabbinical teaching, it is not the teaching of the
Old Testament. In this God makes himself known to Israel by
his memorial name Jehovah, their God by covenant with them ;
he comes to them as Father, as the husband of his people ; he
compares his tenderness to a mother's love for her child. He
reveals his perfections in diversified theophanies ; he dwells and
acts among them in relations of the closest intimacy. These reve
lations are anticipative and preparatory to the great revelation of
the likeness between God and man, of God's love for man, the
possible intimacy and union of man with God revealed in Christ.
The Old Testament does not contain the great words : " God so
loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoso
ever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life,"
nor the Christ on the cross that reveals its meaning. But in it
is revealed the same God, who was to be in Christ, active in the
preparatory stages of the same work of reconciling men to himself.
In it God is revealed as merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and
abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity and transgres
sion and sin ; with him is plenteous redemption. In it we are
taught to pray : " Have mercy upon me according to thy loving
kindness ; according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot
out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin." It records the joy of those who
can say : " Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose
sin is covered."1 Abraham's faith in God has become an example
to all generations of faith as the root of all right character and the
condition of acceptance with God.
In the Old Testament we find also, though as yet in its imma
turity, the same kingdom of heaven which Christ proclaimed as
at hand when he was about to unfold it into a heavenly and uni
versal kingdom, a reign of righteousness. It is recorded in
Genesis that God made a covenant with Abraham that he would
be the God of him and of his seed on condition of their con
tinued trust in and allegiance to him and their fidelity in keeping
his commandments. This covenant was renewed with Isaac, and
afterwards with Jacob. From this time on we trace in the his
tory of Israel the history of a people of God who, by this same
covenant, are united with him as their God and recognized by
him as his people. Just before the deliverance from Egypt God
1 John iii. 16 ; Exod. xxxiv. 6, 7 ; Psalm cxxx. 7 ; li. 1, 2 ; xxxii. 1.

3IO GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
reveals himself anew as the God in covenant with Israel, and
appropriates to himself the name Jehovah as the memorial of
this covenant to all generations. The name had been already
known, but not in the new significance now given it as God's
memorial name.1 At Sinai Israel was organized into a State
under the government of God, administered through Moses, and
on the foundation of the law given in the Ten Commandments.
Ewald calls attention to this organization of a State on the basis
of a covenant of righteousness with the one only God, Jehovah,
as a unique and wonderful transaction.2 In the organization
of the State this code was taken up into the covenant of God
with the people, as the law on obedience to which the fulfilment of
his covenant to be their God and to bestow his blessing on them
was conditioned. Hence the ark in which the two tables of the
law were kept was called the Ark of the Covenant. This State
afterwards became a kingdom, but under all its changing forms
it always retained this fundamental peculiarity of its constitu
tion. Through its whole history it was the kingdom of God.
God was its king, and the human ruler was only the adminis
trator under the sovereignty of God.8 Hence in later times it
was called a theocracy. Its distinguishing and wonderful peculi
arity was its embodiment of the moral and spiritual and its ever
brightening outlook to the Messianic times. The political organ
ization included within itself the spiritual kingdom of God, con
sisting of his true worshipers, who trusted him in constant faith
and served him in willing obedience. This inward spiritual life
is emphasized by the prophets in distinction from the mere
observance of the outward ritual, sometimes rebuking the priests
1 It is greatly to be regretted that the revisers of the translation of the
Old Testament did not retain the name Jehovah wherever it occurs in the
Hebrew. The significance of many passages depends on the use of Jehovah
as the memorial name, and is entirely lost in the translation "Lord."
2 Revelation, its Nature and Record ; T. and T. Clark's Transl., pp. 82,
83 ff.
8 Tiele, in the last chapter of his " Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte,"
says it is certain that the oldest form of government in Assyria was theo
cratic. To these peoples, as to other Semites, the highest divinity was the
real king; the human ruler was only his representative. No trace is found
of the worship of the human king in Assyria, which was so frequent in
Egypt, and which existed so much later in the Roman Empire. So in the
inscription on the Moabite Stone, the king justifies every undertaking by
saying, " Chemosh (the god of Moab) said unto me."

THE TRINITY :— REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 3 1 1
themselves for their formalism and their evil deeds ; it is recog
nized in the whole history of the nation, and is explicitly declared
in the New Testament : " They are not all Israel, who are of
Israel." 1 The political organization inclosed the spiritual king
dom as a bur incloses the nut, the fruit the seed or germ, till in
the fulness of time the conditions are such that it can shoot forth
in a living, growing, and fruitful tree. This kingdom was in the
political and ecclesiastical organization as the Holy of Holies
with its Mercy-seat enshrining the invisible God was in the
temple, until in Christ the veil was rent and the whole world
became the Holy place with the mercy-seat accessible every
where, and the Spirit of God working everywhere to bring men
to Christ and to transform human society into the kingdom of
God. And this grand development of the spiritual kingdom
from within the visible is what Christ proclaimed when he began
to preach and to say : " Repent ye ; for the kingdom of heaven is
at hand."
Through all the history of this kingdom in the Old Testament
we find an outlook to this grand development and the prophecy
and promise of its realization. To this the kingdom looked for
ward by virtue of its constitution. Because God has entered into
human history in redemptive action to bring men back from sin
to himself, the kingdom resulting from it carries in its essential
conception the promise and the prophecy that the future is
always to be better than the past. So in the beginning the fact
that God sought the sinning pair before they sought him, and
while they were hiding themselves from him, reveals his redeem
ing grace seeking men in their sins, of which the promise accom
panying gives assurance for all time afterwards. The promise is
also involved in the covenant of God with Israel as it was renewed
in the successive epochs of their history. This great develop
ment of the kingdom is also through all the history the subject
of prophecy and promise, becoming as the ages pass on distinctively
Messianic. In Eden, when man had first sinned, is given the so-
called protevangeliu-m, or beginning of the gospel promise of re
demption, that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's
head. In the covenant with Abraham is the promise : " In thy
seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." 2
In that early age we find the promise of blessing to all man-
1 Rom. ix. 6. 2 Gen. xxii. 18 ; xxviii. 14.

312 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
kind, and that through a universal religion of a common faith in
the one true God, of a common worship, and of righteous living
in obedience to him. This covenant is renewed at the greater
epochs in the history of Israel, and with it is the renewal of the
prophecy and promise of the blessing to come to all mankind
through the development of the kingdom into a universal kingdom.
The same promise is presented with ever-increasing clearness by
the prophets. While the Jewish people became more exclusive
and tended to shut themselves up into what afterwards became
rabbinical Judaism, the prophets go on proclaiming more and
more clearly the spiritual within the political kingdom and its des
tined development into a universal kingdom of God. Mr. Spencer
says that a people in the earlier periods of its evolution cannot
rise above itself so as to originate the ideas of its later civiliza
tion, and that those ideas if presented would be unintelligible.
But here is a people whose literature cannot have been the spon
taneous outgrowth of its life, but is even contradictory of it, and
ever points onward to an ideal to be realized only in the far dis
tant future. And it is this same covenant with Abraham and the
promise inherent in it which quickened the progress of the king
dom through its preparatory stages, and which, renewed and ex
panded in Christ, still vitalizes the Christian life and the progress
of Christ's kingdom on earth. Of it Paul says : " We, brethren,
as Isaac was, are children of promise." 1
This constitution of the kingdom and the covenant and prom
ise of God vital in it constitute the basis of Messianic prophecy.
This does not consist merely of isolated sentences selected here
and there and identified as Messianic solely because quoted by
Christ and his apostles, as recorded in the New Testament.
These distinctive Messianic prophecies are not isolated. In them
the covenant, promise, and prophecy inherent in God's redemp
tive action, fundamental in the constitution of the kingdom and
underlying the whole course of its history, rise to their loftiest
heights and attain their most distinctive and conspicuous mani
festation ; as mountain peaks rise, not isolated from the plain, but
from a mountain range stretching, it may be, along the length of
a continent. Accordingly in Messianic prophecy the agency through which
the promise is to be fulfilled is not at first definitely announced.
1 Gal. iv. 28.

THE TRINITY : — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 3 1 3
The promise to Adam and Eve indicates only that man's victory
over the power of evil is to come in some way through the posterity
of the woman. In the promise to Abraham the blessing to man
kind is to come through his posterity. Then it is further defined
as coming in the line of Isaac, and afterwards in that of Jacob.
Then we find intimations that it will come through some great
personage in the future ; but the earlier of these are obscure and
their meaning open to debate. Later we find clear and distinct
predictions that the great development of the kingdom is to be
effected through a personal Messiah. But even after this the
older form of representation is not discontinued. Israel is still
called the servant of Jehovah. But these two conceptions coin
cide. Israel stands for the spiritual kingdom of God within it ;
and the Messiah is its King, representing in himself all the
spiritual forces potential in the kingdom and bringing it, with its
covenant and promise of grace and all its promised power of
renovation, into humanity, to be perpetuated as the kingdom of
God forever.
In the theocracy Jehovah was the king administering the king
dom through the reigning monarch. In Messianic prophecy both
of these aspects of the kingship are presented. In the prophe
cies of the future deliverer of Israel under the figure of the living
Branch which was to shoot forth, it is sometimes the Branch of
Jehovah (Isa. iv. 2-6), sometimes the Branch of the stock of
David (Isa. xi. 1-10). In one line of prophecy the Messiah is
to be the Son of David, to sit on David's throne and to per
petuate his kingdom. And Daniel also saw one like unto a son
of man coming in the clouds of heaven. " And there was given
him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations
and languages should serve him ; his dominion is an everlasting
dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which
shall not be destroyed." On the other hand, in the great proph
ecy recorded in the latter part of Isaiah,1 there is indeed one
important recognition of the perpetuity in the Messianic times of
God's covenant with David,2 which itself was but the renewal of
the original covenant with Abraham ; but aside from this, neither
David nor the son or throne of David is anywhere mentioned.
It is the servant of Jehovah, in and through whom, suffering for
men, Jehovah is to realize the fulfilment of the Messianic promise.
1 Chapters xl.-lxv. 2 Isaiah lv. 3.,

3 14 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
In this and other prophecies, sometimes even in those in which
the Messiah is also spoken of as the Son of David, it is Jehovah,
the covenant God and king of Israel, who is to bring in the great
consummation ; attributes, works, and names of Jehovah are
ascribed to the Messiah ; the coming of Messiah is called The
Day of Jehovah ; the angel of Jehovah, the angel of the covenant,
the Messianic king, are distinguished from Jehovah and yet identi
fied with him ; and the whole prophetic representation justifies the
expectation that in the Messiah the double aspect of the theocratic
kingship, the human king and the divine whom he represents, will
be perpetuated and united in the person of the Messiah. This
expectation was fully realized in the God in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself as revealed in the New Testament.
In recent times some, even of Christian believers, are saying
that they cannot find any Christ in the Old Testament. Before
Christ came and before the New Testament existed, Jewish
thought had become saturated with Messianic expectation from
familiarity with the Old Testament alone.1 It is surprising that
any Christian can find no Christ there. The conception of the
kingdom of God in the Old Testament which I have presented,
penetrates deeper than this superficial view and lays hold of the
real and profound significance of the kingdom and its history as
there presented. The truth of this conception is confirmed by
Christ and his apostles. Rothe says in substance, that Christ so
used the scriptures of the Old Testament as to put it beyond
doubt that he had a comprehensive and exact knowledge of them,
even to their details, and had entered into their inward essence,
into their spirit and their great religious and moral ideas, and
therefore held the freest position in relation to the letter. While
in them he stood above them. He adds : " In the light of this
clear and full understanding of the Holy Book he oriented him
self clearly as to himself and his peculiar vocation. The deeper
he entered this sanctuary, the richer and more powerful pressed
on him the relation to himself which he met therein. He found
these scriptures assonant with his own consciousness and knew
that they testified of him. Therefore he afterwards appealed
1 " The ancient Synagogue treated as Messianic 75 passages from the
Pentateuch, 243 from the prophets, and 138 from the Hagiographa; 456 in
all ; and their Messianic application is supported by more than 558 refer
ences to the most ancient rabbinic writings." — Edersheim, "Life of Jesus,"
vol. r. p. 163, and Appendix ix.

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 315
with unqualified confidence to their testimony of him and applied
them to himself, just as a man points to a portrait which repre
sents him. And because he found in the Old Testament a clear
picture of the course of life marked out for him and of the pre
destined development of his human destiny, so he spoke of his
history as the fulfilling of the Scriptures. We find already in the
Old Testament the determinate roots and germs of all the ground-
thoughts of his doctrine." 1 Accordingly in his walk to Emmaus,
" beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted
to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself."
" And he said unto them, These are my words which I spake
unto you while I was yet with you, how that all things must needs
be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses and the prophets
and the Psalms concerning me." In the same manner Christ
had appealed to the scriptures in presenting his claims to the
unbelieving Jews : " Ye search the scriptures ; and these are they
which bear witness of me. If ye believed Moses ye would believe
me ; for he wrote of me." 2 The apostles also speak of the Old
Testament as everywhere testifying of Christ. It was their custom,
when visiting any city, to go first into the synagogue and reason
with the Jews from the Scriptures, showing that Jesus was the
Christ; and Peter declares, "To him bear all the prophets wit
ness." 8 Accordingly Jesus appropriates to himself, and the writers
of the New Testament apply to him, declarations of the Old
Testament originally applied to Jehovah, the covenant God and
King of Israel. Gess points out also various representations and
functions of Jehovah which Christ appropriates to himself.
Jehovah is the shepherd of Israel ; Christ describes himself as
the shepherd of his people. Jehovah is the husband of Israel ;
Christ also is the bridegroom. Jehovah is represented as coming
to his temple as a refiner and purifier ; Christ also purifies the
temple. Elijah is to come before the great and terrible day of
Jehovah ; and Jesus declares that Elijah came in John the Baptist
before his own coming.4 The representations of Christ in the
1 Zur Dogmatik, pp. 173-176.
2 Luke xxiv. 27, 44 ; John v. 39, 46.
8 Acts xvii. 2, 11 ; xviii. 24, 28; x. 43.
4 W. F. Gess, " Das Dogma von Christi Person und Werk," Basel, 1887,
pp. 244-246, 251; Ezek. xxxiv. n-15; Jeremiah xxxi. 10; Isa. xl. 11; Ps.
xxiii. compared with John x. 1-16; Isa. liv. 5, 6; Matth. ix. 15, xxv., 1-12;
Malachi iii. 1-3; Matth. xxi. 12.

316 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Apocalypse are like analogous representations of Jehovah in the
Old Testament ; an instance is the vision of Christ in the first
chapter compared with the vision of the Ancient of Days in the
seventh chapter of Daniel. The Jews regarded Jehovah as the
incommunicable name. In reading the Scriptures they never
uttered it, but read instead the word which in English is Lord.
The Septuagint translators substituted the Greek word meaning
Lord for Jehovah, in their translation. Thus the word Lord
became, both in Hebrew and Greek, the common spoken desig
nation of Jehovah. And this is the name appropriated by the
apostles and the primitive Christians to Christ. Hence James
calls Jesus the Lord of Glory. Peter says, " Ye have tasted that
the Lord is gracious," as the Psalmist had said, " Oh, taste and
see that Jehovah is good " ;' and again, " Sanctify in your hearts
Christ as Lord," as Isaiah had said, "Jehovah of hosts, him shall
ye sanctify." And Paul applies to the Lord Christ the words of
Joel, " Whosoever shall call on the name of Jehovah shall be
delivered ; " and the words of Jehovah himself, " Unto me every
knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear." Accustomed to hear
Lord substituted for Jehovah in the reading of the Scriptures and
in the service of the temple and the synagogues, the apostles, in
appropriating to Christ the title Lord, must have understood and
intended it as denoting his divinity, as identifying him with
Jehovah, the covenant-God of Israel, now revealed more fully in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself. Christ also identifies
his kingdom with the kingdom of Jehovah in the Old Testament.
" Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down
with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven ;
but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth into outer dark
ness." Here he also recognizes the spiritual kingdom within the
people of Israel, and the development of that kingdom at his
coming into a universal kingdom, as the prophets had foretold.1
Paul declares the same unity of the kingdom, and the same dis
tinction of the inward and spiritual kingdom from the political
and visible nation. The Jewish branches shall be cut off, and the
Gentiles grafted in ; but the olive-tree remains the same.2
Devout Christian feeling has always recognized a spiritual
1 James ii. I ; I Pet. ii. 3 ; Ps. xxxiv. 8 ; 1 Pet. iii. 15 ; Isa. viii. 13 ; Rom.
x. 13; Joelii.32; Isa. xlv. 23; Phil. ii. 10, n ; Matth. viii. 11, 12.
2 Rom. xi. 17, 18.

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 317
meaning in the Old Testament, and an outlook in its covenant
and promise and in its Messianic prophecy to Christ. The rev
elation is indeed progressive. The kingdom in its preparatory
stages exists in the environment of a rude age. To the people
of such an age of the world and through them, as the medium
of receiving, communicating, preserving and handing down the
revelation, God must reveal himself. Hence, as Christ teaches,
there is much in relation to the environment which is transitional,
and much remained to be revealed in later times. And the
latter at least was true of Christ's own revelation of God ; he
says : " I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot
bear them now." 1 It is true, nevertheless, that the spiritual
significance and the outlook to Christ are in the Old Testament,
and in all ages have been found there by Christian believers.
An eminent Puritan divine said that every verse of the Bible has
in it somewhere a window opening out to Christ. In his preface
to the Old Testament of ^23, Luther says: "Here shalt thou
find the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ
lies . . . Poor and of little value are the swaddling clothes, but
dear is Christ, the treasure that lies in them." Paul's language
is remarkable : " I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that
our fathers . . . did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all
drink the same spiritual drink : for they drank of a spiritual
rock that followed them : and that rock was Christ." 2 Thus
understood in its spiritual significance and its outlook to Christ,
the Old Testament has always been used for the edification of
Christians and in the worship of the church. The conception
of it which I have given justifies this devout use of it by show
ing that it rests on the true apprehension of its real significance.
The grammatical exegesis of every sentence is indispensable to
the right interpretation of the scriptures ; as anatomical dissec
tion is indispensable to the scientific knowledge of the human
body. But as dissection cannot of itself give the full knowledge
of the body, much less of the man, so grammatical exegesis cannot
give the full significance of the scriptural history in its unity,
continuity, and wholeness. Analysis must always be supple
mented by synthesis if true knowledge is to be attained. The
scriptures claim to be the record of God's action in human
history redeeming man from sin and establishing the kingdom
1 John xvi. 12. 2 I Cor. a. 1-4.

3 18 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
of heaven on earth, and in this historical action revealing himself
to man. It is only as we recognize this divine action recorded in
them that we can interpret them aright and find their true sig
nificance. If we overlook this action of God recorded in them,
all supernatural revelation drops out and nothing is left but the
remains of an ancient literature, recording the myths and
legends of a false religion founded on a false supernaturalism,
with an elevated but imperfectly-developed morality; and we
are forced back on the old rationalism, which has always proved
itself untenable. '
6. That God was in Christ reconciling the world unto him
self is the only adequate explanation of his relation to human
history before and after his coming. We have seen that the
Old Testament is essentially the history of God's action in re
deeming men from sin and establishing and developing his
kingdom on earth in its preparatory stages ; and that Jesus is the
Christ who fulfils the promise and prophecy of the ancient
covenant, who is the predicted Messianic king, and who develops
the kingdom into a spiritual kingdom for all mankind. And
through him and the Holy Spirit whom he sent, the kingdom was
thus developed. Against the most strenuous opposition, first
of Judaism, then of the Roman empire, it established itself and
has prevailed. It has extended itself over vast territories ; from
its ancient covenant of promise, unfolded in its true significance
and made effective by Christ and the Holy Spirit whom he
has sent, it has quickened spiritual life and effected reconcilia
tion with God in thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of
thousands, a great multitude whom no man can number ; it has
brought into human history the idea and expectation of progress
as an effective power in civilization ; it has vitalized the progres-
1 " In all God's dealings in history, there is always a positive element of
actual progress ; a step forward, even though in the taking of it something
should have to be crushed. And this step forward was the development
of the kingdom of God . . . This organic unity of Israel and the Messiah
explains how events, institutions, and predictions which initially were
purely Israehtish, could with truth be regarded as finding their full accom
plishment in the Messiah. From this point of view the whole Old Testa
ment becomes the perspective in which the figure of the Messiah stands
out. It is in this sense that we understand the two sayings of the Talmud :
' All the prophets prophesied only of the days of the Messiah ' ; and, ' The
world was created only for the Messiah ' " (Edersheim, " Life of Jesus,"
vol. i. pp. 162, 163).

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 319
sive and enlightened nations ; it has created a new civilization
which, though according to the promise still looking forward to
a future better than the past, is more enlightened, powerful,
progressive, and beneficent than any non-Christian civilization.
Thus the ages preceding Christ looked forward to him as their
hope ; and the ages succeeding him look back to him as the
source of spiritual light and progress ; and all look up to him
in his glory as the source of their inspiration and strength in
the life and work of faith and love and of their hope of blessed
ness in the life to come. Thus Christ is the central personage
in human history. It is Christ who binds the ages in moral and
spiritual unity and continuity, reveals the "one increasing pur
pose " which runs through them all, and therein reveals the true
end for which man exists, the highest possibilities of his being,
and the true significance of his history. The ancient covenant
with its Messianic promise, prophecy, and hope, and the action
of God in accordance with it, centring in Christ, and redeeming
man from sin and establishing the divine kingdom, are through
all the ages realizing the archetypal purpose of eternal wisdom
and love. The recognition of Christ as central in human his
tory and his kingdom as the end to be progressively realized in
it, is essential to any true and complete philosophy of human
history. 7. It remains to notice the incidental evidence that God is in
Christ : the tone and spirit of Christ's own words and actions ;
the atmosphere in which he moves ; incidental sayings and acts
of Christ implying his consciousness of the divine in him ; the
general tone and spirit of the apostles, and incidental sayings
and deeds revealing their trust in him as divine. In this inci
dental evidence the New Testament makes an irresistible impres
sion on us that Jesus was himself conscious of divinity, and that
his disciples and the churches which they gathered had a devoted
and unwavering trust in him and loyalty to him as divine. It
was this faith which inspired Stephen and all the martyrs of the
primitive churches. I shall not unfold this evidence. To do it
would be little less than to examine the whole New Testament.
It is exemplified in his consciousness of authority above man's
disclosed in his criticisms and emendations of the law in the
sermon on the mount and at other times. His consciousness of
his divine greatness is revealed when he says of himself in his

320 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
humiliation as man : " My father is greater than I." John in
his first epistle declares emphatically : " Every spirit which con
fesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God ; and every
spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God ; and this is the
spirit of the anti-Christ ; and now it is already in the world."
He is supposed to refer here to docetic opinions already making
their appearance, which denied that Christ was really man, and
maintained that all that seemed to be human in him was appear
ance only, not reality. This indicates that, before the generation
to which the apostles belonged had passed away, the belief of the
deity of Christ was so prevalent and overmastering in the apos
tolic churches that the first error was the denial of his real
humanity. Professor Goltz calls attention to the fact that the
belief that God was in Christ had called into existence a pecu
liar phraseology previously unknown : God the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, Chosen of God in Christ before the foundation
of the world, Those who call on the name of the Lord, and many
others.1 Paul says : " I determined not to know anything among
you save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." He thus presents
Christ as the central subject of all Christian preaching, the centre
from whom issue the light, inspiration, and power of the ministry
of reconciliation, and to whom all, who through this ministry are
reconciled to God, are drawn. The epistle of James shows that
its author worshiped Christ as the Lord of glory. The gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the Acts of the apostles, abound
in representations of Christ implying and assuming that God is
in him. Even in the gospel of Mark, in which this incidental
evidence is less conspicuous than in the writings of Matthew and
Luke, an air and manner, and words and actions are ascribed to
Jesus which would imply intolerable self-assumption in any man.2
These are a few of the many instances in the books of the New
Testament of incidental evidence that God is in Christ, and
illustrate the spirit and tone which pervade them all,, the atmos
phere of thought and feeling in which all the writers move.
IV. God in the Holy Spirit. — We have seen that God in
Christ reveals himself in two eternal modes of being — as the
1 Die Christlichen Grundwahrheiten, § 77 ; see pp. 84-107, §§ 63-80.
2 Mark i. 7-1 1 ; ii. 5-1 1, 18-22, and 27, 28 ; viii. 38 ; xii. 35-37 ; xiii. 26, 27 ;
xiv. 62 ; xv. 2.

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 32 1
Father, and as the Son, or Logos, or Word of God. The deity
of the Father has never been controverted. It is not denied
that the Father is revealed in the scriptures as God and dis
tinguished from the Son, or Word of God, revealed in Christ.
The question here at issue has always been whether the Son, or
Word of God, represented in the scriptures as revealed in Christ,
is God. That he is God has now been shown. Therefore it is
certain that, in the biblical representation, the Father and the
Son are distinguished and that each is represented as God.
With equal clearness God is revealed in the Bible in a third
mode of being, in the Holy Spirit. It is not denied that the names
Holy Spirit, Spirit of God, denote God. This is too obvious to
be disputed. Divine names and acts are ascribed to the Holy
Spirit ; the same acts are sometimes ascribed to God and some
times to the Spirit, — as the inspiration of prophets and apostles,
the new birth, sanctification, the indwelling in the Christian. The
question at issue here is as to the distinction in God between the
Spirit, and the Father, and the Son. In establishing the deity of
the Son of God in Christ we have established a distinction in
God of the Father and the Son. This sets aside all a priori
objections to a similar distinction of the Spirit from the Father
and the Son. The same passages of scripture which declare
the distinction of the Son from the Father in repeated instances
refer also to the Holy Spirit and reveal a similar distinction
between the Spirit and the Father and the Son. In many other
passages the recognition of this distinction is indisputable (John
xiv.-xvi.). There are, of course, passages of scripture in which
God is said to be Spirit, or is called the Spirit of God, without
explicit reference to the threefold distinction, as when Christ says
God is a Spirit. But these do not contradict the passages in
which the distinction is indubitably recognized. The Spirit of
God is spoken of in the Old Testament ; the prophecy of Joel
that it should be poured out on all flesh was fulfilled on the day
of Pentecost. This is analogous to the revelation of God in
Jehovah, the covenant-God and king of the kingdom of God, and
the Messianic promise and the intimations of a distinction in
God involved therein.
V. The one and only God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. —
We have now ascertained the elements of the scriptural repre-

322 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
sentation of what God is. The next step must be to combine
them in a unity pf thought. This necessarily gives us the scrip
tural idea of God as triune, three in one ; designated in theology
by the name trinity, which is simply a contracted form of tri-
unity. " The doctrine of the trinity is not a result of mere spec
ulation, not a theory or hypothesis spun by theologians out of
their own fancies, still less, as some eminent writers would main
tain, the result of the importation of Greek metaphysics into
Christian theology. It is, in the first instance, the result of a
simple process of induction from the facts of the Christian revela
tion. . . . The triune conception of God is justified, when it is
shown to be the conception which underlies the triune revelation
God has given of himself, and the triune activity in the work of
redemption." 1
The elements to be combined are three.
First. The oneness and onliness of God.
Second. The three eternal distinctions or modes of being of
the one only God, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.
Third. The proper deity of each of the three ; that is, God,
the one indivisible Absolute Spirit in each of these peculiar and
eternal modes of being.
r . In any correct synthesis or comprehension in thought of the
scriptural teaching as to the Trinity, we must begin with the one
ness and onliness of God. It is necessary to apprehend and
declare this in its true and full significance in order to guard
against any departure from the belief of it through overstatement
or misunderstanding of the scriptural representations of the three
fold distinction of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The fact must
be emphasized in the outset that, whatever may be the distinction
of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is included within the unity of
the one only God.
God is numerically and indivisibly one in his substance or
essential being. This is the common doctrine of our evangelical
Protestant creeds ; as the Westminster Catechism declares that the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit " are one true, eternal God, the same
in substance, equal in pdwer and glory." The same has been
the teaching of the great Protestant theologians. Turretin affirms
that God, in his essential being, is indivisibly and numerically one,
1 James Orr, D. D., "The Christian View of God and the World, as
centring in the Incarnation," pp. 303, 304.

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 323
and as such is the only God, and there can be no other ; that the
Son has from eternity essential being numerically the same with
the Father; that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have between
them numerically the same essence, the like of which does not
exist among created beings. This doctrine he defends against
polytheists and also against tritheists, who exaggerate the threefold
distinction in the Godhead into what is equivalent to three Gods.1
So Calvin also teaches : " It is evident from our writings that we
do not take away the persons of the trinity from the essence of
God ; but simply interpose a distinction between them while they
remain in the one essence. If they were separated from the
essence we should have three Gods, not a trinity of persons con
tained within himself by the one God."2 Augustine also says:
" All those catholic expounders of the divine Scriptures whom I
have been able to read, who have written before me concerning
the Trinity, who is God, have purposed to teach, according to
the scriptures, this doctrine, that the Father, and the Son, and
the Holy Spirit intimate a divine unity of one and the same sub
stance in an indivisible equality ; and therefore that there are not
three Gods, but one God." 3 The same is the teaching of the so-
called Athanasian creed : " We worship one God in trinity, and
trinity in unity ; neither confounding the persons nor dividing
the substance." Gieseler says : " The unity and equality of the
persons, which necessarily resulted from holding sameness of
essence, was not fully acknowledged at once, even by the Nice-
nians, but continued to be more clearly perceived, until at last
it was expressed by Augustine for the first time with decided
logical consequence."4 And from his time on it became the
established belief of the western church. But it had been the
more common doctrine before Augustine's day. The real mean
ing of the Nicene creed on this point began to be debated almost
as soon as the Council adjourned. But it seems incontrovertible
that the Council meant to declare the doctrine afterwards taught
by Athanasius and Augustine, that the Son is of the same sub
stance or essential being, with the Father. This is the legitimate
1 Instit. Theologiae, Locus III., Quaestio III. ii., iii., ix. ; Quaest. XXIII.
xi., xii. ; Quaest. XXV. ii., iii. ; Quaest. XXVIII. iii.; vol. i., pp. 163, 164,
165, 230, 238, 252 ; Carter's ed., New York, 1847.
2 Institutes, Lib. I., cap. xiii. 25.
8 De Trinitate, Lib. I., chap. iv. 7.
4 Church History, Translation revised by H. B. Smith, vol. i., p. 313.

324 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
meaning of homoousios, 6/Aoouo-tos, the word by which they de
scribed the oneness of the Son with the Father. But, because the
word was used with different meanings, this of itself does not
settle the question. But that this was the meaning they gave it,
is evident from the fact that they used it in opposition to the
error that the Son was only 6ju.oiouo-i.os, of similar substance with
the Father ; also from the dissent of Eusebius and a considerable
minority, on the ground that it meant the same substance ; also
because the Son is described as the true God before all ages, by
whom all things were made ; and because, if this was not their
meaning, the creed would declare their belief in two Gods, a
belief which their history shows they never held. And at a. still
earlier period we find this belief that God as Father, Son, and
Spirit is one in substance and essential being, fully formulated
by TertuUian. He says of the Son of God : " He is God and
the Son of God, and both are one. And thus Spirit from Spirit
and God from God becomes another in mode of being, not in
number ; in order, not state or standing (z. <?., as divine) ; and has
gone forth, but has not gone out of (or separated from) the orig
inal (divine) source. . . . They are three, not in substance but
in form, not in power but in a specific distinction ; but of one
substance and power . . . Hold fast always the rule which I
avow, in accordance with which I testify that the Father, Son, and
Spirit are not separated. When I say that they are distinct, only
ignorance or perversity will take this as meaning a diversity
which issues in separation. . . . For the Son is other than the
Father, not by diversity, but by distribution ; not by division, but
by distinction. The Father and Son are not the same, but they
differ one from the other in their mode of being (modulo)."1
Augustine says that the Greek theologians taught that God,
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is one in essence (ovo-ia),
but that the Latins used either essence or substance ; because,
he says, essence usually means nothing else but substance in
Latin.2 We see, therefore, that the prevalent doctrine of the church
and its theologians has been that God, the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, is numerically and indivisibly one in his substance or
1 Apologeticus adv. Gentes, chap. xxi. adv. Praxeas, chap. iii. and ix.
* De Trinitate, Lib. vii., chap. iv. 7.

THE TRINITY : — - REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 325
essential being.1 Therefore, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are
not three Gods, one in a merely generic unity, as men are one in
the unity of the genus ; nor in a merely moral unity, as persons
of the same moral character and purpose are one. They are
distinguished as three only within the numerical and indivisible
oneness and onliness of God.
It is sometimes said that God as absolute transcends all
number. " To apply arithmetical notions to him may be as un-
philosophical as it is profane."2 But this position is as fatal to
monotheism as it is to tritheism and polytheism. If God tran
scends all forms of number it is as " profane " to say there is
one only God as to say there are three, or a thousand. It is
argued that, in order to count things together, there must be
some point of likeness among them so that they can be desig
nated by a common name. But Dr. Newman says, God " has
not even such relation to his creatures as to allow, philosophi
cally speaking, of our contrasting him with thein." Here, then,
is a complete sundering of God from all likeness to his creatures
and from all relation to them. Man is no longer in the image of
God nor capable of coming into any communion with him or of
having any knowledge of him. This speculation is founded on some
false idea of the absolute which necessarily issues in pantheism,
epicureanism, or agnosticism.3 If God exists he must be a being,
and has the name being and all its essential attributes in common
with his creatures. If he is a personal Being, man is also a per
sonal being and has reason and the attributes of a rational person
like God, and is capable of knowing, loving, and serving him.
Thus man knows himself in the likeness of God, and knows God,
in distinction from himself and all finite beings, as the one
only absolute and all-perfect Being. Thus he knows that the
distinction of Father, Son, and Spirit, whatever it may be, is com
patible with and included in the oneness and onliness of God.
1 The English word essence has not the same meaning with substance,
either in logic or in philosophy or in popular usage. I use the phrase
essential being as more nearly expressing the true meaning.
2 J. H. Newman, " Grammar of Assent," pp. 48, 49. Basil also presented
the same idea. See Hodge, " Theology," vol. i. p. 463, and Dorner, " Person
of Christ," vol. ii. p. 310.
3 See my " Philosophical Basis of Theism," chap, xii., and my " Self-
Revelation of God," part ii., chaps, viii., ix., x., on the Absolute, and Chap. III.
of this volume.

326 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
God transcends the principles of arithmetic in the same way as
he transcends the principles of geometry ; all these mathematical
principles are eternal in him, the absolute Reason. We gain
nothing in constructing our idea of the one God, Father, Son, and
Spirit, by assuming that his essential being contradicts the princi
ples which are eternal in him as the absolute being. On the
contrary, we plunge ourselves in the bottomless abyss of a denial
that the universe is ultimately grounded in Reason and of an
assumption that it is grounded in unreason.
In our attempts to form and complete a true conception of
God, we must in the outset take a strong grasp of the truth that
he is the one and the only God ; and this we must firmly hold
through all our investigations. If any conception of the Trinity,
if any speculation on the being and works of God relax this
grasp, we shall drift in hopeless error.
In beginning with the oneness we follow the order and method
of the biblical revelation. God in revealing himself as recorded
in the Bible began with the truth that he is the one and only God.
For centuries he was instructing and disciplining Israel in the
knowledge of himself against the enticements of the polytheism
which surrounded them. It was only after the captivity in Baby
lon that this truth became so vitally incorporated into the national
life that they never afterwards departed from it. Then in the
coming and work of Christ and the Holy Spirit he opened more
fully the recesses of his being and revealed its different aspects
and the diversified riches of his wisdom and love as Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, and further still as the God in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself.
At different periods iu the history of the church Christian theo
logians, in their zeal to defend and emphasize the distinction of
Father, Son, and Spirit, have taken positions logically involving
tritheism, or at least verging very closely on that great error.
These exaggerations have been the occasions at different times
of reactions against the scriptural doctrine itself which these
have been supposed to represent. The truth that there is one
God, who is the only God, is the fundamental truth of religion
and appeals powerfully to the religious intuitions and sentiments
of all men. Any line of thought which throws this great truth
into the background, or weakens the belief of it, imperils all the
interests of the church of Christ. Therefore, in all our attempts

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 327
to attain a true and complete knowledge of God so far as he has
revealed himself, this truth must always enlighten, direct, and
dominate our thinking.
2. The second element in the true and Christian idea of God
is the threeness : God is eternal in three modes of being, in which,
when revealed, God is known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This distinguishes the scriptural doctrine of God from Sabellian-
ism, the doctrine of the so-called modal Trinity, according to
which the Father, Son, and Spirit do not denote modes of being
eternal in God, but only different modes of manifestation in
time, different ways of action in which God reveals himself to
men. Because in his highest self-revelation God makes himself known
as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, these three modes of being thus
revealed must be eternal in his essential being as God ; otherwise
the revelation is not God's revelation of himself, but a mere
make-believe and pretence. Besides this, the scriptures, as we
have seen, present this distinction as eternal in God. They teach
that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is each eternal, and ascribe
to each the names, attributes and works of God. Thus it is
evident that the doctrine of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, involves no contradiction. God is not three in the same
sense in which he is one. He is not three beings in one being,
nor three Gods- in one God, nor three persons in one person. He
is one God in three eternal modes of being.
This or some equivalent expression of the trinitarian distinc
tions in the unity of God is common in theology. Professor
Shedd in his annotations on the American translation of Augustine
on the Trinity, says repeatedly that " the three divine persons
. . . are three modes or forms of one undivided substance num
erically and identically the same in each" (pp. 20, 101). He
teaches the same in his " Dogmatic Theology " (vol. i., pp. 183,
i87-r89). Dorner and other German theologians use the phrase
"modes of being" to designate the trinitarian distinctions.
Turretin says the three persons are distinguished "by their
modes of subsistence" (Loc. III., Quaest. xxiii. 5, 8, and xxvii.
ro, 14). TertuUian, in the passage already quoted, declares
that they are distinguished in form or in mode (modulo, the
diminutive of modus). Basil calls their distinction a mode of
being (TpoVos uirap^cos). Dorner says, "this became, through

328 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
John the Damascene, the standing formula for the innermost rela
tion of the distinctions in God, while the formula for the merely
economic Trinity is that God has three modes of manifestation "
("Christian Doctrine," vol. i., pp. 381, 382, note). The same in
meaning, though expressed in different words, is the teaching of
Calvin and Augustine, and, indeed, the common teaching of trini
tarian theologians, that without division of the divine substance
or essence the three differ only in some peculiar property, or
some peculiar relation to each other, or in some peculiar mode
of subsistence. The criticism of the form of expression which I
have used, that it involves Sabellianism, is entirely unjustifiable.
Calvin himself was at one time charged with teaching Arianism,
and not long after with teaching Sabellianism. He says it
troubled him exceedingly (vehementer perturbavit) that his cal
umniators had injected their unjust opinion of him into so many
churches (" Epistolae," Letter to Grynaeus, Rector of Academy
of Basle, Ed. Amsterdam, 1667, p. 227).
It has seemed necessary in theological thinking to have some
common name for the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit, and it has
been much debated what the name should be. It may be sug
gested that this may be a case in which a common name is im
possible. There is only one God ; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
each is the name of God in one of these peculiar modes of his
being. And this peculiar mode of being distinguishes God in
each mode from God in each of the other modes of being.
Therefore, the Father, the Son, and the' Holy Spirit is each alone
and without a fellow in each several peculiar mode of being.
Yet they are not three Gods, as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace are
three men. It would seem to follow that there can be no com
mon name for the three, but only a proper name for each. They
are only thus designated in the Bible. And we shall find it safest
to confine ourselves to the biblical designations, which, as used
in theology, have become proper names of the three, Father, Son,
Holy Spirit.
But it is a convenience, and perhaps a necessity, in theological
thinking to have a name common to the three. Different names
have been used : by the Greeks, prosopon (aspect), hypostasis,
1S10TT7S (meaning a peculiar property or nature) ; by the Latin
theologians, subsistence and person. The word " person " has be
come fixed in the usage of the western churches as the common

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 329
name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit
But it must be borne in mind that, when thus applied, it is used
as a technical term and not in the sense in which it is now used
both in philosophy and in common speech. By "person " we now
mean an ego, an individual endowed with reason, free will, and
susceptibility to rational motives, and conscious of himself as
one and the same being in all his activity. Boetius gives this
definition : " A person is the indivisible substance of a rational
nature." 1 In this sense of the word there cannot be three per
sons in God, but only one ; for God is one indivisible substance.
When applied to the three eternal modes of being in God it is
used in a peculiar and technical sense. The Latin theologians
began very early to use the word " person " as the common name of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is supposed to have
meant originally a mask, worn on the stage, through which the
voice sounded. Thence it came to denote a character . in a
drama, personated by the actor. It was also used to denote a
man acting in different characters or offices, as Cicero said : " I
being one sustain three persons " ; that is, he acted in three char
acters, which might be, as senator, as consul, and as advocate in
a court. The same usage survives in English; Robert South
says : " How different is the same man from himself, as he sus
tains the person of a magistrate and that of a friend." The sup
position of Thomas Aquinas, that it is derived etymologically
from per se unum, that which is one in itself, is not well sus
tained. And from the beginning, theologians, who have used the
word "person " as the common name of the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, have applied and explained it as denoting distinctions
within the one only personal God, the one God in a peculiar
mode of being. Thus they have shown that they did not use the
word in the sense in which it is now commonly used as denoting
a distinct, individual, personal being. Used with this latter mean
ing, the assertion of three persons in one God would be a glaring
contradiction incorporated into the Christian conception of God
and made the foundation of the whole system of Christian
doctrine. At different times, when in the course of the ages this subject has
been prominent in theological discussion, the suggestion has been
made that the word " person " be no longer used in this application
1 " Persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia. "

330 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
to the distinctions in the Godhead, and that some other word be
substituted,-^ as hypostasis, or subsistence, both of which have here
tofore been freely used.1 But it has been so often and so earnestly
explained that the word is used in a technical and qualified sense,
that this ought to be generally understood by all who controvert
the doctrine. And the word " person " is so fixed and universal in
the creeds and theology of the western churches that it would be
difficult to remove it ; and it probably would be impossible
without causing misunderstanding and division, and unsettling
faith. It is to be noticed, however, that in the doxologies, the
benedictions, the sacraments, the hymns and worship of the
church, the biblical names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are com
monly used, and the name " person " is rarely applied to them.
Nor do we often find in them the word " trinity," and other non-
biblical words and phrases which scientific theology finds it con
venient or necessary to use. It is evident, therefore, that if they
are necessary to theology, they are not necessary to religion and
worship. In the long controversies from age to age on the Trinity, a
considerable number of technical words have come into use :
person, substance, subsistence, essence, nature, hypostasis, ho-
moousian, consubstantial, and others. The use of words of this
class has been the occasion of much misunderstanding, confusion
of thought, and empty logomachy. Words of this class in one
language haye been misunderstood, or wrongly applied, by persons
writing in another; different words in the same language have
been used to denote the same thing ; the same words have been
used with different meanings, at different times, and by different
contemporary writers, and even by the same writer; the very
words used by some to denote God's substance or essential being,
in distinction from the three modes of being, have been used by
others to denote the three modes of being in distinction from the
one divine substance or essential being.2 Hence the history of
the controversies on this subject, long drawn out through the
centuries, is dreary, disheartening, and provocative of skepticism.
1 " If it is desired to substitute one word for another, let it be called sub
sistence." (Calvin, " Institutes," Lib. I., cap. xiii. § 2.)
2 Calvin says : " I observe that the Fathers of the ancient church, while
they always spoke with great reverence on these matters, neither agreed
with each other, nor were always consistent with themselves." He proceeds
to give numerous examples. (" Institutes," Lib. I., cap. xiii. 5.)

THE TRINITY :— REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 33 1
This the most profound and godly defenders of the doctrine of
the Trinity have deeply felt. Dr. J. H. Newman says: "The
word Trinity belongs to those notions of God which are forced
on us by the necessity of our finite conceptions, the real and
immutable distinction which exists between person and person
implying in itself no infringement of his real and numerical
unity." x In the Unitarian controversy in this country, Professor
Moses Stuart said : " We profess to use the word person merely
from the poverty of language ; merely to designate our belief in
a real distinction in the Godhead ; and not to describe independ
ent conscious beings, possessing separate and equal essences and
perfections. ... I could heartily wish that the word person never
had come into the symbols of the church, because it has been the
occasion of so much unnecessary dispute and difficulty ... If
it must be retained, the use of it ought to be so explained and
guarded as not to lead Christians into erroneous ideas of the na
ture of God."2 Calvin says: "They deceive themselves who
dream of three separate individuals, each of whom singly obtains
a part of the divine essence. . . . Let us not take up into our
minds an idea of the Trinity of persons which detains the thought
upon the separation and does not immediately bring it back to
the unity. The words Father, Son, and Spirit, certainly intimate
a real distinction ; let no one think them empty epithets in which
from his works God is variously designated ; but it is a distinc
tion, not a division . . . Let them [the theological names] be
buried, if only the belief persists that the Father, Son, and Spirit
are one God ; and, nevertheless, that the Son is not the Father,
nor the Spirit the Son ; but that they are distinguished by some
peculiar property. I am not so austerely precise as to keep up a
strife about naked words." 8 Augustine says that these theologi
cal terms " sprang from the necessity of having words to use when
copious reasoning was required against the devices or errors of
the heretics ; " and also, since God transcends human speech and
human thought, " that we may be able in some way to utter what
we are in no way able to utter fully." He adds the important,
far-reaching truth : " God is known more truly in our thought
than in our words ; he is more in reality than in our thought." 4
1 Grammar of Assent, p. 48.
2 Letters to Channing, 3d ed. Letter ii., pp. 34, 35.
3 Calvin, " Institutes," Lib. I., cap. xiii. §§ 25, 17, 5.
4 De Trinitate, Lib. vii., cap. iv. 9, 7.

332 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Athanasius, in his Epistle to the Monks (about a. d. 358), says
of the mystery of the Trinity : " The more I desired to write and
endeavored to force myself to understand the divinity of the Word,
so much the more did the knowledge thereof withdraw from me ;
and in proportion as I thought that I apprehended it, I found
myself to fail of doing so. Moreover, I was unable to express, in
writing even what I seemed to myself to understand ; and that
which I wrote was unequal to the imperfect shadow of the truth
which existed in my conceptions. Considering that it is written
... in the Psalms, ' The knowledge of thee is too wonderful for
me ; it is high, I cannot attain unto it,' I frequently designed to
stop and to cease writing ; believe me, I did. But lest I should
disappoint you, or by silence lead into impiety those who have
made inquiry of you and are given to disputation, I constrained
myself to write briefly what I now send to your piety." Hilary
says, " we are compelled to intrust the deep things of religion to
the perils of human expression."
The question now arises, What are the peculiarities by which
the three modes of being are distinguished? The answer is, that
it is pre-eminently in the work of redemption that God reveals
himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ; and it is through this
revelation that we learn, so far as it is possible for us to know,
what the distinctive peculiarities of these modes of being are. We
are therefore to ascertain them simply as they are set forth in the
Bible. The biblical representation cannot be examined here. It
can be unfolded only in the study of God's work of redemption
in all its aspects, as the Bible sets it forth. And this constitutes
a principal part of doctrinal theology.
3. The third element in the Christian conception of God as
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the real deity of each of the
three. This has been already established. It only remains to
make some explanations of this third element in order to prevent
misapprehensions. It has been shown that the doctrine of the church, as set forth
by its ablest theologians, is that the one only God is eternal and
indivisible in three modes of being, in which, when revealed, he
is known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ; and in each of which
he is, by some peculiarity, distinguished from himself and related
to himself in his other modes of being. From this point of view
the third element in the Christian idea of God is this : It is the

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 333
one only God who is eternal and indivisible in that mode of
being in which he is called the Father ; it is the same one and
only God who is eternal and indivisible in the mode of being in
which he is called the Son ; and it is the same in that mode of
being in which he is called the Holy Spirit ; or, conversely, the
Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
The doctrine is not that the Father is God the absolute Being, the
Son God in his personality. The one only God is the absolute per
sonal God, and it is this absolute personal God who exists in each
of the three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The distinction is not
a quantitative division, a part of God in the Father, a part in the
Son, and a part in the Holy Spirit, and the whole God only in the
unity of the three. The one God is indivisible. It is not that
the Father is God, and the Son and the Spirit attributes, facul
ties, or powers of God. The one personal God is undivided and
eternal in each of the three ; yet in each mode of being he is
distinguished by some peculiar proprietas, or property, and so by
a peculiar relation of each to the other. Hence the personal
God cannot be known fully in all his manifoldness till we know
him in all three of his modes of being, — as Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.1
This doctrine is often objected to as incomprehensible or even
as self-contradictory. Certainly some of the forms in which it has
been stated seem open to this objection. For example, Calvin
and Augustine, in the passages quoted in the note, seem first to
distinguish each of the three by a peculiarity, and then to declare
that, as thus distinguished, they are the same. But the context
1 The Augsburg Confession defines " person '' as used in defining the
Trinity, " Persona est quod proprie subsistit," using proprie in its well-
known theological meaning to denote a mode of subsistence (not of mani
festation) marked by some peculiar proprietas, or property. Calvin says :
" The entire nature is understood to be in each hypostasis, with the
distinctive property peculiar to each. The whole Father is in the Son,
the whole Son is in the Father ; as he himself said, ' I in the Father
and the Father in me ' (John xiv. 11) ; nor is one separated from the other
by any difference of essence, as ecclesiastical writers concede." And he
quotes with approval Augustine : " By these appellations which denote dis
tinction is meant the peculiarity in which they are reciprocally related to
each other, not the substance itself in which they are one " (" Inst." Lib. i.,
cap. xiii. 19). And Augustine says : " In that Trinity one is as much as the
three together, nor are two anything more than one. They are infinite in
themselves. So they are each in each, and all in each, and each in all, and
all in all, and all are one " (" De Trinitate," Lib. vi. cap. x. 12).

334 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
and the whole tenor of their teaching demonstrate that this is not
their meaning ; they mean that, while God exists in these three
distinguishable modes of being, it is one and the same God who
exists in each. This seems intelligible and consistent. Its mean
ing, consistency, and possibility may be illustrated from the analogy
of the human personality. A man is one and the same person in
three modes of being, — reason, free will, and susceptibility to ra
tional motives. These are not mere modes of manifestation, but
are inherent in his constitution or essential being as a person, be
fore he has ever revealed them in action. They are not quan
titative parts of the human person, because as a person he is
indivisible ; they are modes of being essential in his personality.
They are not faculties or attributes, but are names of the un
divided person in these several modes of being. It is the whole
undivided person that thinks and knows in the reason, determines
the direction and exertion of his energy in the free will, and feels
himself in the impulse of motives and the reaction of emotions.
And yet in each mode of being is a peculiarity by which the per
son is distinguished from himself in another mode of being, and
comes into a peculiar relation to himself in that other mode. The
mind knowing truth is distinguished by that peculiarity as reason
from the will, which is the same mind directing and exerting its
energy ; and in each of these modes of being it is distinguished
from the same mind conscious of feeling. Hence we cannot
know the human person in the full development of his personality
until we know him in all three of these modes of being. Theolo
gians in all ages have held that, since man is in the image of God,
he is in the image of the Trinity, of the one God, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.1 We see clearly the similitude as to the point that
the one indivisible God is in each of the modes of being which
are known by the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and yet is
distinguished therein from what he is in each other mode ; and
that we cannot fully know God in his personality till we know
him in all three of his modes of being. It is commonly said
that the distinction of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a distinc
tion in the personality of God. More properly, it is a distinction in
God, the absolute personal Spirit. We now see that it is inherent
in the constitution of man as a personal being and essential to the
idea of personality that there be one person in three modes of
1 See Augustine, " Trinity," Books ix.-xv.

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 335
being. A tri-unity is essential to personality, whether in the ab
solute Spirit or in a finite person, like man. This analogy proves
also that there is no inconsistency or contradiction of reason in
the doctrine that the one only God is Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. It also helps us intelligently to apprehend the doctrine.
But this does not remove all mystery from the idea of God.
We are not to suppose that because God is personal like man,
and man as personal is an image or adumbration of the Trinity,
therefore God is altogether like one of us, and that we compass
him in our finite thought and see him on every side. We are not
to suppose that God the Father is Reason, that God the Son is
Will, that God the Spirit is Feeling. In each mode of being it
is the one God, the absolute Spirit, with all the essential attri
butes of personal spirit. The analogy is between beings that differ
by the whole breadth between the absolute and the finite. It
helps us to apprehend God, but not to comprehend him. He is
always the absolute Being, and always transcends us. Through
his revelation of himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he has
opened to us vistas into his being wider, deeper, and clearer than
any other revelation has opened. And for that very reason his
absoluteness and transcendence stand out to view more massive
and overawing. Enlarging the area of clear vision necessarily
enlarges the visible horizon of the unknown which encircles it.
And because God is the absolute and all-perfect Being, the three
modes of his personal being transcend the three forms of human
personality, as the absolute and infinite must transcend the depend
ent and the finite.
It may be objected that this representation of the three in one
and the one in three falls short of the biblical representations of
the three : one sends and another is sent ; one speaks to another ;
they are distinguished by the pronouns, I, thou, and he ; one is
called the Word of God, and the only-begotten. So far as these
forms of expression pertain to Jesus in his earthly life, they may
be explained by the peculiarity of his state of humiliation in the
flesh. But in their highest application to the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, there is a real though less complete analogy
with the human person. A man's reason is said to command his
will ; his will is said to obey his reason, to consent to its prin
ciples and laws ; his feelings are said to overpower him, to run
away with him ; his will resists, subdues, rules over his feelings ;

336 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Socrates says that thinking is the mind conversing with itself. The
man is said to be in conflict with himself, to reproach himself, to
be ashamed of 'himself, to indulge himself, to command himself, to
compel himself to do what he does not wish to do. Paul speaks of
the conflict of the two egos within himself. Such forms of repre
sentation, expressing so exactly the consciousness of a finite per
son, may indicate analogous distinctions in the consciousness ofthe
infinite God properly demanding representations like those of the
Bible for their adequate expression. These analogies may help us
to see a real significance and consistency in the doctrine of the
Trinity. But it must be remembered that they are mere analogies
of the finite and dependent with the absolute and unconditioned ;
and that, therefore, the divine Trinity, however great its revelation
of God, must transcend all finite analogies.
I cannot here enter further into the consideration of questions
pertaining to the relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the
internal being of God. I only add that, whatever the meaning of
the scriptural representations alluded to, I must still insist, with
Augustine and Calvin arid the greatest divines who have left us their
matured thoughts on the Trinity, that the various appellations and
representations by which the scriptures set forth the distinction
of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit indicate God himself in a pecu
liar mode of being wherein he is distinguished, by some peculiar
property or relation, from himself in another mode of being, and
always bring us back to the oneness of the one only God in these
three modes of being. Any interpretation of these scriptural rep
resentations incompatible with this drives us to tritheism, and
thus contradicts the scriptural revelation of God in its wholeness,
in its fundamental principles, and in its unity and continuity from
beginning to end. No one can doubt that Jesus himself and
the writers of the Bible were believers in one only God. We
know God as the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, only as
he has revealed himself. This revelation compels us to infer that
he exists thus eternally. But if we attempt to pass beyond the
created universe and God's revelation of himself in it, and try to
picture how God existed and acted as three in one before any
thing was created, we necessarily fail, for we transcend the limits
of the human mind.
Some of the Christian fathers, especially among the Greeks,
held to a subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father.

THE TRINITY :— REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 337
The view which I have presented excludes this subordination, at
least in the sense of inferiority or dependence or beginning of
existence in time. Gieseler says that all subordination in the
Trinity was effectually excluded by Augustine in his teaching that
the Father, Son, and Spirit are numerically one and the same in
essential being. But Professor Charles Hodge says : " This does
indeed preclude all priority and all superiority as to being and
perfection. But it does not preclude subordination as to the
mode of subsistence and operation. This is distinctly recognized
in Scripture, and was as fully taught by Augustine as by any of
the Greek fathers, and is even more distinctly affirmed in the so-
called Athanasian Creed, representing the school of Augustine,
than in the creed of the Council of Nice. There is, therefore, no
just ground of objection to the Nicene Creed for what it teaches
on that subject. It does not go beyond the facts of Scripture." J
Such a subordination is indicated in the names Son and Word
of God, and in Christ's representation of the Holy Spirit as sent
by the Son from the Father. And it is in and through the Son
that God creates and develops the universe, physical and spiritual ;
and in the Spirit he abides in it and brings all the influences and
agencies of God's righteousness and grace to a focus on the hearts
of men. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Son is called the
effulgence or outshining of God's glory and the very image of his
substance. This comparison with the sun has been used in all the
ages ever since. The sun, shutting its light within itself, cannot
itself be seen, and the universe is in darkness and cold and death.
The light bursting forth illuminates, warms, and vivifies the
universe, and is itself revealed in its overpowering glory. The
sunbeams reflected and refracted in the atmosphere create the
diffused and genial daylight, and, resting on the earth, unsoiled by
the contact and touching every earthly thing, bring out whatever
of beauty or vitality is hidden in it. And the light is one and the
same, whether in the sun, or streaming forth through space, or
resting on the earth and nourishing all things. So the Father is
the original fountain and source of light and life and energy ; in
the Son he goes forth in creating the universe and energizing in
it, and in the Spirit he abides in the universe, and especially in the
spiritual system, quickening spiritual life and carrying forward the
great designs of his wisdom and love. And yet in all conditions
1 Systematic Theology, vol. i. p. 464.
vol. 1. — 22

338 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
and modes of manifestation it is one and the same God. And if
we would carry our thought beyond the beginning of the created
universe, God is never a dead thing, but is eternally active, and
in himself must be the agent and the object of his action, the
thinker and the object of his thought. And the object must in
some sense be second to the agent, the object of thought to the
thinker, and the medium of their conscious unity must be in some
sense the third. This the Greeks designated as Trepixuiprjcns, the
circulating energy within the absolute God. And this was called
the eternal generation, not as having beginning or end, but simply
as declaring that the relation of Father and Son and all the recip
rocal action involved in it are eternal in the essence of God.
God is eternal, ceaseless energy. Here we are trying to pass
into that eternal sphere which transcends all power of imagination
to picture. But this we know, — that in it all, whether within his
own eternal being or energizing in the creation, it is the one only
indivisible God ; and that in him, Father, Son, and Spirit, there
is no subordination in the sense of inferiority or dependence or
beginning. 4. The Trinity is the word used in theology to designate the
one only God thus eternally existing as Father, Son, and Spirit.
It denotes tri-unity ; three in one, not three and one.
The Bible does not give the name Trinity nor explicitly for
mulate the doctrine. This, however, does not disprove it. We
have ascertained the three elements of the biblical conception
of God. If we combine these in a unity of thought, we have
the Trinity. Any other conception, Sabellian, Arian, or Soci-
nian, leaves out one or another of the three elements of
the biblical idea of God. The doctrine of the Trinity merely
expresses or formulates the biblical revelation of the one God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is a sufficient proof of the
doctrine. We also find the elements of the doctrine brought together in
the biblical representation in a way which necessarily implies the
Trinity. They are thus joined in the formula of baptism. The
baptism is to be in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit ; in the name, as of one, — not in the names, as of three.
They are also joined in a similar manner in the apostolic bene
diction ; in our Lord's parting address to his disciples ; in
Paul's account of the distribution of spiritual gifts; in Peter's

THE TRINITY: — REVELATION OF GOD IN CHRIST 339
recognition of the three in the redemption of man ; and in the
baptism of Jesus.1
The objection that neither the word Trinity nor any explicit
formulation of the doctrine is in the Bible is equally valid against
all theological thought, or, what is the same thing, against all
attempts to gain true and clear ideas of what the Bible teaches.
Christianity, free agency, free will, the personal God, and many
other familiar words and phrases are not in the Bible ; but the
realities which they denote are there. The fact that a truth of
God is revealed in its practical relations rather than in a scien
tific formula does not make it any less a truth. If the elements
of a great reality are separately revealed, and a theological doc
trine fairly takes them up and expresses them, the doctrine is as
true as if it had been formulated in the revelation. It does not
become a human invention any more than the scientific law of
gravitation is a human invention because it merely formulates the
result of scientific thought on many observed facts. The law of
gravitation is not formulated in nature any more than the doc
trine of the Trinity is formulated in the Bible. Both in the
physical and the spiritual worlds God acts before us and reveals
himself in the action, and leaves us to interpret his action and
declare its significance. There is no more science in nature
than there is theology in the Bible. But neither in the one
nor the other are our scientific statements of the facts and their
laws false.
It is objected that the doctrine of the Trinity was not held by
the Christian fathers during the first three centuries of the Chris
tian era. But the elements of the doctrine were held by the
ante-Nicene fathers, and thought was already busy in attempting
to grasp and formulate them. In faith in the God in Christ the
church was founded and began its career of conquest ; in this
faith its apostles and missionaries preached and its martyrs died.
This objection also, like the former, is an objection against all
theological thinking. The study of God's revelations of himself,
in order to define clearly what they reveal, to learn their signifi
cance, and to comprehend them all in their harmonious relations
and their unity as revelations of God, must be a work of time.
Therefore the history of the doctrine in the first centuries, instead
1 Matth. xxviii. 19; 2 Cor. xiii. 14; John xiv.-xvii. ; 1 Cor. xii. 4, 5; r
Pet. i. 1, 2; Matth. iii. 16, 17.

340 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
of being an objection to it, is rather an evidence of its truth. It
shows that this doctrine stood forth so conspicuously in the life
and teachings of Christ and the apostles that it forced itself on
the attention of the early churches, and was one of the first to be
discussed and formulated. The whole history shows that it was
not the discussion and formulating of the doctrine which pro
duced the belief of its truth ; but it was the practical living faith
in the God in Christ, in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which
produced the discussion and led to the formulating of the doc
trine. Professor Goltz says : " There were Christians before the
ecclesiastical dogma of Christ was formulated, and who had no
knowledge of it. Therefore it was not the dogma concerning
Christ which generated Christianity, but the historical personality
of Jesus that generated the doctrine respecting him. . . . What
was Christ, the historical founder of Christianity, in the inmost
core of his being? What made Jesus of Nazareth into the Christ
of God, into the centre of divine revelation and sacred history,
into the centre of his own testimony and of the apostolic preach
ing, into the personal, living ground of the church in its doctrine,
culture, and conduct, into the pivotal point of Christian piety in
faith, hope, and love?"1 It is precisely because Jesus was what
he was, and his testimony respecting himself and the testimony
of the apostles respecting him were what they were, that the
Christians trusted and worshiped and served him, and were
i ready to die for him as the God in Christ reconciling the world
unto himself, and in and through him found the one God re
vealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
1 Die Christlichen Grundwahrheiten, pp. 134, 135,

CHAPTER IX
the trinity : — ITS philosophical significance
The doctrine of the Trinity presents to the intellect the clear
est, most comprehensive, and reasonable idea of God and of his
relations to the universe.
I. The Idea of God. — The Trinity proves itself to be, in
its essential contents, the only worthy and satisfactory philo
sophical conception of God and of his revelation of himself in
the finite. As revealed in the God in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself, it is essential to supplement the half truths
of philosophy, to clear away its seeming contradictions, to har
monize the philosophical conception of God with that of religious
faith and the revelation in the Bible, and to give a reasonable,
comprehensive, and self-consistent idea of him.
i. In the Trinity the two phases of the idea of God as the
absolute Being and as personal Spirit are comprehended in unity.
Philosophy, trying to comprehend God merely as the absolute
Being, often misses the way and loses itself in the abyss of agnos
ticism. The absolute becomes an adjective without a noun, a
negative idea without positive contents, a being identified with
non-being, a zero which is the symbol of the cessation of thought.
On the other hand, when men think of God only as a personal
spirit, his absoluteness is overlooked and God is regarded merely
as a magnified man. But the Trinity combines both aspects of
the absolute Spirit and presents them in harmony and unity in
God. It gives full emphasis both to his personality and to his
absoluteness. It reveals his absoluteness in his personality, as
that which gives the absolute positive contents. It presents God
as the personal Spirit more clearly and forcibly than any other
conception of him. It opens out his personality to us, amplifies
cur knowledge of it, and discloses in him a personality of which

342 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the personality of man is a true likeness. It reveals the mani-
foldness of his wisdom and the variety and intimacy of his rela
tions to man. But in its revelation of God as spirit it keeps ever
before us his absoluteness, and awes us with his transcendent
majesty and his incomprehensible infinitude. As the revelation
of his personality goes on, the absolute Being more and more
opens to our view like a mountain through the breaking and lift
ing mists. In his revelation of himself as the Trinity he reveals
his love in its breadth and length and height and depth, so that
we can, as it were, take the gauge and dimensions of it and know
the love of God in Christ, and yet find that it passeth knowledge.
It opens vistas of insight into the internal constitution of God.
But the deeper insight into his being only awes us the more in
the vision of his absoluteness, and discloses the more the clouds
and darkness which are round about him. We even think we
see in the personality of man a certain likeness to the Trinity in
the personality of God. For man exists as one person in three
modes of being, — as reason, as free will, and as susceptible of
being conscious of self as blessed in the perfect realization of his
own ideals of wisdom and love. But in the revelation of the
one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is plain that, however
near he brings himself to us in his three modes of being, he tran^
scends us therein by the whole distance from the finite to the
infinite or absolute. The greatness and sublimity of his revela
tion of himself as the Trinity all the more compels us to exclaim,
" Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways ; how small a whis
per do we hear of him ; but the thunder of his power who can
understand? " (Job xxvi. 14). The more we know of him, the
more the unknown comes in sight. The doctrine of the Trinity
does not permit us to lose the absoluteness of God in his per
sonality as Spirit, nor his personality as Spirit in his absoluteness.
A common difficulty of philosophy in accepting theism has
been the objection that the absolute cannot act in the finite nor
even co-exist with a finite universe, because he would be thereby
conditioned and limited. This has led, on the one hand, to the
overlooking of the absoluteness of the Deity, and, thinking only of
his personality in the likeness of man, to the disintegrating of the
divine into a multitude of finite gods. Or, on the other hand, it
has led to the losing of the personal Spirit in the abstract absolute,
and so sinking into the void of agnosticism or the morass of pan-

THE TRINITY: — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 343
theism. The biblical revelation does not philosophize on this
difficulty. But in it God reveals himself as the absolute Spirit
creating and evolving a finite universe and ever acting in it. In
his absolute being he is the universal Father. But in the biblical
revelation the Father is represented as creating the universe and
administering it through or in the Son or Word. All God's reve
lations of himself in the finite universe are through or in the Son
or Word. " There is but one God, the Father, from whom are
all things, and we for him ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through
whom are all things, and we through him " (1 Cor. viii. 6). The
universe being created, and rational persons in the likeness of God,
who is a Spirit, having been created in it, he abides ever in it as
the Spirit of Holiness, using all the influences of wisdom and love
to develop these persons in his own moral and spiritual likeness
in the life of love, and so is progressively realizing his eternal
archetype of all perfection and well-being possible to be realized
in a finite universe, including rational but finite free agents, which
is the great end for which the universe is created and, evolved.
This threefold potentiality is eternal in God as the absolute Spirit ;
not merely three modes of action or manifestation in time, but
three modes of being eternal in himself, the absolute Spirit,
whereby it is possible for him, without ceasing to be the absolute
and infinite, to act in the finite, and in the creation and evolution
of the finite universe to reveal himself as personal Spirit, glorious
in all spiritual perfection. And he is one and the same God, re
vealed in each eternal mode of being, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. From this point of view, the incarnation of God in Christ
becomes antecedently probable. If God can reveal himself in
material things, how much more may he reveal himself in man.
And if every man is a personal spirit and as such in the likeness
of God and a revelation of God, it is easily conceivable that God
should reveal himself in Jesus Christ, taking possession of and
acting in and through the organization and nature of man, and so
revealing just what God's character would be, and how he would
speak and act, if under human limitations and conditions. We
have also seen that the coming of God in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself, is the continuance and development of his
kingdom and of the revelation of himself as the Son or Word of
God, in Jehovah, the covenant God of his people as recorded in

344 GOD> THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the Old Testament. And it has been continued through all ages
since Christ, in the Holy Spirit, in whom the redemptive energy
of the Son or Logos in Jehovah, the covenant God of Israel, and
afterwards in Christ, is delocalized and made universal, and God,
as the Spirit of Holiness, continues historically active among men
through all ages, developing the same. kingdom of universal love
and gathering men into it on earth and into the glory and blessed
ness of life immortal with Christ.
Therefore the coming of God into humanity in Christ is the
central fact in human history, to which all before it looked for
ward and from which the subsequent progress of man to the
realization of the ideals of perfection and well-being has issued.
And only in the light of this central fact is any true philosophy
of human history, any true and complete conception of the real
significance of human life and of the ideals of perfection and well-
being to be realized in it, possible.
In view of this central fact in human history, this greatest of
miracles, we must see that it is antecedently probable that the
birth of the divine man, our Saviour, would be miraculous, and
that after death he would rise from the grave, triumphant over
death, and receive the answer to his own prayer, " Now, O Father,
glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had
with thee before the world was" (John xvii. 5).
We see revealed in the humiliation or self-emptying (kenosis,
Phil. ii. 7) of the Son of God in Christ, the universality and
supremacy of the law of love, the highest coming down to the
lowest to lift it up. In fact all God's action in the Son or Logos
is in conformity with this law, the highest stooping as it were
from his supreme absoluteness to act in the finite, creating and
evolving the universe in the forms of space and time. Therefore
God coming into humanity in Christ only continues and carries to
its highest conceivable form his revelation of himself in the Son or
Logos creating and evolving the universe in accordance with the
universal law, the highest coming down to the lowest to lift it up.
Here, again, we see the antecedent probability of the coming of
God into humanity in Christ. It is only carrying to its highest
conceivable form the revelation of himself which from the begin
ning God has been making in the creation and evolution of the
universe in harmony with the law of self-renouncing love, the
highest coming down to the lowest to lift it up. Here we also

THE TRINITY : — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 345
see, not only the basis of the true philosophy of human history, but
also the fundamental law which must have regulated God's revela
tion of himself to rational beings in all worlds. We know not the
precise way in which God has revealed himself in other worlds.
But because God is everywhere the same, we know that he must
have revealed himself in the likeness of finite rational persons,
seeking them in love to bring them into communion and union
with himself in loving and obedient trust, and acting in accord
ance with the law of all his action in the universe, the highest com
ing down to the lowest to lift it up, — a revelation, whatever its form,
as complete and effective as the revelation in Christ. All rational
beings are in the likeness of God, the eternal Spirit ; and God
will reveal himself to them as spirit like themselves, the human
side of God, and will reveal his eternal love and his affinity for
them, seeking them to bring them into communion and union
with himself in love, and so to develop them to their highest per
fection and well-being, so that, like him, they may seek all who
are beneath them to lift them up. We know not the form in
which God will reveal himself in Christ glorified to the glorified
spirits in heaven. But he will reveal the human side of God, and
the divine side of man. He will reveal God in the fulness of his
love for man as plainly as Christ revealed it on earth. He will
reveal humanity realizing its ideal in the likeness of God and
glorified in communion with him, realizing in completeness that
fellowship with God which through Christ, and the Holy Spirit
dwelling in us, begins on earth. " Truly our fellowship is with the
Father, and with his Son, Jesus Christ" (r John i. 3). And in
like manner all rational persons from all worlds, who have livea
and are living lives of universal love, will find God revealed in the
Son in their own likeness, seeing him, as it were, face to face. So
will be fulfilled in the immortal life in glory the sublime declara
tion of Paul respecting the Christ glorified as the Son of God :
" Wherefore God hath highly exalted him and given him the
name which is above every name ; that in the name of Jesus
every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth
and things under the earth ; and that every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father " (Phil.
ii. 9-11).
Therefore the Son of God, in whom God is revealed in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself, is the same who is revealed in

346 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the creation and evolution of the universe. The incarnation, as
the highest form in which the Son of God reveals himself in the
finite, is a central fact in the creation and evolution of the uni
verse. In it he reveals God's likeness to his rational creatures,
his affinity for them, his love descending to the lowest to lift them
up to fellowship and union with himself, his development of his
kingdom on earth and in the life immortal, the grand archetypal
ideal for the realization of which he has brought the universe into
being, and is ever active in its development. In whatever analo
gous form he may have revealed himself to rational persons in
other worlds, it must be the revelation of the same God in his
likeness to his rational creatures and in his love for them, seeking
them in love to draw them to himself in the life of universal love,
the highest coming down to the lowest to lift them up and form
them into his own moral likeness in similar condescending and
self- renouncing love, and progressively realizing the same arche
typal ideal in the kingdom of God. All rational persons from all
worlds who have lived and are living the life of love, when they
attain the heavenly glory, will see the Son of God in their own
likeness, presenting the human side of God as plainly as Christ
did when on earth, but the humanity glorified. Then, when they
look upon one another, they will see one another in the likeness
of God, saved and purified and glorified by God's condescending
love, and will all be in unison in their common relation to God as
revealed to men in Christ and their common interest in the king
dom of God and the continued progressive realization, in heights
of glory inconceivable by us, of God's archetypal ideal of all pos
sible perfection and well-being.
This opens to us the meaning of Paul : "We, who are many,
are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another "
(Rom. xii. 4, 5). It gives us insight into the grander outlook
opened to him in writing one of his later epistles : " Having
made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good
pleasure which he purposed in him unto a dispensation of the
fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in
the heavens, and the things upon the earth ; in him, I say, in
whom also we were made a heritage" (Eph. i. 10). It even
gives us some glimpse of the meaning of Christ's own wonderful
words: "That they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me
and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. . . . The glory

THE TRINITY : — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 347
which thou hast given me I have given unto them, that they may
be one, even as we are one ; I in them, and thou in me, that they
may be perfected into one ... I will that where I am, they also
may be with me, that they may behold my glory " (John xvii.
2t-24). 2. In the Trinity the two phases of the idea of God as the one
and the manifold are comprehended in harmony and unity ; the
one is revealed h» different modes of being and in manifold mani
festations. Philosophy has often fallen into the error that the
absolute One must be a self-inclusive Monad that admits of no
being beside itself ; to the absolute One there can be no other.
From a false conception of the absolute it infers that the real
existence of a finite being would imply a limitation of the abso
lute. Therefore it denies that God can create a universe, or any
real being that is finite.- It falls into further error, and ascribes
to God a simplicity of being, incompatible with his having dis
tinctive attributes. It argues that to ascribe to him reason, free
will, or blessedness, wisdom, power, or love, would imply division
and limitation. Thus, again, philosophy falls into agnosticism ;
the absolute Being, shut up within itself and stripped of all dis
tinctive attributes, is reduced to a zero, the symbol of the cessa
tion of thought. On the other hand, when men fix their attention
only on the manifold powers of the absolute revealed in the uni
verse, they have lost the unity of God and have become polytheists.
They worship many gods severally revealed in the powers of
nature. But the Trinity takes up the oneness and the manifold-
ness of God and comprehends them in harmony and unity. In
the Trinity the One finds its Other, and its unity with it, within
itself. In this Other, God sees himself as the object of his own
knowledge. Therein he sees the archetype of all truth, right,
perfection, and good which almightiness, inspired and guided by
love and wisdom, can ever express. In creating the universe and
energizing in it, he is progressively expressing this archetype of
his own perfection of power, love, and wisdom, by giving it reality
in the finite, and thus is, as it were, ever becoming conscious of
himself and of his own perfection as progressively revealed in the
universe in the forms of space and time. Thus the universe
becomes the ever evolving expression of the perfection of God,
the temporal becomes the ever " moving image of the eternal."
Thus God sees himself not only in the Other within himself, but

348 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
also as revealed in the universe. In thus knowing and revealing
himself as the Trinity, God reveals himself as not shut up within
himself incommunicably in a self-inclusive simplicity, but as
coming forth in creating the universe and energizing in it, as
bringing into it moral beings in a moral system, who are objects
of his love, as revealing himself in it in Christ and his ever-present
Spirit redeeming men from sin and establishing his kingdom of
righteousness and peace. To men he communicates the riches
of his grace, and brings them into communion with himself. His
is no longer the incommunicable name, but the name ofthe Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost, into which every believer is to be baptized.
3. The Trinity comprehends in harmony and unity the two
aspects of God as transcending the universe and immanent in it.
Philosophy, considering God as transcending the universe, falls
into the error of isolating him from it. Either he is regarded as
the First Cause, remote in the beginning, the creator of the uni
verse but not immanent in it, — or as too great to concern himself
with the trivial interests of finite beings, — or as too pure to defile
himself by creating the universe, or, after some demiurge has
created it, by immanence in it. Or, in view of sin and suffering,
it supposes an eternal power of evil independent of God. On
the other hand, considering God's immanence in the universe,
philosophy lapses into pantheism and identifies the universe with
God. But in the Trinity God reveals himself as at once tran
scending the universe and immanent in it. He sees it distinct
from himself, yet always dependent on him. He sees it revealing
his perfections and declaring his glory. In it are persons in his own
likeness, who are the objects of his providential care, his righteous
government, and his universal love. Instead of being too pure
and holy to be in the universe, as Greek philosophy in some of
its forms was teaching, he in Christ enters into humanity, mingles
with sinners, and participates in their sorrows to redeem them
from their sins.
4. The revelation of God as the Trinity is the basis for com
prehending him as eternally active within his own absolute being
independently ofthe creation.
The action in which God reveals himself is action in creating
and administering the universe. The objection is urged that thus
God's action is only relative to the universe, and therefore con
ditioned and limited. But because God reveals himself by action

THE TRINITY : — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 349
on and in the universe, it does not follow that he cannot act
otherwise. It is evident that God is never dead substance, but
the eternally living and acting God. As absolute Being he can
not be dependent on the universe, but must be eternally capable
of activity within himself, and independent of the universe. And
it is involved in his personality that his action must be eternally
self-exertive, self-directive, and free. He " shall neither slumber
nor sleep." Various inadequate attempts have been made to
reach a philosophical solution of this problem. If with Philo we
describe God as an overflowing cup, his fulness necessarily over
flowing into creation, or if, on the other hand, he is conceived
as having wants, to satisfy which he must create the universe, in
either case he is represented as dependent on the universe and
conditioned by it. If, with Julius Muller and Dorner, we say that
if God is the absolute and unconditioned, he must be the cause
of his own being, must create himself, otherwise God would be
conditioned and limited by the constitution of his own being,
which he did not cause or create, — then we get, indeed, the con
ception of eternal activity, but God is resolved into mere action
(actus purus) . This supposes action abstracted from the agent,
and this abstracted action creates the agent; it supposes the
exertion of power without a being to exert it, and this abstracted
exertion creates the being who puts forth the exertion. Thus the
GnosfTc abyss of nothingness reappears as the origin of all things,
and the absolute becomes a mere zero, or symbol of the cessation
of thought. If, rejecting this absurdity, we swing to the opposite
extreme, and say with Spinoza that God is the one only substance,
then he cannot create a universe, he is not the efficient transitive
cause of anything, he cannot act or cause any effect in time and
space. He is thus limited by being shut out of time and space
and shut up in his own being, as really as finite beings are limited
by being shut up within time and space and unable to transcend
them. The necessary inference is that all the finite is an illusion ;
that there are no finite beings having any real existence, no intel
ligent beings in a rational and moral system to whom God may
reveal himself; and, if there were, that God could not reveal
himself to them. Then God himself sinks to an unknowable and
an unthinkable, a zero which denotes the cessation of thought,
and the universe and all knowledge would be overwhelmed in a
hopeless vortex of Nihilism.

350 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
But in the trinitarian conception God is the absolute Spirit,
eternally active as at once the subject and the object of his own
knowledge, love, and action.1 And because he sees eternally in
his own Reason the archetype of the universe which he has freely
chosen to be realized in the forms of space and time, he eternally
sees himself revealed to himself as he will progressively reveal
himself to his creatures in time. Thus in the Trinity, without
attempting to picture it in the imagination, we find a reasonable
basis for thinking of God as eternally active within himself inde
pendently of the universe. In the universe he progressively
expresses in the forms of space and time the thought which in
himself is archetypal and eternal. Thus time is the progressive
revelation of eternity. Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity. — Shelley.
Thus the Trinity is the basis for comprehending God as eternally
active within his own absolute being independently of the creation.
5. The Trinity is also a basis for a reasonable apprehension of
God's action revealing himself in the universe, while not identified
with it. Thus it is a basis for answering objections urged by
false philosophy against the possibility of his so acting and re
vealing himself. Thus we may find that we must go back to the
Trinity as the ultimate basis of the world-process and of all
scientific knowledge of it.
The Scriptures represent God the Father as being in himself
unrevealed in any creative act, and therefore, as thus unrevealed
by his own action, unapproachable and unknowable in his absolute
being. " No man hath seen God at any time ; the only begotten
Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him "
(John i. 18). And Christ himself says : " Neither doth any
one know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son
willeth to reveal him " (Matth. xi. 27). But God as the Word
or Son is represented as no longer shut up within his own being,
but also as coming forth in creating the universe and acting in it,
which is distinct from him while always dependent on him
1 Oh Light eternal, sole in thyself that dwellest,
Sole knowest thyself and known unto thyself,
And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself.
Dante, Paradise, Canto xxxiii. 125.

THE TRINITY: — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 351
(John i. r-s ) . Accordingly, the Son is spoken of as " the out
shining of God's glory and the very image of his substance "
(Heb. i. 3). God is represented as coming forth also in the
Holy Spirit, " whom," Christ says, " the Father will send in my
name," and " whom," he also says, " I will send unto you from
the Father, even the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the
Father" (John xiv. 26; xv. 26). The Father and the Son
are here represented by Jesus as uniting in sending the Holy
Spirit and thus as concurrently bringing into the universe in him
the energies of God in the three modes of his eternal being.
Thus in him God is ever immanent and active in the universe,
and especially as the Spirit of Holiness, abiding with men forever,
quickening them to the life of love and advancing God's kingdom
of righteousness and good-will. The theological doctrine, that
the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, is derived
directly from these teachings of Christ. The Eastern church omits
" and the Son." Thus it fails to express the full truth as Christ
declared it, and so misses an essential and important part of the
significance of the mission of the Holy Spirit. In the Spirit all
the energies of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit go forth
unitedly into the universe and are immanent and active in it in
advancing the great ends of divine wisdom and love for which it
exists. The circuit (Tn-pixuprjo-is) of God's eternal action in the
three modes of his absolute being, independent of the creation, is
always within himself in conscious oneness. So, in his action in
the universe revealing himself in the eternal distinctions in his
being, the divine energy concentrates itself in unity in the Holy
Spirit. So Peter represents this concurrence in unity in the
redemption of a sinner : '• elect according to the foreknowledge
of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto
obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Christ " (1 Pet. i. 1, 2).
Thus in the Spirit all the divine influences and energies of re
deeming grace are united and may be concentrated in a focus
on every individual heart, to quicken it to the life of faith and
love. Thus it brings every soul into contact with the heavenly
influences which bathe it like the sunshine, and thereby into
immediate connection with God; and every willingly receptive
spirit is penetrated by the divine energy and through the in
dwelling of the divine Spirit is quickened and nourished by the
all-pervading love of God. Augustine calls attention to the fact

352 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
that the Spirit in its relation to the Father and Son is called by
the name which designates God : " God is a Spirit." Qf this he
says : " Therefore the Holy Spirit is a certain unutterable com
munion of the Father and the Son, and on that account, perhaps,
he is so called, because the same name is suitable both to the
Father and the Son. For he himself is called specially that
which they are called in common; because both the Father is
spirit and the Son is spirit, both the Father is holy and the Son is
holy. In order, therefore, that the communion of both may be
signified by a name which is suitable to both, the Holy Spirit is
called the gift of both."1 The Spirit perpetuates and carries
forward through all time the redemptive work of God in Christ.
So Christ represents his work : " When he, the Spirit of truth, is
come, he will guide you into all the truth ; for he shall not speak
from himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak.
He shall glorify me, for he shall take of mine and shall declare it
unto you" (John xvi. 13, 14). This concurrence of God,
Father, Son, and Spirit, in carrying forward the work of re
demption through all time, is recognized by Christ, who says
indiscriminately, " the Comforter whom I will send unto you from,
the Father, even the Spirit of truth, that proceedeth from the
Father," and, "the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in
my name" (John xv. 26; xiv. 26).
In Hegel's Trinity the absolute Being is conceived as evolving
itself into the universe and returning into itself enriched with the
consciousness of itself as revealed to itself in the universe. Here
the Spirit, the third in the Trinity, is conceived as God thus
returning into himself conscious of himself in his oneness in this
threefold form. But because Hegel's conception is pantheistic it
loses all real significance. The absolute is impersonal and
unconscious. It comes to consciousness only in the conscious
ness of finite beings. Thus the absolute as self-conscious is
divided into innumerable individuals, each having his separate
self-consciousness, and the absolute is incapable of any unity of
consciousness in itself. Pantheism can preserve the unity of the
absolute Being only by denying the reality of any finite being and
therefore of any finite person. Finite beings must be regarded as
mere modes of the existence of the one absolute Being. Thus all
1 Trinity, Bk. v., chap. xi. 12.

THE TRINITY:— ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 353
real personality and freedom are lost and a moral system in any
true significance cannot exist. Notwithstanding this, Hegel
regards Jesus Christ as the man who first recognized his nature to
be divine, and in whom God first knew himself in humanity.
But this is incompatible with pantheism and loses all real
significance if forced into pantheistic modes of thought. The
Hegelian Trinity suggests truth, but gropes in vain for its real
significance and its adequate expression. These are found only
in the Christian Trinity.
As reason and will are inseparable in idea, so they are revealed
as inseparable in the universe. For what science finds every
where in the universe is power acting in conformity with
principles and laws of reason. Accordingly Hartmann says : " The
whole world-process is, in its content, only a logical process, but
in its actual existence, a continuous action of will." Here is a
great truth which is recognized with real significance in the
Christian Trinity, but which in the forms of pantheism loses all
real meaning. Reason and will, as Hartmann uses the words, are
unconscious and impersonal, therefore not reason and will to
which we can attach any meaning. Reason and will in unity
constitute personality. Hartmann falls into the contradiction of
affirming their existence in unity and denying the personality,
and then identifying them with the unconscious and impersonal
world-process. This exemplifies a characteristic of Hegel's philosophy and of
pantheistic thinking since his day. It takes up some truth or
fact presented in Christianity. An attempt is made to find a
basis for it in pantheistic philosophy. This may suggest to a
Christian thinker thoughts helpful in attaining a reasonable
explanation and vindication of the Christian doctrine. But the
attempt to find in pantheistic philosophy a basis for the Christian
doctrine is necessarily unavailing, because pantheism is a philo
sophy which destroys all real significance in the Christian truths
themselves, and in the thoughts suggested for their justification
and explanation. Hence the remarkable fact that this Hegelian
philosophy is always approximating to theistic and even to
distinctively Christian ideas, but is never able to give their real
significance and their adequate expression. On the contrary,
their real significance drops out.
vol. 1. — 23

354 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Here is one danger in philosophical theology .at the present
time. It is the danger of being led by the truth suggested by
these explanations to embrace the pantheistic philosophy which
underlies them, and so to lose the personal God and the moral
system altogether. This is possible, because pantheism is a one
sided, narrow, and erroneous conception of God's immanence in
the universe. Christianity also declares this immanence, but
comprehends with it all complemental truths, which pantheism
overlooks. Christianity itself has given the conception of God,
which pantheistic speculations attempt to explain and justify to
the reason. The very ideas which pantheism suggests, and by
which Christian thinkers are in danger of being fascinated into
pantheism, are presented by Christianity in their real significance,
with more clearness and power, and with a comprehensiveness
which escapes the contradictions of pantheism, and holds the
truth in harmony with the full-orbed compass of divine revelation
and rational philosophy. The great safeguard against the present
tendency to pantheistic conceptions of God is the Christian reve
lation of the Christian Trinity, the God in Christ, and the ever-
present Spirit of Holiness dwelling in every receptive soul. And
this is, philosophically considered, the only worthy, complete, and
satisfactory conception of God ever presented to the human mind.
It is the only one which presents a satisfactory comprehension of
God as at once absolute Being and personal Spirit, of the co
existence and the distinction of the absolute and the finite, and
of the revelation of the absolute in the finite.
God reveals himself as a Trinity in the universe pre-eminently
in his action in redeeming man from sin. This we should natur
ally expect ; the moral system consists of the highest order of
created beings ; therefore, in creating such beings and dealing
with them in a moral system under the moral law, God makes the
highest and fullest revelation of himself. But it is reasonable to
expect to find some revelation of the Trinity in the constitution
of man and even in the physical system. Accordingly, profound
thinkers have imagined that they have found in the " world-pro
cess " an expression, type, or adumbration of the Trinity. We
have already found in the personality of man, who is in the like
ness of God, an analogy to the tri-unity of God. In organic life
we see progress from unity to diversity, and thence to a higher

THE TRINITY: — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 355
unity. In the hatching of an egg there is, first, the homogeneous
yolk, then diversification, then the unity of all the diversified parts
in the living chicken. Christ takes organic growth as the type of
the growth of his kingdom, — "first the blade, then the ear, then
the full corn in the ear." Spencer tells us that this process of
organic life and growth is the type of the evolution of the uni
verse ; first, the homogeneous, then its diversification by motion ;
then the unity of molecules and masses, of many beings organic
and inorganic, in a system the unity of which is dynamic in the
interaction of many forces, and rational in the action of forces in
accordance with rational laws and for rational ends. It is not
strange that minds plunged into these depths of speculation are
sometimes bewildered and lost. At the same time it will not be
surprising if the theory of evolution, disclosing, in all the action
of the uuiverse in which God reveals himself, a circuit from the
homogeneous through diversity to a higher unity, shall bring, from
physical science itself, illustration and support to the doctrine of
the Trinity, and even to some of the speculative explanations of
it. All reflective thought consists of apprehension, differentiation,
and integration or comprehension ; in other words, of thesis, anti
thesis, and synthesis. It ma)- be that this is the law of all thought,
because so only can thought accord with the constitution of the
universe and discover and comprehend the reality in it ; that
there is a tri-unity in thought because there is a tri-unity in the
universe, both in the rational and the physical systems ; and that,
therefore, we must go back to the Trinity in God as the ultimate
basis of the world-process and of all human knowledge of it.
God is in the universe as the sunshine on a waterfall ; the
water ever changing and flowing, the sunshine ever abiding. But
it is not merely that the sunshine reveals the rolling and falling
water, but the water also reveals the sunshine, reflecting it in
every direction and refracting it through the spray in all its pris
matic colors in the rainbow. Here again is an illustration of the
fact that it is the eternal which is continuously revealing itself in
the flow of time ; as the white light of the sun, the same through
all the ages, is diffused into mild daylight by the atmosphere and
reflected from all objects ; its constituent colors revealed by re
fraction in the rainbow, and in all the varied colors of the earth,
the waters, and the sky ; and its eulightening, warming, life-sus-

356 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
taining, transforming, almost creative energies disclosed by the
effects of its continuous action throughout all nature.1
Thus the doctrine of the Trinity as revealed in Christ and in
redemption through Him and by the Holy Spirit is essential to
any worthy philosophical conception of God. As Paul says of
Christ to the Corinthians, in every thing, in all utterance and
knowledge, ye were enriched in him. Aside from the revelation
of God as the Trinity, the human mind has never the conception
of the universe in its relations to him, in its comprehensive
ness, completeness and unity, but has stuck in one-sided or frag
mentary apprehensions. No doctrine of God has so satisfactorily
resolved into unity the dualisms and the seeming antinomies aris
ing in every attempt to construct a theory of the universe and to
grasp the idea of the absolute, — none has ever so completely com
prehended the bipolar and complemental truths in the vast idea
of the absolute Being and his relation to the finite, as the doctrine
of the Trinity. As to the imagined dualism between God and
man, the fact of the God in Christ reconciling the world unto
himself is the grandest revelation of the likeness of God and man,
of the eternally human in God and the essentially divine in man,
of the intimacy of man's communion with God, of his real union
with God, who dwells in man by his Spirit, and of the necessity of
the continuous reception of divine quickening and guiding to the
right development of any man, and of God's free offer of it, com
passing men with his love as the sunshine environs the living and
growing plant. And as to the moral unity of the universe, rione
so fully reveals the law of love as the solvent of all society in
unity of character and in mutual trust and service.
1 The cataract, between the crags deep-riven,
I thus behold with rapture ever growing,
From plunge to plunge in thousand streams 't is given,
And yet a thousand, to the valleys shaded,
While foam and spray in air are whirled and driven.
Yet how superb, across the tumult braided,
The painted rainbow's changeful life is bending,
Now clearly drawn, dissolving now and faded,
And evermore the showers of dew descending !
Of human striving there 's no symbol fuller;
Consider, and 't is easy comprehending :
Life is not light, but the refracted color.
Goethe, Faust, Part II., Act i. ; B. Taylor's trans.

THE TRINITY:— ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 357
II. Historical Confirmation. — The conclusion drawn from
the essential elements of the Trinity as revealed in Christ and
redemption through him is confirmed by history.
r. It is confirmed by the early history ofthe doctrine. It was
originally developed from the Scriptures in the conflict of Chris
tianity with Greek philosophy and in commending it to the reason
of men trained in that philosophy. Christianity established itself
in the world in a time of great activity of philosophical thought.
There were Epicureans and Stoics, Platonists and Neo-Platonists;
there were Gnostics, who regarded God as too pure to defile him
self by creating the world or by dwelling in it. .All the current
forms of Greek and Roman philosophy were earnestly studied and
discussed. These philosophies, with whatever errors, held more
or less of the truth which abides forever. At Athens certain
philosophers of the Epicureans and Stoics had encountered Paul.
In his Epistles he warns the Christians against allowing any one
to spoil them through anti- Christian philosophy. He warns
Timothy to turn away from the oppositions of science falsely so
called.1 Several of the early Fathers had been educated in Greek
philosophy. As Christianity was preached throughout the Roman
empire, Christian teachers were obliged to meet the objections of
these philosophies, to recognize their truths, to expose their
errors, to commend Christianity as reasonable to educated and
vigorous thinkers and keen inquirers and to -gain for it a footing
in the best thought of the age. The sublime conflict of Chris
tianity with the persecuting power of the empire and its triumph
over it are always and everywhere recounted by the church with
thanksgiving and praise to God. But here was the conflict of
Christianity with heathen philosophy through those same cen
turies, scarcely less decisive of the destiny of the church, scarcely
less momentous and sublime. In its conflict with these philoso
phies, rejecting their errors and appropriating their living truths,
it prevailed, through the grace of God, by the doctrine of the
Trinity as revealed in the God in Christ and the redemption
wrought through him. Here was found the conception of God
and his relation to the universe, which comprehends and har
monizes his absoluteness and his personality, his unity and his
manifoldness, his transcendence and his immanence, his right
eousness and holiness and his gracious union and communion
1 Col. ii. 8; 1 Tim. vi. 20.

358 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
with men; and which establishes his reign in the human heart,
bringing the love of God home to every man.1
2. Our conclusion is confirmed also by the history of mono
theism apart from the Trinity. Mention has already been made
of false views of God as shut up in self-inclusiveness and set apart
from man, arising from one-sided conceptions of his transcen
dence, his simplicity and his absoluteness. The history of mono
theism shows the prevalence and the hurtfulness of these one-sided
conceptions. A rigid monotheism, excluding the God in Christ
and the Christian Trinity, has shown a tendency to rest in half-
truths, to entangle itself in contradictions, to separate God in
lonely and chilling transcendence from men. It has failed to
bring the full richness and power of God into the minds and
hearts and lives of men, and to quicken them to love and helpful
service to one another or to a proper reverence for man and
respect to the sacredness of his rights. This gives some support
to the old doctrine of non-Christian philosophy, that monotheism
is a doctrine only for the most advanced thinkers ; that it is too
difficult to be understood by the common people and cannot be
safely communicated to them. Mohammedism is an example of
this tendency of monotheism. In it God is little more than a
blind and irresistible fate, and his service a stolid submission,
not to an all-controlling wisdom and love, but to a resistless des
tiny. It cannot develop and nourish the tenderness and power
1 Canon Kingsley, in his " Lectures on Alexandria and its Schools," says,
" My belief is that they expanded and corroborated Christianity, in spite of
great errors and defects on certain points, far more than they corrupted it ;
that they presented it to the minds of cultivated and scientific men in the
only form in which it would have satisfied their philosophic aspirations, and
yet contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to ground their philosophy on the
very same truths which they taught to the meanest slaves, and to appeal in
the philosophers to the same inward faculty to which they appealed in the
slave, — namely, to the inward eye, the moral sense and reason, whereby each
and every man can, if he will, judge for himself what is right." With this I
heartily concur. Dr. Hatch, in his Hibbert Lectures on " The Influence of
Greek Ideas on the Christian Church," has presented a one-sided and greatly
exaggerated view of the evil influence of Greek philosophy in the early
development of Christianity. Even he says, " It helped the Christian
community to believe as an intellectual conviction that which they had first
accepted as a spiritual revelation " (p. 207). It did much more. It helped
the Christian Fathers in their reasonable efforts to attain the essential sig
nificance of the revelation of God in Christ and to commend it to the
educated minds of the time, by showing that it met all valid demands of
reason.

THE TRINITY: — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 359
of faith in God and of love to God and man. It develops intense
egoism. It legitimately issues in fanatical contempt and exter
minating hatred for all of any other religion, and in self-propaga
tion by the sword, in the predominance of the sensual over the
spiritual, and in an incapacity to recognize the brotherhood and
rights and worth of man as the object of God's love which has
naturally issued in the toleration of slavery, polygamy, and despot
ism. Under Christian civilization the tendencies of a rigid and
one-sided monotheism have been exemplified, in different ways,
in deism and arid and barren rationalism. Some writers present
the religion of the Jews as an example of " stiff and stark mono
theism." But this is not true of the teaching of the Old Testa
ment, whatever the later rabbinical teaching may have been. In
the Old Testament God reveals himself in the most free com
munication with his people ; he takes the name Jehovah as the
memorial of his covenant with them ; he describes his relation to
them under the names of the most intimate and important of
human relationships, — father, mother, husband, king ; he is their
shepherd, tenderly caring for the feeblest of the flock ; and
through his prophets he continually points them forward to a new
and better covenant, to a larger development of his kingdom and
to his more glorious revelation of himself in the Messianic days.
Thus the Jews were accustomed to look for the special manifesta
tions of God ; while the Greeks were accustomed to seek a
philosophical basis for the knowledge of him. In Christ both
these lines of thought meet and are comprehended in one.1
There is something in the presentation of God merely as the
absolute Being which oppresses and depresses. The absolute
and the finite are incommensurable. When a man in the con
sciousness of ignorance, weakness, and limitation feels himself in
the presence of the absolute Spirit, his own spirit is crushed by
1 Modern Judaism denying Christ, in spite of its rich inheritance of the
knowledge of God from the Old Testament, tends to a stiff and self-inclusive
monotheism, rigid in its exclusiveness towards men. It has before it the
alternative either to accept Christ, and so return to its ancient faith as
legitimately developed in the knowledge of him, or else to lapse into bald
rationalism denying supernatural revelation, as already exemplified in one of
its developments. For the Old Testament, if it is not the revelation of God
in the preparatory stages of his kingdom which has come in Christ, ceases
to be a supernatural revelation of God and becomes merely the fragments
of an ancient literature.

360 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the infinite greatness of the being and his immeasurable distance
above him. When he sees him as the holy judge, he is conscious
of himself as sinful ; he is terrified, and, like Adam and Eve in
the first consciousness of sin, he would flee and hide himself from
God. It tends to fear and separation rather than to reconcilia
tion and loving trust. The tremendous issues of endless existence
determined by the man's relations to the infinite God become
overpowering. He is in danger of living selfishly for the other
world instead of living in loving service of his fellow-men in this.
A natural result is the ascetic withdrawing from the world and the
devotion of himself in isolated egoism to preparation for the
world to come. The thought of the awful greatness of the abso
lute Being suggests in contrast the littleness and insignificance of
man, and so tends to generate contempt for man instead of
reverence and a sacred regard to his inalienable rights, to isolate
men from one another instead of drawing them into unity in love.
This tendency is recognized in the eighth Psalm : " When I con
sider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the
stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful
of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?" But the
Psalmist, enlightened by the revelation of God's love to men in
Jehovah, the covenant God of his people, immediately sets forth
the opposite and legitimate inference, the greatness of man as
the object of God's loving care, made in God's likeness, "but
little lower than God," and exalted to rule over nature and to
appropriate its powers and resources in the service of man.
Neander says : " The elder Pliny, while absorbed in the con
templation of nature, is lost in admiration of an immeasurable
creative spirit beyond all human comprehension, manifesting him
self in his works. But his admiration for this exalted spirit of
the universe served only to awaken in tenfold strength the depress
ing sense of the narrowness and vanity of man's existence. He
saw nothing to fill up the chasm between feeble man and that
unknown, all-transcending spirit. He says : ' What man is, . . .
is beyond the compass of man's understanding to know. But it
is a foolish delusion, which has sprung from human weakness and
pride, to imagine that such an infinite spirit would concern him
self with the petty affairs of men.' " 1 All these are manifesta
tions in various forms of man's sense of the need of a mediator,
J Neander, "Hist, of the Church," vol. i. p. 10; Torrey's transl.

THE TRINITY: — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 361
whenever he is conscious of the presence of God in his greatness
as the absolute Being.
Dr. Bellows says : " The origin and history of the race exhibits
the care with which God has hidden himself away from his
creatures in the infancy of their existence, lest they should be
scorched and shrivelled in the glory of his presence."1 He goes
on to say that the world must first make or develop the man
before the church can save him. But if this author had recog
nized God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he would have found
in the God in Christ the needed mediator, reconciling man to
God, and bringing him into free and trustful communion with
him. And he would have seen that the true making or develop
ment of man is through God's grace in Christ renovating him to
the life of faith in God and love to God and man, and not by the
world except as it is the medium of his discipline, education, and
training in the life of love to the highest perfection of his being.
Comte refers to this depressing influence of mere monotheism,
though with exaggeration and misapprehension, as evidence dis
proving the existence of God and supporting his own theory that
humanity itself is the only proper object of worship. He says :
"The conception of one single God involves a type of absolute
perfection, complete in each of the three aspects of human
nature, — affection, thought, and action. Now such a conception
unavoidably contradicts itself. Infinite power, on the one hand,
and infinite wisdom and goodness on the other, are qualities
which cannot be reconciled." And he argues that if such a
being should exist, by his very infinitude he would be separated
from men and incommunicable to them. He would not only
isolate men from himself, but also from one another. He would
crush out all altruistic affections. " An omnipotent being can
have no occasion for wisdom or for goodness. . . . The principle
of omnipotence involves egoism both in the Deity and in his
worshipers. . . . His desires being gratified as soon as formed,
they can consist of nothing but pure caprices ; there can be no
appreciable motive either from within or from without. And
these obscure caprices must of necessity be purely personal."
Hence, Comte infers, the Almighty One must live only in and for
himself, and thus would be an example of complete egoism.
And in the presence of so great a being, on whose favor the
1 The Suspense of Faith, p. 19.

362 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
eternal destiny of men depends, every man's interest would be
concentrated on the future world, and this present world with all
its interests would be reduced to comparative insignificance.
Thus the tendency would be to shut the man up in egoism, to
isolate him from his fellow-men and drive him to monastic seclu
sion and asceticism. Comte says : " The Christian type of life
was never fully realized except by the hermits of the Thebaid.
These men by narrowing their wants to the lowest standard were
able to concentrate their thoughts without remorse or distraction
on the attainment of salvation." He says that Paul, " the real
founder of Catholicism," selected Christ from the "army of
prophets," "the many adventurers who would at that time be
constantly making efforts to inaugurate monotheism, aspiring,
like their Greek forerunners, to the honors of apotheosis." He
also teaches that Paul and his successors, in what Comte calls the
priesthood, developed the doctrines of the God in Christ, of the
Trinity, of salvation by grace, of the antagonism of nature and
grace, and thus transformed the naked monotheism into Chris
tianity. He teaches that they did this in order to eliminate from
monotheism its tendencies to a spiritualistic egoism, to provide
recognition of man's altruistic tendencies, and so to make it
harmonize with a safe and healthy constitution of society. But
he insists that these additions and emendations were not a legiti
mate development of monotheism and could not remove the evil
tendencies inherent in it. Hence he concludes that the altruistic
affections can never find their full development till humanity itself
is made the supreme object of reverence and devotion.1
The extravagance and groundlessness of this theory are suffi
ciently obvious. But we have in it Comte's testimony to his own
conviction that the Christianity actually introduced into the world
in the name of Christ by Paul, his coadjutors, and successors, com
prised the doctrines of the Trinity, of the God in Christ reconcil
ing the world unto himself, of the sinfulness of man and the
necessity of his renewal from the life of nature to the spiritual
life of faith and love, and of salvation by faith through God's
grace ; and that these doctrines were taught in the belief that
they would bring man out from his egoism and organize society
under the law of love. His objection is not that they do not
1 Positive Polity, vol. iii. pp. 365, 376, 348, 383, 346, 347, 378, 384, 387 ;
Trans. London, 1876.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 363
have this tendency, but that they are incompatible with the mono
theism of Christianity, of which they claim, falsely as he says, to
be the legitimate development. And it is the doctrine of the
church that the Trinity revealed in Christ is the revelation of
God, not shut up in his own absolute Ego, but opening out in
creation, ennobling humanity by revealing the essential elements
of human personality eternal in himself, — in Christ identifying
himself with man, bearing his sins, his sorrow, and his death, in
order to save men from their egoism and bring them back to the
life of universal love. The secret of Jesus, " he that findeth his
life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find
it," is the revelation that obedience to the law of self-sacrificing
love is the only way of blessedness, — that a life of egoism is spirit
ual death, and the death of egoism is the true spiritual life of faith
and love and blessedness; and this is the " life of God in the
soul of man."
In the Trinity as revealed in Christ, we see God, Father, Son,
and Spirit, reconciling the world unto himself. The reconciliation
of man with God is the only effective reconciliation of man with
man. Here, then, in the revelation of God in the Trinity, we
have the principle of universal reconciliation, of universal har
mony and love, to be realized in the kingdom of Christ. This
principle is to be realized in the world, not by rules and statutes
prescribing the details of duty and forbidding the details of wrong
doing, and contending, perhaps with violence and blood, for their
enforcement, — but by the spirit of Christ's self-sacrificing love to
sinners, taking possession of human hearts, and uniting them with
God and with one another through their faith in him, the mediator
between God and man. Under his seeking and drawing, men are
to return as prodigals to their Father's house and dwell together
as brethren. And this principle of reconciliation is to continue
working until it brings into harmony under the law of love all
customs, laws, and institutions, and society is transformed into
the kingdom of Christ.
3. The conclusion is, therefore, alike from the essential ele
ments of the doctrine and from history, that the Trinity as re
vealed in Christ is the only worthy conception of God, satisfying
the demands of reason. A true definition of God must set forth
both his absoluteness and his personality, his oneness and his
manifoldness, his transcendence and his immanence, his inde-

364 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
pendence and his communicableness. It is the endeavor of all
religions to find God communicating himself to man, and to bring
man into communion and union with God. But it must be the
real God, in both sides of his being as the absolute Spirit. The
danger is, as history shows, that in grasping one of these, men
lose their hold on the other. Hence God is lost in agnosticism,
or set apart from man in deism, Mohammedism, or Epicureanism ;
or he is identified with the universe in materialistic or pantheistic
monism ; or he is divided and belittled in polytheism ; or in recog
nizing his personality as the one only God, the man loses sight of
his absoluteness, and exposes himself to the divine rebuke, " Thou
thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." Chris
tianity presents precisely that representation of God which com
pels us in the very act of taking it into our minds to hold both
aspects of his being, as the absolute Being and as the personal
Spirit. It illuminates God in his personality and communicable
ness as Spirit, as no other representation of God does; but it
equally illuminates him in the absoluteness of his being, as light
ning reveals the cloud on which it crinkles. The mystery in God
brought to notice in the Trinity is itself a revelation of him. It
reveals his absoluteness and transcendence. The mystery in the
doctrine is thus a revelation of reality in God and an element
of power in bringing men to reconciliation with him. Thus
the very difficulty which the doctrine at first presents to the intel
lect becomes on further thought a revelation of God and an evi
dence of the truth of the doctrine itself. And the Trinity as
revealed in Christ presents, as no other conception of God does,
the full-orbed idea of God as at once the absolute and the per
sonal Spirit. Let it be noted, however, that it is not the mys-
teriousness in itself which is the power, but the absoluteness and
transcendence of God revealed in it, as the background of God's
clearest and fullest revelation of himself as personal Spirit, and of
his communication of himself to men and of his intimacy with
them in love. On the contrary, the very simplicity and clearness
of the so-called simple theism, which are urged so confidently as
proofs of its truth, are found on further thought to be proofs of its
falsity and elements of its practical weakness. It strips God of his
majesty, and man of his awe before him. Already in literature
some writers are speaking flippantly of the gods, instead of rever
ently of God. As Dr. Bushnell says, we cannot decoct the whole

THE TRINITY : — ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 365
mass of- God's revelation of himself, " and draw off the extract
into pitchers of our own ; fine, consistent, nicely-rounded pitchers,
which, so far from setting out anywhere towards infinity, we can
carry at pleasure by the handle and definitely measure by the
eye." 1 Because the revelation of God in Christ is the largest
revelation of God, for that very reason it must be the largest reve
lation of the mystery of his absoluteness and transcendence. Al
ways the larger the area of clear vision, the larger the bounding
horizon of the unknown. 1 God in Christ, p. 69.

CHAPTER X
THE trinity : — ITS practical significance
In presenting the practical significance of the Trinity I do not
refer to the human speculations respecting it, but to the concep
tion of the one only God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as revealed
in the redemption of men through God in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself, and in the Holy Spirit proceeding from the
Father and the Son, and taking of the things of Christ and
showing them unto men, as set forth in the Bible. I shall not
attempt to define the full practical significance and application
of this scriptural revelation of God, because it sheds its own
peculiar light on the significance, and penetrates with its own
peculiar and vitalizing influence the practical application, of every
truth, precept, and historical fact in God's revelation of himself.
Therefore I must confine myself to a few points showing its prac
tical power.
I. Christ presents the Trinity as central in the organization,
worship, doctrine, and work of his church. A little while before
his ascension Jesus came to his disciples and, in a parting charge,
gave to them their great commission. He was never given to
speculative theorizing, but his instructions had always been in
tensely practical. Most of all, in these parting moments, when he
is committing to them the work of gathering all men into his king
dom, and of organizing, instructing, and building up his church, he
will give them in their commission what is essential to the work in
its most condensed and comprehensive form. What he does give
them is the Trinity. " Go ye and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Ghost " ; and this he gives them as central in the
organization, the worship, the teaching, and the work of his
church. The only reasonable explanation is that this formula of

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 367
the Trinity sums up the essential contents of Christianity and
concentres in itself its highest practical power, — that " it is the
sum and summit of Christian truth."
It is the central reality on which the church is organized. Bap
tism is the sacrament of admission to the Christian church. In
all ages and nations, whoever enters it is to see the triune name
emblazoned over its gateway, and in being admitted into the
church is to be baptized into the one name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
It is central in the worship of the church. Baptism itself is
worship in its highest form. The confession and consecration
involved in it imply that the Trinity is central in all the worship
in which Christians evermore express their trust and joy in God
who has redeemed them from sin. The other sacrament, the
Lord's Supper, was instituted by Christ, to be observed in remem
brance of him by all Christians so long as his church shall exist
on earth. This sacrament also is worship in its highest form, and
of that worship the God in Christ is the centre. All access to
the Father is in the name of Christ and under the quickening of
the Holy Spirit. Accordingly in all ages the Trinity has been the
theme of the benedictions, the doxologies, and the ascriptions of
praise in the Christian church.
The Trinity is central in the teaching and work of the church.
Christ gives his church the great commission to go into all the
world and to preach the gospel. Here he institutes the ministry
of the word to be perpetuated in the church through all ages.
And all this is in order to make all men disciples of Christ, and to
bring them into the church by baptism in the one name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Thus, evermore,
as the central theme of all Christian preaching and the condensed
but comprehensive formula of the doctrine of redemption which
is to be preached, the Trinity is central in all Christian work,
carrying the glad tidings of redemption through all the world, and
gathering all men into the kingdom of Christ.
It has been a common impression that the doctrine of the
Trinity is only a speculative theory, "a scholastic figment," hav
ing no practical significance or power. The falsity of this impres
sion is evident when it is seen that Christ presents this doctrine
as central in the organization, the worship, the teaching, and the
doctrine taught, and the work of the Christian church.

368 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE • SPIRIT
II. The Trinity as revealed in the God in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself gives to Christianity, as revelation, doc
trine, and life, its distinctive and essential significance and power.
¦ i. It is essential to the distinctive significance of the Christian
revelation. Christianity takes up into itself all truth recognized
in the ethnic religions, all that God has revealed of himself through
nature, through the constitution of man and the light of reason
and conscience, and through man's spiritual environment, which
is the all-encompassing presence of God acting on him and pre
senting himself in his consciousness. But Christianity in its dis
tinctive essence rests on the revelation of God by his action in
human history redeeming man from sin, as recorded in the Bible.
This action began as soon as man sinned, and culminates in
Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit " on all flesh." The
God in Christ, God's redemption of men through him, and the
establishment of the kingdom of God on earth under his Messianic
reign, and the agency of the Holy Spirit sent from the Father by
the Son, are the essence of this whole historical action, and in
grained in the biblical record of it, and the conception of the one
God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is fully revealed in them, and
especially is inwrought into the New Testament.
2. The doctrine of the Trinity as revealed in Christ gives sig
nificance and harmony to the system of Christian doctrines. It
is like the keel of a ship, stretching the whole length of the struc
ture, giving support to every timber, and binding the whole
structure together.
It has been shown that the denial of this doctrine opens the
way to one-sided and erroneous views of God.
It equally changes the conception of man. We lose the ideas
of the dignity and worth of man, the sacredness of his rights, the
equality and brotherhood of men before God, which Christ has
made powers in civilization. We lose also the consecration which
Christ has given to human life, and all the inspiration which
comes from him to realize the ideal perfection of man in our
selves and to secure it for mankind in the kingdom of Christ.
The denial changes also the conception of man as a sinner and
of the nature of sin. If Christ is only a man, then man needs
only instruction and development ; he needs no redemption from
sin. Then what we have called sin becomes only a necessary
step in his development, and ceases to be sin for which the man

THE TRINITY:— ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 369
is blameworthy. As a recent Unitarian writer says, the fall of man
was " a stumble up the altar-stairs of creation into the light of a
new moral universe." Thus the whole conception of God's moral
government and of a moral system disappears. Man is not a
personal free agent ; he is evolved through the necessary processes
of his nature like a plant. And the denial of redemption annuls
all the doctrines of Christianity involved in the fact of redemption
through Christ from condemnation and sin. The central doc
trines of atonement by Christ, of regeneration and sanctification
by the Holy Spirit, and of justification by faith disappear, and
with them all ^he distinctive doctrines of the gospel of Christ.
The proclamation of his coming is no more glad tidings of great
joy to all the people.
3. The Trinity as revealed in Christ is of vital moment in the
practical experience and work of the Christian life. The doc
trine of the New Testament is that the Christian life begins and
goes on by faith in the God in Christ. John presents to us
Christ as bringing into the world the divine light and life and
love, and pouring them on human spirits to illuminate, vitalize,
inspire, and transform them. Pre-eminently, it is God's love
which is revealed in Christ, quickening and inspiring men to
love like his. In this revelation man sees his own sinfulness,
his alienation from God, his deserved condemnation, his need
of forgiveness and of a mediator between God and himself. Ill
the God in Christ the mediator is revealed, reconciling the world
unto himself. In him he trusts. Through him he is justified by
faith ; he rejoices in the forgiveness of sin, in reconciliation and
peace with God ; he is transformed into Christ's likeness, in
spired with his sacrificial love, the same mind is in him which
was also in Christ. His life becomes a life of intimacy with God
by faith in Christ, and of self-renouncing service of man in love
like his. The motive, inspiration, and strength of his Christian
life and work come from God in Christ and through the Holy
Spirit redeeming men from sin and reconciling them to himself.
As a single example I cite Professor Goltz : " My religious ex
perience, in its origin, preservation, and growth, testifies to the
central importance of the person of Christ. . . . The cross of
Christ first taught me the hatefulness and curse of my sin. . . .
I know no period of great stirring in my inner life, no moment of
great influence upon my later course, which has not been essen-
vol. 1. — 24

370 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
tially a renewed and wider shining forth of the glory hid in the
person of Christ, and a time when my heart established some
new relation toward him. Whatever in my religious develop
ment and experience has not come into living contact with this
focus has remained a dead knowledge and opinion, but has grown
to no life and no power. My inner knowledge of God, learned
not in human schools but in the school of the Holy Spirit, has
concentrated itself more and more in the face of Jesus Christ.
The more I learn to think, the more does God without him be
come to me the incomprehensible, the inapproachable, the un
speakable. God becomes all the more distant from me, the more
my spirit seeks to convince itself of his reality. In Christ the
fulness of life of the invisible Father comes near me as life and
love, as holiness and brightness, as a being who never ends, a
power ever present, and I find access to the inapproachable. In
Christ is solved for me the enigma of my own heart and life, this
half-way position between sense and spirit, betwixt bond and
free, betwixt the entanglement in sin and death and the destiny
to eternal life, between the weak impure beginning and the aim
of perfection. The enigmas of the world about me also lose all
their mystery, all their oppressiveness for my mind, when I con
sider them in the light of God's fatherly management of all
things, as that is determined in Christ. . . . Only what comes
from him, what beams from his hidden glory, only that has be
come in me light, power, peace, and blessing." x
In the moral system as Christ presents it, the ground of the
unity of all men is revealed in their common relations to the God
in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. All right character
and virtuous action are " rooted and grounded in love," that is,
in God's love. They are connected with and nourished by the
mighty influences of God's redeeming grace sweeping through the
course of human history, vitalizing and advancing the kingdom
of God. The denial of the Trinity as revealed in the God in
Christ changes the conception of the essential character ofthe
right moral life. It sunders morality from religion ; emphasizes
man's natural ability and freedom while overlooking his depend
ence on God ; emphasizes man's work of righteousness while
overlooking the fact that man's normal development is possible
1 H. von d. Goltz, " Die Christliche Grundgedanken oder die allgemeinen
Principien der Christlichen Dogmatik," § 93, p. 125.

THE TRINITY: — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 37 1
only in union with God through his free and continuous reception'
of God's prevenient grace and of all the divine influences coming
upon and into his soul from God's all-encompassing love. Con
sequently this denial tends to disintegrate virtue into isolated
acts. The great motives and influences which circulate through
the moral system from God and vitalize it, which quicken uni
versal love, enthusiasm for humanity and the expectation of
human progress to the realization of the kingdom of God on
earth, lose their power and ultimately disappear. Instead of
the outflow of universal love, morality becomes a doing of duty
piecemeal in obedience to the individual conscience. Virtue
becomes like a child's flower-garden, cut-flowers stuck in the
sand, cut off from all capacity to receive quickening and nourish
ment from the forces and resources of the great system of nature.
But every plant that lives and grows is rooted into the physical
system, quickened and nourished by all its cosmic agencies. So
every man, as to his spiritual life, is rooted in God's love, quick
ened and nourished by the mighty influences and agencies of
God's grace sweeping through the ages, quickening the spiritual
life of individuals one by one, and so vitalizing and developing
his kingdom, living and growing in the world like the corn, first
the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.
Therefore, when we are met with objections and arguments to
draw us away from Christ, we must reply in the words of Peter :
" Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal
life" (John vi. 68).
Thus it appears that the belief of the doctrine of the Trinity
as revealed in Christ and the denial of it do not differ merely on
some minor matter of speculation or interpretation. They issue
in two radically different systems ; and the more fully each is
understood and developed the wider the difference is seen to be.
It is objected that pure monotheism, denying the Trinity, has
an advantage because the belief of it rests on the constitution and
religious consciousness of mankind ; and that the belief in the
historical Christ, historical redemption, and the Trinity " sus
pends the burdened heart of the world upon the attenuated
thread of historical tradition, which the slightest movement of an
all-pervading and restless skepticism may break." 1 The answer
is, that the revelation of God in the historical Christ takes up and
1 Christian Examiner, vol. 65, Nov. 1858, p. 386.

372 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
appropriates all truth respecting God and his relation to the
world recognized in the religions and philosophies of mankind,
develops its true significance and its relation to all God's revela
tions, and adds the more complete and glorious revelation . in
Christ. Thus Christianity rests, as solidly as the monotheism
which excludes the Trinity, on the manifestations of God in
nature and in the constitution and religious consciousness of man,
while enlarging this knowledge of God by the historical revelation
culminating in Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit. And
Christianity does not hang on " an attenuated thread of tradi
tion." It has its roots in history, from the beginnings of history
until Christ's coming, and its branches ramifying through history
from that time until now. Even according to any school of criti
cism, the Old Testament was completed centuries before Christ
came. It was so pervaded with the Messianic prophecy and
promise that the Jewish mind became saturated with the expecta
tion of the Messiah's coming ; the prophecy was fulfilled in
Christ ; and from him the kingdom of Christ opened out into
human history with mighty power, and has continued a power in
history to this day. Human history itself cannot be accounted
for without the historical Christ and the historical kingdom of
God on earth.
III. The practical significance and power of the Trinity, as
revealed in the God in Christ and the redemption of men from
sin through him, are confirmed by the common and persistent
belief of it in the Christian church through all the ages.
Neander says : " The economico-practical doctrine of the
Trinity constituted from the beginning the fundamental conscious
ness of the church. ... It is this which forms the basis of the
true unity of the church and the identity of the Christian con
sciousness in all ages." x
A decisive evidence of the truth of Christianity is found in the
fact that, seeming so feeble at the beginning, it prevailed in face
of the tremendous powers resisting it, became the religion of the
Roman empire, and has vitalized the progressive civilization of
Europe and America to this day. This is equally evidence of the
trinitarian doctrine, underlying as it does the doctrine of the
redemption of men from sin and their reconciliation with God
1 History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. i. p. 573.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 373
through the God in Christ ; because this doctrine in its practical
significance has prevailed and persisted with the prevalence and
persistence of Christianity.
The argument is not the mere fact that the doctrine has been
generally believed, but that it has been believed and been practi
cally powerful in the Christian life, in the face of difficulties which
the doctrine presents to the understanding. Abstruse discussions
and sharp controversies have arisen in speculative attempts to
answer subordinate questions, to frame minute distinctions, defini
tions and formulas, to give metaphysical explanations and con
structions of the doctrine, and these have sometimes resulted in
contradictory decisions by councils of different grades. One
would think that if anything could lead men to renounce the
doctrine, these abstruse controversies would have done it. But
the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, in their essen
tial elements and their practical significance, have always main
tained the ascendency. When they have been denied and assailed
it has led the church to a more explicit declaration of the doc
trines and to the declaration that the opposing theories are here
sies. Thus these doctrines have flowed on in the great current
of Christian thought and life through all the Christian ages and in
all Christian countries. From generation to generation they have
held their sway, in ages of darkness and in ages of light, in times
of corruption and times of reformation, among the ignorant and
among scholars. Philosophies have changed, political systems
have flourished and decayed, society has lapsed through the
changes of 1800 years from Jewish and Roman civilization through
medieval darkness to the light of the nineteenth century, yet
these doctrines have been always dominant, received by nearly
all of every Christian name, received with a devotedness such
that multitudes have died martyrs to their faith.
The religious system which rejects these doctrines starts none
of these difficulties at first sight. It appears to be very simple
and easy of comprehension. It would be natural to expect that
it would prevail. Accordingly, in the beginning of the Unitarian
controversy in this country, the opponents ofthe doctrine of the
Trinity expected an easy victory. Professor Norton said : " The
doctrine of the Trinity and that of the two natures in Christ are
doctrines which, when fairly understood, it is impossible from the
nature of the human mind should be believed. They involve

374 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
manifest contradictions ; and no man can believe what he be
lieves to be a contradiction. They are of such a character that
it is impossible to bring arguments in their defence and unneces
sary to bring arguments against them." x Thomas Jefferson wrote
to John Adams : " You and I will live to see the time when every
child born in America will be a Unitarian." 2 Rev. Dr. Ellis says :
" One who reviews this controversy, even with his prejudices and
convictions strongly on the liberal side of it, can hardly fail to
be impressed with the seeming coolness, we might almost say
the nonchalance, or the superciliousness and effrontery even,
with which the Unitarians took for granted that the great change
of religious opinion advocated by them could establish itself as
a matter of course. Some Unitarians wrote and talked as if in
utter amazement that orthodoxy should presume to say a word
for itself in arrest of judgment. The most assured and confix
dent and intolerant of the new party did not scruple to declare
that orthodoxy was past apologizing for, and ought to retire as
gracefully as possible to the moles and the bats." 3 The same
has been true in a greater or less degree in all periods when the
anti-trinitarian doctrine has been revived. But its advocates
have found that success was never possible and the reception of
their doctrine was always limited and transient.
This is a significant fact which demands explanation. Uni
tarians themselves have often called attention to it. One of their
writers says : " When we see how much more natural, genial,
and beautiful our doctrine is, how much better fitted to ennoble
and guide human nature and to give harmony and happiness to
life, — when we see, on the contrary, how arbitrary, severe and
repulsive the Calvinistic theology is, how its rigid and petty
technicalities offend the liberty of reason, while its morose gloom
puts a ban on the natural joys of life, how its dogma and spirit
vilify man, — contemplating these facts it must awaken our special
wonder to observe what a miserable minority of advocates the
Liberal Faith has won, and what an immeasurable majority of
adherents the Augustinian scheme retains. How is it that the
popular religion holds its great place in the world with such
rooted tenacity, with such tyrannical vigor, against the apparently
1 Reasons for being a Unitarian, p. 22.
2 Christian Examiner, vol. 64, Jan. 1858, p. 87.
3 Half-Century of Unitarianism, pp. 31, 32, 6, 7.

THE TRINITY: — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 375
irresistible objections to it? Why is it that Liberal Christianity
advances with such a creeping, faltering pace, notwithstanding its
apparently irresistible attractiveness? " : The answer cannot be
that the prevalence of the trinitarian belief, with its cognate
beliefs and practical applications, is due to ignorance or super
stition, or to the incapacity to perceive obvious contradictions.
For during all the history of the church these beliefs, more than
those opposed to them, have had the support of the intellect,
scholarship, and culture of the successive ages. On the other
hand, the reason cannot be that the opposing doctrines have not
had fair and able presentation. Ever since the days of Arius
they have from time to time been defended by men of large
intellect, culture, and learning, many of them devout men ; so
that it may reasonably be supposed that every consideration in
their defence which can be addressed to the intellect or the heart
has been presented in its full significance. Yet the church in the
great current of its thought and life has persisted in the trinitarian
belief. The only sufficient explanation is that the doctrine in its
essential significance is true ; that it commends itself to the
thinking of the Christian intellect and to the spiritual wants of
the Christian heart; that, though at first sight it perplexes the
understanding, yet there is in it that which the reason demands
and for which the heart in its deepest spiritual needs yearns ; on
the contrary, that the opposing doctrine, so level to apprehension
at first sight, has in its superficial plainness defects which balk the
reason in its efforts to apprehend God as the absolute Spirit, and
the heart in its deepest spiritual needs and its loftiest spiritual
flights. And this conclusion prominent Unitarians have seemed to
accept. Dr. Bellows says : " The theology of Christendom, that
theology which is essentially one and the same in all ecclesiastical
history — one and the same because probably the only possible
form in which the essential paradoxes of Christian truth can be
conveyed, one and the same because created by the contact of
the gospel facts and records with the human soul, when it was
childlike enough to respond to them without an interior attempt
at coherency and comprehension — that theology is destined, I
suspect, to an eternal existence and to be the permanent
apparatus or body of divinity, through which the powers of the
1 Christian Examiner, vol. 64, Jan. 1858, p. 88.

376 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
world to come are to make themselves felt in the world that now
is." 1 Dr. Ellis says, referring to the whole Unitarian movement
in the first half of this century : " It would seem as if the course
of thought and discussion must have satisfied all candid persons
bearing the Christian name, that there is a vitality in the ideas or
faith of which the doctrine of the Trinity is the more or less
happily chosen and adequate expression. Only an amazing self-
conceit or an individual self-assertion amounting to arrogance
could resolve all the interest which now goes with the doctrine
into superstition or falsehood. The doctrine may risk the state
ment of an error, or it may fail to state the truth on which it
fastens with a strong hold. It may pass from the range of the
intelligible and the essential to the sphere of the unintelligible
and the visionary. But that it has hold of a truth and has always
been the means of conveying infinitely more truth essential to
the Christian system than it has conveyed error, is a fact which I
could not deny without calling in question the providential
oversight of God over the church of Christ. . . . During the last
fifteen hundred years a proportion of at least nine-tenths of
the nominal and actual disciples of Christ have accepted and
cherished, as a vital and fundamental Christian doctrine, a tenet
of belief expressed by the doctrine of the Trinity. This majority
has embraced its full proportion of each class of professed and
nominal Christians ; of the masses, the simple, the unlearned, the
confiding; and of the learned, the inquisitive and the independent
thinkers, who have exercised all their utmost individual power of
thought and scholarship in connection with this doctrine. About
one-tenth of those numbered in the Christian fold may be taken
as a fair estimate of the relative proportion of those who have
silently or avowedly dissented from all the popular conceptions
and assertions of the doctrine of the Trinity. And further, as an
expression of individual opinion, I would avow my own mature
conviction, that this proportion of nine-tenths and one-tenth is also
a fair measurement of what is true and of what is false in all the
ideas, scriptural arguments, Christian testimonies and practical
bearings identified more or less closely with the doctrine of the
Trinity. . . . Anti-trinitarians . . . may profitably study with new
zeal that evident fact of gospel-revelation, which does distribute the
whole working force and efficiency of the gospel-truth and power
1 Sequel to The Suspense of Faith, pp. 25, 26.

THE TRINITY: — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 377
under three divine methods or agencies, assigned respectively to
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That Trinity in unity is in the
gospel. It is the gospel. And from my heart I do believe that
there is wrapped up in that truth the substance of what is and
has been really sought and held in the doctrine of the
Trinity." 1
IV. Historically, the doctrine of the Trinity has been asso
ciated with the highest spiritual experience and power of the
church ; its denial has been associated with the decay of spiritual
experience and power.
The denial of the God in Christ reconciling the world unto
himself leads to the denial of God's work of atonement and re
demption, of regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and of the sinful
ness of man and his alienation from God constituting his need of
redemption ; and some have even denied the fact of sin itself in
its essential and distinctive significance. Necessarily, therefore,
it precludes all the deep spiritual experience responsive to God's
redeeming grace, which in all ages and countries has been distinc
tive of the Christian life. It precludes all the mighty motives which
come from the love of God in Christ, and all the gracious influences
flowing from him in the Holy Spirit drawing every man to turn
from sin to God in filial trust, and quickening him, thus turning,
to live the life of universal and self-sacrificing love in the likeness
of Christ ; it precludes the possibility of ever joining in the ascrip
tions and the new song of heaven.2 In criticising a Unitarian
Service Book, issued in 1868, a leading Unitarian newspaper re
fers to the confessions of sin and the petitions for forgiveness, and
exclaims, " What has the courageous piety of to-day to do with
such utterances?" Hence Unitarianism does not generate revi
vals of religion, such as in various forms have marked the history
of the Christian church ; it has rather, as in the case of Theodore
Parker, put itself in opposition to them. It has not entered
largely into missionary work at home or abroad. It seeks to re
form political and social abuses rather than to renew the heart
of man to faith in God and love to God and man. It addresses
the cultured rather than the masses. It cultivates the graces of
1 The Christian Trinity, A Discourse by Rev. George E. Ellis, pp. 5, 6,
7, 13. H-
2 Rev. i. 5, 6; v. 9-14.

378 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
domestic and social life, the amenities of refinement and ele
gance. It depends on " sweet reasonableness " rather than on
the word and Spirit of the living God. Similar has been the
repeated testimony of Unitarians themselves. Dr. Ellis says :
" Unitarianism has proved itself inferior to orthodoxy as a work
ing power, a method of presenting and applying the gospel so as
to engage the enthusiasm, the zeal, the hearty, devoted service of
its disciples in devising eminently Christian schemes and in carry
ing on great religious enterprises. The coldness with which the
orthodox have charged us we have felt, and instead of denying
the charge we prefer the grace of frankly acknowledging it." *
Another writer says : " Unitarianism has made too much account
of understanding and will, too little of intuition and spirit. It is
essentially an ethical system ; and although, unlike the austere
monotheism of the Hebrews, it twines the lovely wreaths of senti
ment around its iron rods of law, still, when humanity presses
against it its warm breasts, a chill strikes through the leaves. With
all its noble speech about the dignity of human nature, it has not
believed heartily enough in the worth of the ' common people ' ;
notwithstanding its many tender thoughts about the dear God, it
hesitates to send the vulgar criminal and the hardened sinner to
meet his regenerating kiss. While it has refused to shut the
Father out from immediate access to the heart of his child, and
has opened the door of the intellect that the Divine Teacher may
come in, it is not quite ready to leave its guarded house, to stand
under the broad sky, to acknowledge a purely vital connection
between God and man, and to trust the currents of celestial in
fluence that are pressing in at every pore of sense, reason, affec
tion, conscience, and soul. Unitarianism lacks organic heat and
impulse, the outward abandon Godward which charms the popular
heart ; nor, for that very reason, has it the comprehensive sym
pathy with mortal needs which attracts the great body of the
obscure and the toiling, the sin-sick and the sad. As its love of
God is wanting in enthusiastic fervor, so its love of man is want
ing in earnest heroism. Hence it wins neither the worshipers
nor the workers ; and, however extensive its negative influence in
modifying the prevailing theology, it has failed hitherto in estab
lishing itself as a positive and commanding faith." 2 Professor C.
1 Half-Century of Unitarianism, p. 39.
2 Christian Examiner, vol. 65, Nov. 1858, pp. 386, 387.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 379
C. Everett, of Harvard University, says : " One does not need to
be connected with any branch of the orthodox church to recognize
the great debt that we owe to that church in the past, and our
great dependence upon it in the present. If we take the history
of our country as a whole, we must admit that it has been the
orthodox church, under one or another of its forms, that has
stood for religion in the past and which represents it at the pre
sent time. I do not underrate the work and the power of the
liberal churches ; but when we look at the length and breadth of
our history, these may be almost left out of the account. It is
true that in the greater part of our country to-day the strength of
the orthodox churches means the strength of religion, their weak
ness the weakness of religion." J
Notwithstanding its deficiencies, Unitarianism has produced
powerful advocates of moral, social, and political reform, and
many accomplished preachers and writers. It has sought in the
constitution of man a foundation for faith in the personal God.
It has earnestly declared and defended the harmony of religion
with reason, the right to free inquiry and private judgment, the
superiority of life to dogma, the mission of love to overleap all
limitations of creed and character. The spirit of the age moves
in this direction. Whatever Unitarianism has contributed to
spread right views on these points, the trinitarian churches gladly
acknowledge. We value doctrine as it quickens and guides life.
We do not use creeds to stifle thought or to silence reason. All
the more on account of the doctrines which we firmly believe and
earnestly teach, does our love transcend all limits of sect or party,
of condition or race, of character, education, or culture, and em
brace all men, not merely as children of a common Father in
heaven, but also as sinners like ourselves, for whom Christ died,
and to whom, as to us, all the influences and agencies of God's
redeeming grace, all the invitations and promises of the gospel,
are to be. proclaimed. And while believing in God's historical
revelation of himself in Christ as recorded in the Bible, we also
maintain that religion with the belief in God is rooted in the con
stitution of man. If not, man could not be the recipient of God's
revelation of himself. And we welcome whatever helps to eluci
date and vindicate this great truth.
1 " An Outside View of Revivals," The Forum, August, 1887.

380 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
V. The denial of the Trinity has disclosed a tendency to a
false rationalism. It tends to fix the attention on abstract truth,
philosophy, ethics, rather than on the living God revealing him
self historically in redeeming men from sin, quickening them by
the Spirit in the new birth to the spiritual life of universal love
and progressively developing his kingdom on earth and in the
heavenly glory. For, as Gladstone says, " The incarnation brought
righteousness out of the region of cold abstractions, clothed it in
flesh and blood, opened for it the shortest and broadest way to
our sympathies, gave it the firmest command over the springs of
human action by incorporating it in a person, and making it, as
has been beautifully said, liable to love."
Unitarianism tends to the denial of the formal principle of Pro
testantism, that the Bible is the rule of Christian faith and prac
tice, and also to the denial of its real principle, the doctrine of
salvation from sin through faith in the God in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself. In the former of these two tendencies it
issues first in simple theism, denying all miracles and ultimately
all God's revelation of himself in any real and distinctive signifi
cance, and resting solely on naturalistic and rationalistic grounds ;
and when this tendency is legitimately carried out, it cannot stop in
theism, but issues in the loss of all positive belief in the existence
of the one only personal God. In the latter of these tendencies
Unitarianism legitimately issues in magnifying man's freedom,
while overlooking his dependence on God, — in magnifying
man's worth and dignity, while overlooking the fact of his wilful
alienation of himself from God, — in magnifying the action and
power of man, while overlooking the gracious action of God upon
him and the need of man's trustful reception of the enlightening
and quickening influence of God's love, — and consequently in
substituting morality and culture for religion and spiritual devel
opment. i. The real significance and issues ofthe denial of the Trin
ity are not usually seen at the outset. The doctrine is denied in
order to escape intellectual difficulties in formulating and explain
ing it, with no thought of opposition to the essential truth and
power of Christianity, and with no sympathy with the issues to
which the denial tends. Hence those who have made the denial
have usually retained, for a time at least, the distinctively Chris
tian conception of God as in or through Christ the redeemer of

THE TRINITY: — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 38 1
men from sin and reconciling the world unto himself. The
Polish Socinians debated whether or not divine honors should be
rendered to Christ. The Rakovian Catechism declared that
those who refused to invoke and adore him were not Christians.
Unitarians have not hesitated to call him Saviour, Mediator, Law
giver, and Judge, " sacrifice for sin," " abolisher of death, "fore
runner into eternity, where he evermore liveth to make intercession
for us." The Polish Socinians stood fast by the inspiration of the
Bible and appealed to it as the final authority. Priestley did the
same, reserving to himself the right of interpretation. The early
Unitarians of this country believed in miracles and in the autho
rity of the Bible as the revelation of God. In the early stages of
the controversy the appeal on each side was to the Bible. Some
of their writers have seemed ready to accept the Trinity itself
One writes : " Certainly the doctrine of Trinity, in itself consid
ered, need not in the least disturb our simplest conceptions of the
unity of the Godhead. ... If the persons live and work in har
monious consent of mind and will, as the Sacred Three of the
Athanasian creed unquestionably do, there is but one God,
supreme and undivided." 1 Another, while denouncing the trini
tarian use of the word " person" as an unwarranted human inven
tion, and distinguishing the doctrine of Athanasius from the so-
called Athanasian creed, says : " With the Athanasian conception
of the Godhead we have no quarrel. As an article of speculative
theosophy we have not only no objection, but are willing to con
fess a speculative leaning toward it. But when it is thrust dogma
tically forward as one of the essentials of the Christian faith, as of
binding authority, and as Scripture doctrine, we feel it to be a
falsity and an offence. . . . We shall have failed to make our
selves understood, if in these criticisms we have seemed to im
pugn the Christian doctrine embodied in the Trinity. It is only
the forced construction of that doctrine in the Constantinopolitan
creed, and the claim that any construction of it by any council or
creed is of evangelical and binding authority, against which we
protest. The belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
embraces and cecumenizes Christendom in one confession. The
dogma of tri-personality confuses and divides. The confession is
common, the interpretation of it must be left to the individual
mind and heart. ... To us it is the summit of Christian truth.
1 Christian Examiner, vol. 65, Nov. 1858, p. 374.

382 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
We see in it that which specifically distinguishes our religion from
all antecedent and contemporary faiths, exactly defining it against
polytheism on the one hand, and Hebrew and Arabian monothe
ism on the other, evangelically dividing it ifrom Persian dualism
on this side and Hindu tritheism on that. We see in it the sub-
limest and completest theory of God : a God whose nature is
neither diffracted by multiplicity, nor yet concluded in singularity,
who is neither the unconscious All of pantheism, nor the insulated
Self of Judaism ; a God whose essence is not to be sought in lone
seclusion, but in everlasting self- communication, whose being is a
unit and yet a process, — a process of which the two associated
names, the Son and the Holy Ghost, are the august terms and the
perfect methods ; a God who allies himself with the finite intelli
gence by the co-eternal, mediating Word, and reflects himself in
human nature, and enchurches himself in human society by the
ever proceeding, sanctifying Spirit. So believing, we also join in
the reverent and dear ascription : ' Glory be to the Father, and to
the Son, and to the Holy Ghost ; as it was in the beginning, is
now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.' " 1
2. But whatever may be true of individuals, these tendencies
are inherent in Unitarianism as a movement of thought. While^ it
has favored free inquiry and progressive thought in theology, it
has failed to make thought conservative and comprehensive as
well as progressive.
Unitarianism is an atmosphere of thought rather than a sys
tem. It is wont to repudiate creeds and definitions. Yet an
eminent Unitarian preacher has recently given a formal and ex
plicit definition of it : " Its very first and fundamental principle,
that which distinguishes it from all other religious bodies, and
that which is parent of all the results which thus far have been
achieved, is the fact that Unitarianism holds to the supremacy of
reason over all church organizations, over all books ; reason as
the method for the seeking of truth, as the criterion as to whether
the truth has been found ; reason as applied to the facts of the
universe and of human experience." Unitarianism as thus pre
sented is much broader and deeper than the mere denial of the
Trinity and of the deity of Christ. It avows the sufficiency of
human reason to attain all the knowledge of God which is essen
tial to religion and attainable by man. This is the same type of
1 Christian Examiner, vol. 68, March, i860, pp. 239, 266, 267.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 383
thought which appeared in the false rationalism of the last cen
tury and which is now active in substituting the impersonal, the
natural, and the ideal for the personal, the spiritual, and the
historical. The error here is not in the ultimate appeal to reason, but in
excluding the conditions essential to the knowledge of objective
reality through the exercise of reason. Therefore we must dis
criminate between false rationalism and the true.
The first defect of false rationalism is that it fails to give due
prominence to revelation as an essential factor in all human knowl
edge, or even overlooks it altogether. God alone has absolute,
self-originated knowledge. He knows the universe in its arche
type in his own mind before he gives it being in space and time.
But man as finite is on the hither side of the created universe and
can know it and the realities in it only as they previously act on
him in some way and so reveal themselves to him, either by
presenting themselves immediately in his consciousness or by
effects presented in his consciousness from which he may infer
the existence of some cause of a kind already known to him.
Our knowledge of material things presupposes that they reveal
themselves by acting on us through the sensorium, thus pre
senting themselves in consciousness, or through effects of past
action thus revealing themselves. By thought reflecting on things
thus revealed under the guidance of the universal and constituent
principles of reason, we ascertain what they are and what are their
relations and laws. All physical science rests primarily on the
revelation which the world makes of itself by acting on us directly
or indirectly, and the action of reason interpreting the revelation.
And this is only saying that it rests on the observation of facts. Our
knowledge of men as rational presupposes that they reveal them
selves as such by their action on us presenting themselves in our
consciousness, or by their action in the past communicated to us
by testimony or inferred from observed effects. Any imagined
knowledge of the physical world or of rational beings, attained by
reason and reasoning alone, without their revealing themselves,
would be a mere creation of our own minds, a mere subjective
idea without objective reality. It is equally true that the knowl
edge of God presupposes his revelation of himself, either by his
immediate action on us, as is assumed in the doctrine of the in
fluence of the Holy Spirit on men, or by historical action in the

384 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
past, known by testimony and by "its observed effects. Even the
primitive and self-evident rational intuition that some absolute
Being exists presupposes the knowledge of beings already existing
and exerting power, which, to the intuition of reason, reveal the
absolute Being. Any idea of God attained by pure reason, were
its attainment supposable, without any previous action of God
revealing himself, either immediately or historically, would be a
mere subjective idea created by our own minds. Thus J. G.
Fichte announced to his class, " To-morrow we will create God."
And Kant insisted that the idea of God attained by the pure rea
son cannot be known to be objectively real, because it has not
presented itself in consciousness with any real objective content.
And this he insists on, though he equally insists that the idea
is necessary to the reason, that the mind may complete its own
necessary processes of thought. He afterwards asserts that God
does thus reveal himself in man's moral constitution and action,
and so gives content in consciousness to the necessary idea. With
equal truth he might have added that God reveals himself in the
constitution of man as intellect and as free will, both of which are
essential presuppositions of moral ideas and character. The uni
versal and constituent principles of reason are themselves the light
of the absolute and eternal reason shining in finite minds which
are in its own likeness. And the objective reality of the absolute
Being is included in the necessary idea of God, which Kant recog
nizes as a necessary idea of reason, necessary in order that it may be
reason. Therefore, God's revelation of himself by his own action
is essential to the knowledge of him. If God's revelation of him
self is not recognized as essential to the knowledge of him, if the
knowledge of God is supposed to be obtained by the subjective
reason alone, then no real knowledge of him is possible ; we are
shut up to subjective idealism as the only true theory of knowl
edge. It would be an attempt to climb up to God on the ladder
of our own subjective thinking, — a ladder resting on our own
subjective thought, made up of the subjective processes of out
own thinking, and its top resting on nothing beyond our own
thought. By such a ladder we can never reach God. There
must be the hand of God reached down to us, which we may
grasp and so be lifted up ; there must be the voice of God
speaking in the soul, to which we can respond and so come
into communication with him. Thus false rationalism overlooks

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 385
the necessity and reality of God's revelation of himself to man,
and so can recognize as the ultimate ground of the universe only
the impersonal and the unconscious.
A second defect of false rationalism is that it does not ade
quately estimate man's dependence on God for light and for
guidance, his capacity to receive the illuminating and quickening
influence of the divine Spirit, and God's readiness to impart these
influences to all who willingly receive and follow them. Man in
his normal condition is in union with God. God in Christ makes
the great revelation of his likeness to man and of man's likeness
to God as a rational personal being, of God's love seeking man to
bring him into union with himself, of the capacity of the human
spirit to be receptive of the divine and, while personally distinct,
to be in union with God, so that we can say , with a true and real
significance, in the words of Paul, " We are a temple of the living
God." 1
Here we see both the necessity and the significance of the great
doctrine of salvation by faith. Faith is the receptive action of
man, in which, recognizing his dependence on God and trusting
his love, the man willingly accepts Christ as he is offered in the
gospel and all the gracious divine influences revealed and offered
to men in him. In faith man is willingly and trustfully receptive
of God's revelation of himself, and of all the divine influences
freely given out of God's infinite wisdom and love to all who are
willing to receive them. Thus faith is fundamentally necessary,
not to sinners alone, but to all rational creatures, who, as finite, are
all dependent on God ; not for forgiveness of sin only, but for all
knowledge, for all intellectual, moral, and spiritual development,
for the right direction and highest efficiency of all the energies.
God is our spiritual environment. " In him we live, and move,
and have our being." A finite person can thrive in the spiritual
life only as he is willingly and continuously receptive of the gracious
influences of God, — as a plant can thrive only in the continuous
reception ofthe influences of its physical environment. This willing
and trustful reception of God's gracious influence is faith. A
right life and normal development are possible to finite persons,
whether men or angels or archangels, whether sinless or sinful,
only by faith in God. And the glad tidings of the gospel, the
great revelation of God in Christ, is that God seeks man to bring
• 1 2 Cor. vi. 16; 1 Cor. iii. 16, 17; vi. 19.
vol. 1. — 25

386 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
him back to himself, even though he is a sinner; that God seeks
man before man seeks God ; that God's gracious influences are
always available and sufficient for every one who willingly and
trustfully receives them and yields himself to them.
Christian rationalism, the rationalism of Christ, supplies these
defects of false rationalism. It appeals to human reason as the
ultimate judge of the reality, the contents and the meaning of
God's revelation of himself. But it appeals to reason, which
recognizes its own dependence on and affinity with God, the
absolute Reason, — which recognizes the fact that God reveals
himself, and accepts all that he has revealed wherever it .finds
it, — which seeks the guidance of the ever-present Spirit of God,
and willingly trusts and follows his gracious illumination, quicken
ing, and drawing. It is the reason of the Christian man already
acquainted with God, receptive of his Spirit, and conscious in his
own experience of God's gracious influences upon him and of
living communion with him. And here we see the real signi
ficance of the common saying that man cannot know God by his
" unaided reason."
The principles and spirit of false rationalism with its defects
vitalize Unitarianism as a movement of thought. But at different
times and in different persons there has been less or more ap
proximation to their full recognition and expression. In the be
ginning of the rationalistic movement in Germany in the last
century, the Bible was acknowledged as containing the true reve
lation of God. Lessing held that human reason, if it had been
given time enough, would have discovered all which can be known
of God. The Christian revelation merely accelerated the progress
of man in the knowledge of God. Rationalistic interpreters of
the Bible rejected miracles. But they attempted to explain them
as natural occurrences, and so consistent with the acknowledged
authority of the Bible as the revelation of God, For example,
Christ's miracle of feeding the multitude was explained by saying
that the disciples exhibited the food they had brought with them ;
this led the others to do the same, and the result was a general
picnic. A witty reply was that they wrought philological miracles
to displace the physical ones.' Beginning with the denial of such
incidental miracles, they gradually proceeded to the denial of the
resurrection of Jesus and of all supernatural revelation. The Uni
tarian movement in this country in denying the deity of Christ

THE TRINITY: — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 387
had already reached a position at which it would naturally deny
his resurrection and ultimately all supernatural revelation.
It is doubtless true that this movement was in part occasioned
by errors of trinitarian theologians in formulating their doctrines
by ramifying distinctions and definitions to extreme minuteness
beyond the teaching both of Scripture and of reason, in taking
positions tending to tritheism, in decrying human reason as un
trustworthy, as if it were superseded and set aside by revelation,
in requiring unquestioning submission to the authority of the
church, in declaring the sovereign supremacy of God's will
unregulated by the truth and laws of reason, in tolerating deistic
conceptions of God as the First Cause apart from and transcend
ing the universe and not immanently active and revealing himself
in it, so that all his action in it would be occasional irruption and
interruption in violation of all law. In the Renaissance, thought
was busying itself with literature and art. But it was preceded
and accompanied by religious revivals under the lead of
"Reformers, before the Reformation." The Protestant Refor
mation, while it protested against the suppression of free thought
under ecclesiastical authority, also emphasized the fact of the
witness of the Spirit, and thus declared the reality of God's
revelation of himself in the consciousness of individuals ; it also
declared the reality of the historical revelation of himself in
Christ by emphasizing the supreme authority of the scriptures,
as witnessed by the Spirit, in all matters of Christian faith and
practice. Thus the charge that Protestantism was essentially
rationalistic and revolutionary is refuted. It was, as fully as any
great movement in the history of the church, comprehensive of
the three great factors of religious knowledge, the revelation of
God in the personal consciousness or experience, the historical
revelation in Christ, and the definition, vindication, and interpre
tation of the same by the reason. But in the second period of
Protestantism the witness of the Spirit had receded into the back
ground, human reason was decried, and freedom of thought and
of conscience was restrained beneath the authority of the letter of
the scriptures declared dogmatically in creeds prescribed by the
church. From this issued the rationalism of the last century,
which came gradually to deny all revelation of God, whether
immediate in personal experience or historical as recorded in the
Bible. The result was that the personal God was lost entirely in

388 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
pantheistic speculation, or retained only as a creation of sub
jective thought, or as an unknowable, or as a distant deity between
whom and the human intellect as well as the human heart lay
" deserts of vast eternity." '
The progress of true Christian rationalism has set aside these
errors while conserving the truths and facts of revelation and fur
ther developing their real significance. It is only false rational
ism which, divested of a profound historical sense, cuts itself
adrift from the historical and progressive development of Chris
tian theology and in correcting temporary errors rejects also the
fundamental truths and facts. When once it is admitted that
God reveals himself to men, that he is immanently active in the
universe, revealing himself in the ongoing of the physical system,
that he exercises moral government over men under the law of
love, is active in the courses of human history in establishing his
kingdom of righteousness and good-will, that he reveals himself
in the conscious experience of individuals in all ages, — then there
can be no a priori presumption against the continuance of his
revelation to its consummation in Christ and the Holy Spirit, as
recorded in the Bible, nor against its continuance under the
influence of the Spirit through all time. Nor can we determine
a priori what the methods or the contents of the revelation may
be ; except only that it can never contradict the universal
principles of reason, nor realize any absurdity, nor contradict
any truth which God has already revealed.
We have attained the conception of God as immanently active
in the universe and in human history, and thus continuously in
the most intimate relation with both the physical and the moral
systems. In the progress of science man finds the universe
everywhere revealing reason like his own, ordering the universe
according to the same constituent and all-regulating principles
which are laws to his own thinking and . energizing. In the
constitution of man, moral and spiritual, God is revealing himself
in the likeness of man and revealing to man his likeness to God
and his capacity to be receptive of the divine. This conception
of God removes all a priori objections to the possibility of miracles.
It permits us to regard them as accordant with the principles and
laws fundamental in the constitution of the universe and as
incidental to God's action progressively realizing, in harmony
with these laws, the ends for which the universe exists. They are

THE TRINITY:— ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 389
not violations of the laws of nature, but only reveal a super
natural power acting in and upon nature in accordance with its
fundamental laws. This immanence of God in the universe and
his continuous intimacy with it in all its ongoing, revealing his
likeness to men and his care for them, creates an antecedent
probability that this revelation of himself will rise to higher forms
and will culminate in some transcending revelation of his love to
man and of his purpose to bring him into union with himself and
into his own moral likeness as the God of love. The God in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself is a revelation in the
same line with that which he has been making in the physical
universe and in humanity, and is its fitting consummation. The
a priori objections to the possibility of miracles and to the great
est miracle, the God in Christ, arise from a totally different con
ception of God in his relation to the universe, from the conception
of God as transcending the universe so that he is separated from
it and excluded from acting in it, and so from revealing himself
in it.
When we see that the doctrine of the Trinity comprehends
in unity the dualisms and the complemental truths, and solves
the seeming antinomies in the idea of the absolute in his relation
to the finite universe and his revelation of himself in it, while
it saves us from the abyss of pantheism and the nothingness of
agnosticism, we are prepared to accept it as the most complete
and comprehensive conception of the one only God in all the
manifoldness of his being. Here God in his three modes of be
ing is the central source of the threefold efflux of the divine into
the human : Light, the absolute Reason that lighteth every man ;
Life, the energizing will that, as the eternal Word, is forever
realizing and expressing in the finite the thought of the eternal
Reason and revealing its eternal Light ; Love, the harmony of
the Will with the Reason, in God's free and eternal purpose, to
give full expression in the finite creation to all that is true and
right and perfect and good, to give full expression to the thought
of his wisdom in the action of his love.
3. This inherent tendency of Unitarianism has been exemp
lified in the history of the Unitarian movement in this country.
Early in this movement tendencies of this kind were noticed
both by its supporters and its opponents. Professor Moses
Stuart, writing to Dr. Channing, put on record this prophecy:

390 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
" I am well satisfied that the course of reasoning in which you
have embarked, and the principles by which you explain away
the Divinity of the Savior must lead most men who approve of
them eventually to the conclusion that the Bible is not of divine
origin and does not oblige us to belief or obedience." i A great
clamor arose at once, indignantly denying the imputation and
denouncing the professor for his uncharitableness and bigotry.
But the prophecy was long ago fulfilled. For a considerable
period Theodore Parker's doctrine was repudiated by many Uni
tarians, and all ecclesiastical union with him and his followers
was declined. It would be repudiated by few now, except in
deed as many seem to have gone beyond him and have no sym
pathy with his reverence and love for the Bible and his active
agency in circulating it. Accordingly, in a sermon, soon after
his death, an eminent Unitarian preacher said truly : " He is as
a teacher the legitimate fruit of our denomination. He belongs
to us, and there is no way in which to deny him. We stand as
the extreme logical result of Protestantism ; he stands as the ex
treme logical result of Unitarianism. Draw the line of demarca
tion as closely as you can, you cannot draw it this side of him."
Dr. Channing early discovered the evil tendencies inherent in
the Unitarian system. In r820 he wrote: "I have told you
how much I think Unitarianism has suffered from a union with
a heart-withering philosophy. ... I fear we must look to other
schools for the thoughts which thrill us, which touch the most
inward springs and disclose to us the depths of our own souls."
In 1839 he wrote : "I would I could look on Unitarianism with
more hope. But this system was a protest of the understanding
against absurd dogmas, rather than the work of deep religious
principle, and was early paralyzed by the mixture of a material
philosophy, and fell too much into the hands of scholars and
political reformers ; and the consequence is a want of vitality and
force, which gives us little hope of its accomplishing much under
its present auspices or in its present form." In 1841 he says:
" With Dr. Priestley, a good and great man, I have less sympathy
than with many of the orthodox. ... I am little of a Unitarian.
I have little sympathy with the system of Priestley and Belsham.
. . . Old Unitarianism must undergo important modifications or
developments. This I have felt for years. Though an advance
1 Letters to Dr. Channing, p. 141.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 391
on previous systems and bearing some better fruit, it does not
work deeply, it does not strike living springs in the soul. This
is perfectly consistent with the profound piety of individuals in
the body. But it cannot regenerate the world. No matter how
reasonable it is, if it is without power." 1
Similar is the testimony of Mrs. Sarah A. Bradford Ripley :
" Yesterday being Sunday, Mr.  preached ; and I felt more
than ever how fast I am receding from the church of which Uni
tarianism is the exponent ; and that is the only manifestation of
its power with which I am familiar. We must have the life of
God in the soul. If we find it in the church, how venerable in
its environment of olden time ! But we eschew the church when
it is only a mask to cover the want of it. Mr.  preached
from the text, " O wretched man that I am," &c. (Rom. vii. 24,
25). How the bucket of the gentleman danced up and down
on the surface of that deep well of spiritual life from which the
saints have in all ages drawn living water." 2
From Dr. Channing's day till now, Unitarianism has been re
markable for its continual criticism of itself. Dr. Bellows de
scribes the process by which his denomination has been passing
to "The Suspense of Faith." After saying that Unitarianism
originated in an attempt to effect a better adjustment between
the theology of Christendom and the spirit, culture, and politics
of the last century, he says : " It accordingly began to compare
the theories and doctrines of Christendom with the letter of the
written scripture, and by and by with the less legible but elder
scripture of human reason or natural conscience. In this pro
cess, in which by degrees tradition and the integral quality of
history and the common consciousness of the church . became
disowned, the gospel of Christ gradually resolved itself into a
philosophy, — high, noble, pure, but intellectual, cold, and dreary,
— a philosophy in which at first only the old forms, dogmas, sym
bols, and rites of the church were discarded as refuse or slag, and
in which at last the history and records and personality of Chris
tianity were thrown off, as accidental or even excremental, or at
any rate as non-essentials of a system which had yielded its
secret and soul to the crucible of metaphysical and scientific
analysis, and now stood simplified and condensed in the phials
1 Memoirs, vol. ii. pp. 97, 394, 380, 381, 399.
2 Memoir, in " Worthy Women of Our First Century," p. 166.

392 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
of social philosophy. . . . here in George Combe's ' Constitution
of Man,' there in Newman's book on ' The Soul,' now in Morell's
'Philosophy of Religion,' then in Parker's 'Discourse of Re
ligion.' ... It was not deliberate and cold-blooded. It was
forced on its agents by necessity, by the logic of events, by in
ternal and irresistible laws of the mind and of the age. One step
involved another. ... As brave men descend into a well to save
lives that are perishing in its exhausted atmosphere and are them
selves drawn out half dead, they ascended into the thin and chill
ing air of mere religious philosophy, in hopes of proving that men
incapable of living where they were, could breathe and live there ;
they hoped to find, in the roomy chambers of ' the vague im
mense,' attractive, safe, and wholesome quarters for an unbeliev
ing and undevout humanity, on which the church had lost its
hold, and to which it gave no shelter. But they had forgotten
how weak, how mortal, how domestic Humanity is ; how narrow
the boundaries of its proper self-reliance, how hemmed in by his
tory, how dependent on tradition, how circumscribed by experi
ence, how tended and folded by God's providence, and lodged
and fed within his own house. They had not known how con
genially adapted to mortal wants is a positive revelation, an his
torical religion, an incarnated Divinity, an external apparatus of
doctrines and symbols possessing authoritative quality, tangible
shape, and positive testimony. These, the imagined obstacles,
were actually the essentials of a religion ; the absolute conditions
of any common faith or worship among men ; the sole basis of
religious institutions, and the only means of any organic and
continuous religious influence." * In an Address before the
Alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, in 1859, he says : "Why
is it that the moment we find ourselves in possession of men
whom genius, character, and scholarship fit to lead us in our
logical career to new victories and the extension of our faith, they
almost uniformly become paralyzed by doubts and scruples, and
lose their interest in the progress which they might assure? It
is simply because the small elevation which gives them command
of us, reveals to them the absence of any more road in the di
rection we have been going. Not brave enough or quite clear
enough to announce this, they allow themselves to seem smitten
with sudden indifference to their former interests, and leave the
1 Sequel to The Suspense of Faith, pp. 21-24.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 393
rank and file to blunder on and find out the truth for themselves.
Of later years this has been our almost constant experience as
a body." 1 And he says emphatically : " The time has arrived
when Unitarianism has this option, either to turn into Ration
alism and essential though devout and pure Infidelity (which in
one of its wings it threatens to become), or to turn more de
cidedly into the church, carrying its wealth with it, to find there
its home and the ideas and influences it has missed in its earnest
and honest exile." 2
Unitarianism, in its most advanced development at the present
day, would receive into its fellowship "as Unitarians those who
have lost all belief in a personal God. Rev. J. H. Allen, Lec
turer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University, in his
"Three Phases of Modern Theology," says : " One may distinctly
rule out from his belief everything that is technically supernatu
ral ; yet it is free to him, if he will, to profess himself a Christian
and claim the fellowship of his birthright Church." Since God
is technically and in every true sense supernatural, the language
implies that an atheist may properly claim to be a Christian, and
is to be recognized as such by the Unitarian churches. The
same is the view avowed by the Western Unitarian Conference.
This Conference, when organized, took its stand as a distinctively
Christian organization. But the influence of the Free Religious
Association, organized in Boston some years ago, extended west
ward. In 1875 the Conference adopted a proposition definitely
changing its basis, dropping the word Christian and welcoming to
fellowship all who would work to promote " the kingdom of
God." In 1886, at the meeting in Cincinnati, a resolution, de
claring the purpose of the Conference to be " to promote pure
Christianity," was voted down. Another, declaring its object to
be to promote a religion of " love to Cod and love to man," was
also voted down, the objection to it being that the word God is
" dogmatic." Then the Conference adopted a basis for itself
distinctively and solely ethical. At the meeting in Chicago, in
1887, the subject came up again, and after discussion the Con
ference, reaffirmed its action, declaring its welcome to " all who
wish to join us to help establish truth, love, and righteousness in
the world," with the only qualification that the resolution is " to
1 The Suspense of Faith, p. 23.
2 Sequel to The Suspense of Faith, p. 20.

394 G0D> THE 0NE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
be regarded only as the thought ofthe majority." Thus, in spite
of the earnest opposition of the more conservative members, the
Conference established itself on a distinctively ethical basis. But
ethics without God is a very uncertain and indefinite thing, — like
an astronomy of the solar system with no recognition of the sun.
So far Unitarianism has advanced beyond the absolute religion of
Theodore Parker, with its three doctrines of God, his moral law
and immortality, which was as repugnant to the conservative Uni
tarians of his earlier ministry as the exclusion of belief in God from
the basis of fellowship is to the conservatives of to-day. Thus,
while proclaiming the worth of life above dogma, these extrem
ists have reached the point where mere intellectual skepticism
supplants both religious doctrine and life. While proclaiming
the right of free thought and private judgment, they have pushed
individualism to the extreme in which the religious thought of
each person is disintegrated from that of every other, as well as
from that of the Christian community ; and the religious belief
and life of the present are cut off from the vital growth and devel
opment of the past. There is full justification of the words of
Ralph W. Emerson : " ,Luther would have cut Ms hand off sooner
than write theses against the Pope, if he had suspected that he was
bringing on with all his might the pale negations of Boston
Unitarianism." J
VI. The Christian conception of God meets spiritual wants
disclosed in all religions, and realizes ideas for which the ethnic
religions have been and are groping.
The idea of God has been held in three forms : the One, the
Many, and the All. Monotheism recognizes God as the one
absolute and personal Spirit. Polytheism recognizes God in the
diversity of his powers as revealed in the universe, but fails to see
his unity in them all. Pantheism makes God the All. Here
human thought, seeking to define God as immanent in the uni
verse, identifies him with it. Seeking to declare the oneness of
God in all his varied manifestations in the universe and the union
of God with man, it overleaps its goal and sinks in the morass of
pantheism. God, identified with the universe, is lost in the im
personal and the unconscious ; man, becoming only' a mode of
1 "The Sovereignty. of Ethics," N. American Rev., May and June, 1878,
P- 415-

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 395
the existence of God, loses his individual personality and his
moral freedom and responsibility. Christianity has superseded
all three by taking up the truths of each and comprehending them
in unity in itself.
Religion consists in the communion of man with God, neces
sarily implying God's revelation of himself to man and commun
ion with him. All religions strive more or less consciously and
intelligently for the perfect realization of this communion. Mo
hammedism and deism, holding the simple and rigid unity of
God, fail to know him in his varied powers and manifestations, in
the pervasiveness of his presence and action in the universe, in
the fulness of his love to men and the intimacy of his communion
with them. Polytheism, recognizing a deity in every power of
the universe, disintegrates the manifestations and fails to appre
hend the oneness, the majesty and the love of the one absolute
Spirit. Its profound thinkers, however, have passed behind the •
multitude of gods and have recognized the one absolute Being,
and, at least since the time of Anaxagoras, have from time to time
recognized it as the supreme and absolute Reason. Pantheism
destroys all foundation of the possibility of religion, because it is
impossible for man to have communion with the impersonal and
unconscious, by whatever name it may be called. Christianity
alone, in its revelation of the God in Christ reconciling the world
unto himself, and therein of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, comprehends God in all his varied aspects, — as the one
absolute Spirit, as energizing in the universe and immanent in it,
and as the God of love, in Christ reconciling men to himself, and
dwelling with them in loving intimacy in the Spirit of Holiness.
Thus in the ethnic religions men disclose the consciousness of
spiritual wants which Christianity alone can satisfy, and are groping
after a God whom Christianity alone clearly reveals.
Accordingly we commonly find in the more developed ethnic
religions a triad of principal divinities ; three Heads of all the
deified powers manifested in nature and in humanity. We find
also incarnations of the divinity, especially in the East, and vari
ous appearances of a divinity in human form. It is objected that
these are not identical with the Christian conception of God in
the Trinity and in the God in Christ. This is true. But it does
not invalidate the argument. It is only in God's redemption of
men in Christ that he is fully revealed as the one God, Father,

396 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Son, and Holy Spirit, and as the Word becoming flesh and dwel
ling among us. We therefore do not expect to find it fully re
vealed in the ethnic religions. The argument is merely that in
these religions men have become aware of spiritual needs which
only the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, revealed in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself, can satisfy, — and find
in nature and in man indications which point in the direction of
the distinctively Christian conception of God.
Dr. Dorner suggests that in the oriental religions the thought
begins with the divine — and God is conceived as coming down to
man in incarnations — finally losing itself in pantheism. In the
Western religions thought begins with man and conceives of him
as elevated to God ; it issues in the deification or apotheosis of
great men. In the East, God becomes man ; in the West, man be
comes God. Both seek the same end, the union and communion
of man with God. But both failed to reach this end. In the East,
man's receptivity of the divine, held in a one-sided way, excluded
the freedom, activity, and development of man. His religion was
meditative and ascetic, an inactive resignation and quietism ; his
philosophy was pantheism, with no basis for the free personality
of either God or man ; on earth he was content with supine inac
tivity under despotism, caste, and unchanging custom ; for the
future life he was satisfied with the expectation of absorption into
the absolute and the extinction of his conscious personal being.
In the West, man's personality was held in a one-sided way, over
laying his receptivity from God and implying his sufficiency for
himself. The result was consciousness of freedom, vigor of
thought, energy of action, self-sufficiency, man deifying himself.
He could never be content with the absorption of his conscious
personality in the absolute. Yet the issue of this one-sided
development in self-sufficiency was the coming of the Caesar and
his deification, the enslavement of the western world under des
potism, and the loss of God, either by separation from man in
Epicureanism or by identifying him with the universe in panthe
ism. Man deified the world and sought his blessedness in it.
Christianity comprehends in unity both of these one-sided con
ceptions. God comes down to man to lift man up to God. Man
is receptive of the divine by his own free trust in God, and is
quickened by God to the highest development of all his capaci
ties and the highest exertion of all his energies in love and its

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 397
willing and self-sacrificing service. Thus man becomes a worker
with God in establishing the kingdom of God on earth.
Similar indications pointing to the Christian conception of God
are found in philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, philosophy at
different times has sought the rational theory of the existence and
constitution of the universe in some sort of a Trinity.
Bancroft, the historian, has said that some idea of the triune
God " is inherent in every system of thought which can pretend
to vitality." 1 Coleridge says : " The Trinity is the only form in
which an idea of God is possible, unless it be a Spinozistic or
World-God. ... I affirm that the article of the Trinity is reli
gion, is reason and its universal formula ; and that there neither
is nor can be any religion, any reason, but what is, or is an ex
pansion of, the truth of the Trinity." 2 It is now evident that
there is a truth in these seemingly extravagant assertions. The
history of religion, and of theological and philosophical thought
has shown that the Trinity and the Incarnation present a concep
tion of God necessary to satisfy spiritual wants which all religions
have more or less clearly disclosed, and to meet the demands of
reason in every attempt to construct a theological or philosophical
theory of the universe in its relation to God. The triads and in
carnations of the ethnic religions and philosophies disclose, even
in man's dimmer apprehensions of what God reveals himself to
be, some consciousness of him as being what in Christ he is more
clearly and fully revealed to be.
VII. The truth of the doctrines of the God in Christ, and of
the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is independent of the
philosophical and speculative questions respecting them which
have been discussed within the church, and of the failure to attain
agreement in answering these questions. The revelation of the
God in Christ, and of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
underlies the whole revelation of God as the redeemer of men
from sin, and is inseparably connected with it. It is thus in
wrought into the essence of Christianity. Hence these doctrines,
as thus revealed in the Scriptures and in their practical signifi
cance as connected with redemption, have been the common
belief of the church in all ages. The truth of these doctrines has
1 Christian Examiner, vol. 69, September, i860, p. 213.
2 " Literary Remains," Works, Shedd's ed., pp. 36, 404.

398 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
not been the question at issue in the controversies which have
arisen within the church. These have pertained to attempts to
give more exact definitions and formulas, to explain how the
divine and the human are united in Christ, or how the three exist
as one in the eternal being of God ; while on both sides of the
controversy the aim has been to elucidate the doctrines, to remove
objections, and to vindicate them as true.
Theologians distinguish between the ontological or immanent
Trinity as eternal in God independent of his revelation of him
self, and the economic or practical Trinity as revealed in the
scriptures in its practical significance as related to redemption.
It may be objected to this distinction that what God reveals is
himself; and the Trinity revealed must be the Trinity that God
eternally is. But the distinction, rightly apprehended, is between
the Trinity so far as revealed and the idea of the Trinity as formed
by the human mind, when in reflective thought it goes behind the
revelation and attempts a metaphysical construction of the Trinity
as it is eternal in God, or a picturing of it in the imagination.
The results of such attempts are speculative theories as to the
ontological Trinity. But every revelation of God must be on a
background of mystery. No finite mind can completely compre
hend God. The revelation of God in Christ, and of God, the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, opens a deeper insight into the
essential being of God and his relations to man than any other
revelation. For that very reason it discloses to us more fully the
mystery of his being. Therefore, though all attempts to picture
God, as thus revealed, in the imagination, or to define him with
exactness and completeness, or to answer all speculative questions
which may be asked, may fail, God so far as revealed may still be
apprehensible, and the revelation may be real, far-reaching, and
of great practical power.
A similar distinction must be made between Christ the Son of
God and the Son of Man, as revealed in the work of redemption,
and conceptions of him arising from attempted psychological con
structions of his person as human and divine. Attempts at such
construction have been common in the history of the church.
They have been the occasion of discussion and controversy within
the church, which continue to this day. But in all this theo
rizing and discussion within the church, it has not been disputed
that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. There

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 399
has been a general agreement in recognizing the union of the
human and the divine in the person, Jesus the Christ. The diffi
culty has been how to construct his person in thought. But in
whatever way it has been constructed, the belief in the God in
Christ has remained unchanged. The history shows that neither
one theory nor another of constructing the idea is essential to the
doctrine in its scriptural and practical significance.
The common doctrine of the church has been, that Christ is
one person having two natures, the divine and the human. The
question is, What person is it that presents himself in Christ ? Is
it God, or man ?
It cannot be a human person, a particular man, named Jesus.
This is an ancient error, controverted in a short paper of doubt
ful genuineness, attributed to Athanasius, and bearing a title simi
lar to one of his genuine writings. The writer says of this error :
"They who say this contradict the Word (Logos), since they say
that a Son of man, not descending from heaven but arising from
the earth, received God descending from heaven into himself." J
Moreover, any possible union of God with him would be a union
with only one man, not with humanity. And further, if the per
son presented in Jesus was a human person, then, however richly
endowed, he could never become God, but must remain in every
action and through all his history, always a man ; for it is impos
sible for one person either to be transformed into another, or
united with another in one person ; and God cannot impart his
absoluteness to a man, because that would be the absurdity of
creating a second God. Jesus then would be a man distinguished
from other men only by a higher prophetic inspiration and richer
spiritual gifts, and incompetent for the work of God in Christ
redeeming men from sin. This, therefore, involves the denial
that he is divine, except in the sense in which all men are so,
being in their personality in the likeness of God. Thus it logi
cally leads to the Socinian doctrine that Christ is a mere man.
On the other hand, it may be supposed that the person in
Christ is God, in that eternal mode of his being in which he is
revealed as the Logos, the Word, or the Son. The danger here
is that in this conception the human in Christ may be displaced
by the divine or lost in it. Accordingly Docetism appeared early
1 " On the Incarnation of the Word (Logos) of God," Works, vol. iv.
p. 91. Ed. J. P. Migne; Paris, 1857. Patrologia Graeca, vol. xxviii.

400 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
in the history of the church, affirming that Christ's body and all
the human sensibilities through which man suffers had no reality,
but were merely illusive appearance. Apollinarianism, on the
other hand, recognized the reality of Christ's body, with all its
natural sensibilities, but denied the existence in him of a rational
spirit. From these facts, as well as from the whole history of the
early Christian church, it is evident that it was the deity of Christ
rather than his humanity which made the most powerful impres
sion on the primitive Christians. In opposition to the two errors
of Docetism and Apollinarianism, the church in its creeds de
clared the existence in the Christ of " a true body and a reason
able soul." But throughout the whole history, the common beliefs
of trinitarians has been that in some way the one person of Christ
is the Logos, or Son of God.
Some in our own day have propounded a doctrine essentially the
same with Apollinarianism. This arises from confounding the
human nature predicated of Christ in theology with a distinct
human person. A rational human spirit, as it exists in a man, is
itself the person of the man. Therefore, it is argued, personality
is of the essence of the human spirit or soul ; if impersonal, it
would not be a spirit or soul. Thence, it is inferred that if Christ
has a rational human soul and is at the same time the Son of God,
he is no longer one person, but two. Then the Logos or Son of
God, is recognized as the one person in Christ to the exclusion
of a rational human soul.
This conception of Christ really divests him of human nature
in its higher attributes as rational free spirit, and regards him as
God acting only through a human body. This annuls every con
ception of Christ as at once human and divine. It therefore
excludes all the significance of Christ as the revealer of man as
well as of God, and as revealing the essential likeness of man to
God. And it does not remove the difficulty. There is more
difficulty in conceiving of God as incarnate in a mere material
body than in a complete human nature. It is only the likeness
of man in his higher nature to God which makes the incarnation
possible. God cannot impetrify himself in a stone, or indendrify
himself in a tree, or incarnate himself in mere living flesh, as in
an oyster. God as a spirit cannot become matter. Therefore,
by adopting the Apollinarian theory, nothing is gained and new
difficulties are created.

THE TRINITY: —ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 401
But it is not necessary to resort to this theory. The doctrine
of anhypostasia, commonly held by the Reformed churches, pre
sents a more scriptural conception of the person of Christ, and
more effectually removes the difficulty. Trinitarians who reject
it, commonly show that they have not apprehended its real sig
nificance. It is commonly spoken of as the doctrine of the im
personality of Christ's human nature ; and this is misunderstood
as denying that he is human. But, in fact, the doctrine does not
deny that Christ is human, but strenuously affirms that the one
person, Jesus Christ, is both divine and human ; in one aspect
this one person is divine, having all the attributes essential to
personality in God ; in another he is human, having all the attri
butes essential in human personality. For it must be remembered
that personality is not the person, but is only the name of the
abstracted qualities or nature which constitute a being personal,
and that absoluteness and finiteness are not of the essence of
personality, but only different forms in which personality may
exist. The doctrine simply denies that Jesus ever existed as an
individual man, a human person before the incarnation, but as
serts that he is a human person in and through the union of the
divine with the human in the incarnation. In this the two natures
are united, as the Council of Chalcedon declared, "indivisibly
and inseparably." This doctrine has been designated by the
Greek words, anhypostasia, as denying Christ's human personality
antecedent to and apart from the incarnation of the Logos, and
enhypostasia, as asserting his human personality in the incarnation
of the Logos.1
1 Athanasian Creed : " Who, although he is God and man, yet he is not
two, but one Christ. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but
by assumption of the manhood into God. One altogether ; not by con
version of substance, but by unity of person. For as the rational soul and
the flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ."
Turretin: " By the intimate and perpetual conjunction ofthe human and
divine natures into the unity of a person, the human nature, which was des
titute of a personality of its own and hivirio-Taros, because otherwise it
would itself have been a person, was taken up to the person of the Logos
and conjoined or adjoined to it into the unity of a person, so that now it
may be £vvw6o-to.tos, since it has coalesced into one person with the Logos.
. . . The union is effected by the assumption of the human nature into the
oneness of the person of the Logos." — Instit. Loc. xiii., Quaest. 6, VI.
and III.
Buddaeus : " The human nature, destitute of all subsistence in itself sub
sists in the subsistence of the Logos. ... By this union of the two natures,
vol. I. — 26

402 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
The thought will, then, be as follows : God, in the Son, creates
the universe and thus brings into being reality other than himself.
He energizes in the creation, preservation, and evolution of the
universe, and thus is continuously and progressively expressing his
thought therein in the finite, in the forms of space and time. He
reveals himself in the physical system. He makes a higher revela
tion of himself in the spiritual system, every person in which is, as
personal, in the likeness of God. In the fulness of time, when the
world is prepared for it, he reveals himself in Christ. The Word
or Son of God creates a germinal human being that would have
developed into a man rational and personal. But, instead, the
divine Son or Word takes possession of the germinal organization
thus created, and from the beginning acts in and through it under
the limitations and conditions of a human nature. But the per
sonal nature or essence of God is the same in kind with that of
man. And acting in Christ through a human organization and
under human limitations and conditions, it is also the same in the
form of its manifestation. Thus it is at once divine and human.
And the two are the same in essence and in form. Thus Christ is
the God-man. God, the Son, is the person energizing and reveal*
ing himself in him, the God in Christ reconciling the world unto
himself. Thus Christ in all his words and actions and character
is the exponent to us, under human forms, of the thought and
heart of God ; and he manifests the divine more and more as in
the divine and the human, by which the divine takes up the human, desti
tute of all subsistence in itself, into its own person (hypostasis) and unites
itself most closely with it, it comes to pass that one person, the God-man,
results." — Lib. iv., ch. ii., §§ 6 and 7, pp. 743, 744.
Richard Hooker: "It pleased not the Word or Wisdom of God to
take to itself some one person among men, for then would that one have
been advanced and no more; but Wisdom, to the end she might save
many, built her house of that nature which is common unto all : she
made not this or that man her habitation but dwelt in us. . . . If the Son
of man had taken to himself a man now made and already perfected, it
would of necessity follow that there are in Christ two persons, the one
assuming and the other assumed ; whereas the Son of God did not assume
a man's person unto his own, but a man's nature to his own Person." —
Eccles. Polity, Bk. v. lii. 3.
Samuel Hopkins ; " The human nature which this divine person, the
Word, assumed into a personal union with himself, is not and never was a
distinct person by itself : and personality cannot be ascribed to it and does
not belong to it any otherwise than as united to the Logos, the Word of
God." — Works, vol. i., p. 283.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 403
his growth from infancy to maturity he becomes more and more
capable of being the medium through which God manifests him
self. At the same time he has every attribute of a pure humanity,
both of a true body and a reasonable soul. And he reveals the
fact that personality in its essential elements is the same in man
and in God ; and that man through God's love may attain also to
the moral and spiritual likeness of God in character, in love such
as God has revealed in Christ. Thus, in Christ uniting himself
with human nature and acting through it and under its limitations
and conditions, God makes his highest and fullest revelation of
himself to mankind.
The supposition that God reveals himself through " the one
mediator between God and man, himself man, Christ Jesus," in
volves no difficulties different in kind from those inseparable from
every attempt to picture God or to construct a definite idea of
him in his action in creating or in any revelation of the absolute
Being in the finite. And the Son of God, thus revealing himself
in Christ, does not cease to be God energizing elsewhere through
out the universe any more than when energizing in the sun he
ceases to be God energizing elsewhere throughout the universe.
Athanasius says : " If the Logos of God is in the world, which is
a body, if he is immanent in all and every thing, is it incredible
or absurd if we assert that he is also in man? If it is absurd
that the Logos exists in a body, it would be absurd that he
should exist in the universe and illuminate and move it by
his providence. But if the Logos can exist and be known
in the world, then there is no inconsistency in his appearing
in a human body and its being illuminated and having its
powers of action from him." And he compares the Logos or
Son of God in Christ, while at the same time acting throughout
the universe, to the spirit of man which acts throughout the whole
body, yet specially and pre-eminently reveals itself through a sin
gle organ — that is, the tongue.1 The Athanasian Creed refers to
the union of body and spirit in the one person of a man as analo
gous to the union of the divine and human in Christ. In this
union in a man's own person, the human spirit acts and reveals
itself in the physical organization, which as material is not the
1 Oration on the Incarnation of the Logos, §§ 17, 41. A2 1 Works, vol. i.
b " Patrologia Graeca " (Migne), vol. xxv. This is the genuine work of
Athanasius bearing this title.

404 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
same in kind with itself. Were we not familiar with this union in
ourselves, it might be more difficult to conceive of it as possible
than it is now to conceive of the union of the divine and the
human in Christ, in which the Son of God unites himself with
humanity and acts in and through a human nature, which, so far
as it is personal, is the same in its essential attributes with his
own nature as personal.
We now see the true significance of the doctrine of the avimo-
o-To.o-ia, that Jesus was never a human person antecedent to and
apart from the incarnation, but only in the personality of God in
carnate in him (ivvTroo-Taros) . This also gives the real significance
of the kenosis or self-emptying of the Son or Word of God. The
doctrine would mean that in the humiliation the God in Christ
exercised all the powers which constitute the essence of his per
sonality, but under human limitations and conditions. It is not
that he ceased to be the absolute Being ; but that in the humilia
tion in Christ he acts in and through the human organization
which he had created as the medium of his highest revelation
of himself, and under the conditions of humanity.
I do not deny or depreciate whatever of value has accrued from
the attempted philosophical constructions and explanations of the
incarnation and the Trinity and from the controversies respecting
them within the church. But the history of these discussions has
at least shown that complete agreement is not- to be expected on
some of the questions which have been under debate, and warns
us against fruitless speculation. And from what has been said it
is evident that the truth of the doctrines in their scriptural and
practical significance is independent of the philosophical questions
respecting them which have been discussed within the church and
of the failure to attain agreement in respect to some of them.
Therefore I shall not enter into further consideration of these
questions. The words with which Calvin closed his discussion of
the Trinity in " The Institutes " are always pertinent. " Finally I
trust that the entire sum of this doctrine has been unfolded, if
indeed the readers impose some limit of moderation on their
curiosity and do not call up troublesome and perplexing
questions more eagerly than is fit. I do not in the least expect
to satisfy those who are carried away in intemperance of specu
lation. I certainly have not craftily passed by anything which
I might suppose opposed to me ; but, while I study the edification

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 405
of the church, I have purposely left untouched many points which
are of little practical importance and would only cause useless
perplexity to the readers." J
The difficulty in believing these doctrines arises in great part
from the stupendous greatness and glory of the revelation of God
in them. We have noticed the law of the universe, that the
highest goes down to the lowest to lift it up. But when we are
told that God descends to humanity, and even to sinful humanity
in the humiliation, it seems too much to believe. Christ was
predicted as the sun of righteousness rising. We watch the
dawning light, waiting and hoping for the coming of the sun.
The arch of light rises ; the darkness is crowded toward the
west ; the hill-tops are illuminated ; the valleys are filled with
light. But when the sun begins to lift itself above the horizon
and its level rays strike our eyes, we are dazzled and blinded with
excess of light. So it is when Christ, the sun of righteousness,
rises and pours on human eyes the glory of the present God.
" 'Tis thus when, unto yearning hope's endeavor,
Its highest wish on sweet attainment grounded,
The portals of fulfilment widely sever ;
But if there burst from those eternal spaces
A flood of flame, we stand confounded ever ;
For life's poor torch we sought the shining traces,
And seas of fire — and what a fire — surprise us." 2
In order to believe the revelation of God in Christ and in the
Trinity we need to attain a more profound and practically
dominant conviction that the fundamental reality in the universe
is the spiritual ; that God is immanent and active everywhere in
it ; that in his personal and spiritual being man is like God and,
constitutionally and aside from sin, is in affinity with him ; that
" God is not far from every one of us ; " that his love, seeking the
lowest, is without measure ; and that his coming into humanity
in Christ is only the legitimate expression of love which is divine.
Therefore Paul prayed for Christians in his day, that they might
be lifted above the range of sense into spiritual vision : " that the
God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto
you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him,
having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what
1 Institutes, Bk. i. chap. xiii. 29.
2 Goethe, " Faust," Part ii. Act i. : Werke, vol. ii. Ed. Stuttgart &
Tubingen, p. 411.

406 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
is the hope of his calling, what the riches of the glory of his
inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his
power to us who believe, according to that working of the might
of his power which he wrought in Christ." 1
I close this chapter in the strong words of Dr. Bushnell : " To
hold this grand subtonic mystery, in the ring of whose deep
reverberation we receive our heaviest impressions of God, as if it
were only a thing jusf. receivable, not profitable ; a dead truth, not
a living; a theologie article, wholly one side of the practical
life ; a truth so scholastic and subtle as to have in fact no
relation to Christian experience ; nothing, we are sure, can be less
adequate than this, or bring a loss to religion that is jnore deplorable,
unless it be a flat denial of the mystery itself. In this view we
cannot but hope that what we have been able to say may have
a certain value. . . . preparing some to find how glorious and
blessed a gift to experience, how vast an opening of God to man,
how powerful, transforming, transporting, this great mystery of
God may be. We can wish the reader nothing more beatific in
this life than to have found and fully brought into feeling the
practical significance of this eternal act or fact of God, which we
call the Christian Trinity. Nowhere else do the bonds of limi
tation burst away as here. Nowhere else does the soul launch
upon immensity as here ; nowhere fill her burning censer with
the eternal fires of God, as when she sings,
One inexplicably three,
One in simplest unity.
. , Neither will it do for us to suffer any impatience or be
hurried into any act of presumption, because the Trinity of God
costs us some struggles of thought, and because we cannot find
immediately how to hold it without some feeling of disturbance
and distraction. Simply because God is too great for our
extempore and merely childish comprehension, he ought to be
given us in forms that cost us labor and put us on a stretch of
endeavor. So it is with all great themes. . . . Let no shallow
presumption turn us away, then, from this glorious mystery till we
have given it time enough and opened to it windows enough by
our praises and our prayers, to let in the revelation of its glory.
Let it also be a welcome commendation to our reverence, that so
1 Eph. i. 17-23.

THE TRINITY : — ITS PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE 407
many friends of God and righteous men of the past ages, such as
bore a greater fight than we and grew to greater ripeness in their
saintly walk, bowed themselves adoringly before this holy mystery,
and sang it with hallelujahs in the worship of their temples, in
their desert fastings and their fires of testimony. And as their
Gloria Patri, the sublimest of their doxologies, is in form a hymn
for the ages, framed to be continuously chanted by the long
procession of times till times are lapsed in eternity, what can we
better do than let the wave lift us that lifted them, and bid it roll
on : Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy
Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen." 1
1 " The Christian Trinity a Practical Truth," Literary Varieties, vol. iii.
Building Eras in Religion, pp. 144, 148 (originally in " New Englander," vol.
xii. Nov. 1854).

CHAPTER XI
the trinity : — THE practical significance of the revelation
OF GOD IN CHRIST
The practical significance of the revelation of God as the Trin
ity has been considered. I proceed now to consider the distinc
tive practical significance of the revelation of God coming into
humanity in Christ ; the Word that was in the beginning, that
was with God, that was God, became flesh and dwelt among us,
full of grace and truth. This significance can be set forth only in
the full history of the work of God in Christ reconciling the world
unto himself, renovating individuals to the new spiritual life of
love in Christ, and developing his kingdom among men. There
fore, it is possible here only to indicate some lines of practical
significance in the work of God in Christ. In ascertaining this
significance we must look at it from the points of view already
attained. I. Christ the Revealer of God. — Christ in his oral teach
ing, and much more in his person, and in his work, sufferings,
and death, is the revealer of God.
r. The self-revelation of God in the universe through the eter
nal Son or Word is one revelation, continuous and progressive
through successive epochs, and reaches its highest plane or form
in the God in Christ. The scientific theory of the evolution of
the universe harmonizes with the Incarnation, and points for
ward to it as reasonable and probable. The theological doc
trine of the Trinity is the true philosophical basis of the scientific
theory of the progressive evolution of the universe. Before the
creation and before all time God is eternal, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. In the creation God, in the Son or Logos, is ex
pressing the archetypal thought of perfect Reason, moulding it, as

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION. 409
it were, into types in the forms of space and time ; and continu
ously in the evolution of the universe he is unrolling the imprint
of this eternal archetype and progressively revealing what God is.
In this sense the universe itself is a copy or imprint of God's
thought, and thus an ever-progressive but never-completed revela
tion of him.
The infinite can never be fully contained or expressed in the
finite. God's revelation of himself in the universe is, therefore,
necessarily progressive and at every point of time incomplete.
And science discloses the fact that the universe has been evolved
through successively higher stages of being. Accordingly in it
God is continuously revealing his presence and power, his wisdom
and love ; and the revelation is progressive, reaching successively
higher and higher planes. At first is the homogeneous nebulous
matter, — then motion, and the inorganic universe with its mechan
ical and its higher chemical forces. But motion can begin only
from a power transcending the motionless homogeneous matter.
Here the primitive homogeneous itself is in contact with a power
transcending it, acting on it and thus revealing itself in it. Then
comes a time when organic vegetable life appears. But life can
be produced only from previous life. Whence comes the first liv
ing germ ? Here again the physical evolution directly confronts
the unseen and spiritual. From this sphere of higher life, the
living God, comes this higher form of being. A new power, im
perceptible to sense and unmeasurable by any instrument of phys
ical science, is brought into the universe and develops in it a new
and higher order of being. Herein God's revelation of himself
in the universe rises to a higher plane. Then again comes a
time when an organism appears that is sensitive. Again, the
physical confronts the spiritual, and from the latter comes the
power that lifts the inanimate organism into sensitive life. Here
is a new and higher plane of God's self-revelation in the universe.
Then, after many ages of preparation, as soon as, in the progress
of the evolution, a vital physical organism is developed, through
which it is possible for a rational personal being to act, man ap
pears, a being not only sensitive, but endowed with reason and
free will, and susceptible of rational motives and emotions. Here
not only is the universe confronted and acted on by a transcend
ent spiritual power, but in the universe itself appears a being in
the likeness of God, a rational personal spirit, the same in kind

4IO GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
with God the. eternal spirit. In this new creation God's self-
revelation reaches a higher plane, that of rational beings, as such
in the likeness of God, and therefore the highest in kind which
is possible in the finite. Thus, in the evolution of the universe,
so soon as any portion becomes elaborated so as to be capable of
being the medium through which a higher power can be mani
fested, that power makes its appearance from God ever imman
ent in the universe, reveals itself in a new and higher order of
being, and in it God makes a higher revelation of himself, of his
presence, power, wisdom, and love. In man the physical evolu
tion is transcended and becomes a moral and spiritual evolution
under moral and spiritual influences ; and moral law and govern
ment, discipline and education, redemption by the grace of God,
begin. This is not the evolution from man of a higher order of
beings that will crowd the human race out of existence ; but it is
the result of moral and spiritual agencies and influences which are
fitted to develop men individually to the realization of the highest
possibilities of their being, in immortal life, and to establish the
kingdom of God on earth, to gather all the redeemed and renewed
into it and to perpetuate it forever in the life immortal. And as
in the physical evolution there is elaboration of material prepar
ing it to be susceptible of receiving and manifesting a new and
higher power, so it is in the spiritual process. The spiritual evo
lution goes on in the course of human history. God reveals him
self to all men for their progressive education and development.
We find also a special line of God's historical action among men
leading on to the coming of God in Christ. In the Old Testa
ment we see the Son or Word of God disciplining and educating
men through many centuries in preparation for the new power of
spiritual life which was to enter humanity and develop the king
dom of God into a universal and spiritual kingdom. At last in
the fulness of time, when the world has become capable of receiv
ing the Saviour, the Word becomes flesh and the God in Christ
appears. Here is indeed a new creation, — - not of a new order of
beings, but of a human nature in which the Son of God person
ally and immediately reveals himself to men, and redeems them
from sin. Here, indeed, something has entered into the universe
that was never in it before. Here God's revelation of himself
reaches its highest plane. The Spirit proceeding from the Father
and the Son will take of the things of Christ and show them unto

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 41 1
us ; what men were not prepared to understand from the lips of
Christ they know afterwards, as he himself promised ; the study
of all the ages has not yet grasped all the significance of the God
in Christ, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are
hid ; the Christian experience of all the ages has not measured
" the breadth and length, and height and depth, and known the
love of Christ which passeth knowledge " ; the revelations of the
heavenly world will show nothing brighter than the glory of the
Lamb that was slain, standing in the midst of the throne of God.
Through this revelation we shall be forever increasing in the
knowledge of God ; but God's self-revelation will never reach a
higher plane than this immediate revelation of himself in Christ
in and through the finite spirit and nature of man. As the God
in Christ, when he comes into the world, is a new reality and
power acting in the universe, and a new revelation of God on its
highest plane, so " if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature."
The Spirit whom Christ sends renews sinful man to spiritual life,
wherein they are put in the way of realizing the true ideal of
man ; thus Christ becomes the head of a new humanity, consist
ing of all who are born anew by the Spirit of God. And at last,
in the new heaven and the new earth, he will make all things
new. It is a common error that the coming of God in Christ is an
abrupt irruption into the universe, an interruption and disruption
of the unity and continuity of its development. This error has
occasioned much of the difficulty in believing the fact. But as
from this highest . plane, which we have now attained, we look
back on God's action in the evolution of the universe, we see
that it has been one continuous process of revelation, progressive
through successive stages, till it reaches its highest plane in Christ,
and is perpetuated in the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the coming of
God into humanity in Christ is not abnormal or unreasonable.
It is the legitimate issue of the progressive revelation of God in
the finite in the creation and evolution of the universe from the
beginning. 2. What God in Christ reveals is primarily the personality of
God, the same in its essential characteristics with the personality
of man. All finite persons are alike as endowed with reason, free
will, and susceptibility to the influence of rational and spiritual
motives, and as being every one conscious of himself as an in-

412 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
divisible ego persisting in identity. Therefore the God in Christ
reveals the likeness of God to all personal beings in the essential
characteristics of personality, and thus reveals all men and angels,
all personal inhabitants of all worlds, as in likeness to God and to
one another in the unity of one and the same moral system.
The Scriptures represent the God in Christ, not only as the
being in, through, and for whom all things were created, but also,
after his ascension and glorification, as the Lord of all orders of
spiritual beings in the world to come. How this is to be is not
further revealed.1 But all rational persons are in the likeness of
God, and, therefore, in the likeness of one another. When God,
who is the personal Spirit in the form of the absolute, reveals him
self as personal Spirit in the form of the finite, the personal Spirit
thus revealed is, in all his essential personal attributes, like the hu
man personal spirit. Therefore God, as rational and personal, is
eternally and essentially like all finite personal spirits. He is the
original, eternal spirit, of which they are miniatures, the absolute
archetype (Urbild) of rational personality of which every finite
personal spirit is a type (Ebenbild) . It is only in and through
this likeness of God to the human spirit that any finite personal
spirit can know him. To man he is thus revealed in Christ.
There is, therefore, eternal in God a likeness to man, which he
has revealed to men in Christ, through whom they have their
highest and most complete knowledge of God. When Christ
is glorified, all the accidents of humanity drop off, and only the
essence of the perfect human spirit remains. Then in the glorified
Christ God will be revealed in his eternal and essential likeness to
man. The human is thus glorified in its likeness to the divine, and
the divine revealed in its eternal and essential likeness to the hu
man. Therefore, in the God in Christ glorified, all redeemed and
glorified men will know God in his essential likeness to themselves
as personal spirit, and will freely commune with him.. This will
be the vision of God, the face-to-face knowledge of him forever.
As God immanent in the physical world is continuously revealing
himself in its evolution and the interaction of its forces, so he is
in Christ forever revealing the likeness of men which is eternal in
himself. Here we recur to the fact already noticed, that all personal
spirits, of whatever order and in whatever world, are in the like-
1 Col. i. 15-17: Eph. i. 10, 20-23; Phil. ii. 10.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 413
ness of the personal God, and, therefore, in the likeness of the
personal spirit of man. Hence they also, when they pass beyond
their immature state of being into the heavenly life, through what
ever change in them corresponds to death in man, will see the Son
of God in the Christ in their own likeness ; and with glad hearts
they will see glorified men and spirits of every order and from
every world like the God in Christ and like themselves. Then in
joyful and loving fellowship they will know themselves all one in
Christ. The God in Christ will be the centre of the unity and
communion of all spirits in his kingdom. Thus the prophecy will
be fulfilled that in his name every knee shall bow, of things in
heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth, and
every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory
of God the Father. In no stronger phrase could language ex
press the union of all spirits of every order and from every sphere,
who are developed and perfected in the spiritual life, in the king
dom of the God in Christ. Accordingly, angels are represented
as rejoicing and praising God at the birth of the Christ. Paul
calls attention to the fact that he was " seen of angels " ; and
we are told there is "joy in heaven over one sinner who
repenteth." r
Thus in the knowledge of Christ we are lifted above the " pro
vincialism of this planet " and brought into fellowship with angels
and archangels, with finite spirits of all orders and all worlds.
God, in that eternal mode of his being called the Logos, the
Word, the Son, existed and was working out the great ends of
eternal wisdom and love before his advent in Christ on earth.
In the mystery of his eternal being, he was uttering himself,
bringing himself forth in action as the eternal personal Spirit, the
eternal archetype and original of all finite rational persons. In
ways unknown to us, he may have revealed himself to the rational
inhabitants of other worlds in his likeness to them as personal
Spirit. He may have been trusted and adored by innumerable
myriads of finite persons from other worlds before he revealed
himself on earth in the son of Mary. So he himself says in prayer
to his Father in heaven, " The glory which I had with thee before
the world was." And he describes himself as the Son of man
who came down from heaven, and who, even while on earth, was
in heaven. 1 Luke ii. 13, 14 ; 1 Tim. iii. 16; Luke xv. 7.

414 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Therefore, we may reasonably suppose that it was he who re
vealed himself in Jehovah, the covenant God of Israel, and in
various theophanies in which he appeared in local and transient
manifestations in preparation for his predicted advent in the
Christ. This justifies the belief that the saints of the Old Tes
tament trusted in God the Son, or Word, who afterwards was in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself. And being justified by
faith in him as thus revealed, they could not have been kept un-
forgiven and unjustified in some Sheol till the death of Jesus was
announced to them. This, even when applied to men who served
God on earth before Christ's coming, looks too much as if God
took advantage of a technicality or quibble of the law to delay
the acceptance of them to his favor and the acknowledgment
of them as his children. The further inference is reasonable
that all the revelations which God has made to men in the uni
verse, which he created and develops in and through the Logos
or Son, whether in the constitution and order of nature, or in the
constitution and providential history of man, or in the direct action
of his love on human hearts, were revelations through this same
Son or Word of God, who, when manifested in the forms of a
finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God
which is eternally and essentially human. Then, heathen, who
never heard his name as Christ, may have trusted him and been
accepted by him. John says of the Word that was made flesh :
" There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every
man, coming into the world. He was in the world and the world
was made by him, and the world knew him not." He seems to
imply that before he came into the world in Christ he was, even to
those who knew him not, the true light which lighteth every man.
We know that in Christ God has revealed himself on earth in
his likeness to men, and has thus united himself and, as it were,
identified himself with humanity. He has not revealed how he
has made known to personal beings in other worlds his likeness
to them, nor how he has identified himself with them in order to
bring them into union with himself, and either develop or reno
vate them to the true and perfect spiritual life. But it is reason
able to conclude that in dealing with personal beings in other
worlds he has acted on the same principles and for the same
ends as in dealing with men. In some way unknown to us he
will have reached the highest plane of revelation to them analo-

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 415
gous to his revelation to man in Christ. Precisely how he has
done it, it is a waste of intellect even to conjecture. But the
Son or Word of God will have revealed to them their own
likeness in himself and himself in their own likeness. In the
heavenly state they will find glorified in him the likeness of them
selves and of all spirits. And in and through him they will see
God and commune with him. The peculiarities of his revela
tion of himself in different worlds will have dropped off as tem
porary, local, and incidental, and the essence of the personality,
eternal in God, and alike in all, will be revealed. The likeness
to finite persons in the essence of personality is eternal in God,
and will be revealed forever in the Son or Word of God, " the
same yesterday, to-day, and forever." God in Christ when he
ascended did not leave his humanity behind him, for he brought
it with him and it is eternal in him. He glorifies it in all its
essential elements in the divine. In him forever all glorified
spirits from every world will see and know God and commune
with him. In him they will all be one ; as Christ prayed while
on earth : " That they may all be one ; even as thou, Father, art
in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us."
Dr. Dorner suggests that this earth may be " the Bethlehem of
the universe." 1 He also holds that God did not come into the
world in Christ merely to redeem man from sin ; but that it
would be necessary, even for those who had never sinned, in
order to complete God's revelation of himself and to give effi
ciency to his work as perfecter, disciplining and developing bis
rational creatures from immaturity to the perfection of their be
ing. And he holds that no one can be justified, perfected, and
admitted to the heavenly bliss unless he has known the historical
Christ and intelligently accepted him. This assumes that the
thirty-three years of Christ's life and action on earth, with his
resurrection and ascension, as an historical transaction among
men, is the central fact on which the development and perfec
tion, or, if they have sinned, the redemption, perfection, and
glorification of all persons in all worlds, and of all orders of spiri
tual beings depend. This substitutes the peculiarities of God's
revelation of himself in humanity for the essential facts of God's
likeness to his rational creatures, his love for them, and his seek-
1 System of Christian Doctrine, Transl., vol. iii. p. 325, § 103 ; Person of
Christ, Transl., Div. ii., vol. iii. p. 267.

416 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
ing them to bring them into unity with himself, which' are re
vealed in Christ. It is an unwarranted attempt to picture just
in what manner God would reveal "himself to personal beings
in other worlds, or to men if they had never sinned. It also in
volves most unreasonable inferences. Suppose the only gospel
preached to men declared that the Son of God was incarnate in
a planet of the dog-star a, million of ages ago, and that no man
could be accepted by God except by believing this as an histori
cal transaction, and trusting to that Saviour. What is the skep
ticism of to-day compared with the skepticism which would then
exist ? J Or suppose that numberless worlds have existed inhab
ited by rational beings through immeasurable ages ; then these
countless hosts were excluded from heaven and from the vision
and blessedness of God, were shut up in some Sheol, and their
normal development arrested until Christ came less than two
thousand years ago, and thereafter until the knowledge of the
historical Christ should be communicated to them. And after
his coming, the glad tidings, communicated to those living in in
numerable worlds, would announce an event in a planet of whose
existence they would be ignorant ; it would have no connection
with their history, could be known to them only through the
irruption of the supernatural in a magical way, and would carry
in itself the strongest conceivable objections against its truth.
The hypothesis is an extravaganza and not a product of sober
thought. But the principles involved in God's revelation of
himself in Christ to men require us to believe that the likeness
to finite spirit, the humanity as we call it, which is eternal in the
essence of God as personal Spirit, is revealed in some way to all
his rational creatures ; that through it they have opportunity to
come into union with God ; that so coming they will be de
veloped to the spiritual perfection of their being, and be gathered
into the kingdom of God in oneness with all in every world and
every order of spirits who live the life of faith and love and have
come into like fellowship with God ; and that when glorified in
the heavenly state they will see God with spiritual vision, the God
1 J. Norman Lockyer says that the probability is that the number of
stars visible through a telescope of moderate dimensions is between thirty
and fifty millions ; that light, moving 186,000 miles in a second, would be
about three-and-a-half years coming to the earth from the nearest stars, and
3,500 years in coming from visible stars of the twelfth magnitude (Nine
teenth Century, Nov. 1889, p. 786).

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 417
in Christ in his glorified humanity, which will be equally the glo
rified nature of all finite spirits, and in union with all the blest
will commune with him as their common Head and king. And
with them men will see in the glorified Christ God in his human
side and man in his divine side.
As to the conjecture that God would have come into humanity
in Christ if man had never sinned,1 it is not to be doubted that
in some way the Son of God would have accomplished for man
all which is accomplished in Christ. But we cannot affirm that
he would have done it in the same way ; and it is idle to^ waste
time in conjecturing what God would have done if the course of
human history had been so fundamentally different from what it
has been. It may be, if man had not sinned, he would not have
been subject to death, but would have attained the spiritual body
by some change analogous to an epoch in the growth of a plant,
such as its blooming into blossoms. And this accords with the
doctrine of the church, that death came upon man by sin. Then,
if man had not sinned, at least Christ could not have died. It
is enough to know that the coming of God in Christ into hu
manity was no isolated or accidental action ; that it was the legi
timate outcome of his continuous and progressive revelation of
himself by his action in the universe ; and that if man had never
sinned the revelation of God in humanity and the consummation
of the union of God with man, and all the glorious results follow
ing, would have been effected in some way equally worthy of God
and equally essential for the realizing of the highest ideal of man.
This answers the objection that the theological doctrine of the
atonement implies that the atonement was made by sinners reject
ing and crucifying the Christ. We now see that the revelation of
God in Christ was an epoch in the continuous revelation of God
by his historical action progressively realizing the archetypal ideal
of all perfection and well-being so far as possible in a finite uni
verse, and in a moral system of finite rational free agents, and in
the exercise of good-will in righteousness ; that is, in exact ac
cordance with the principles and laws of the eternal Reason.
If man had never sinned, God, in the realization of his archetypal
ideal, would have revealed himself in humanity as effectively as
he has revealed himself in Christ. When men have sinned, God
1 This is controverted by Calvin in opposition to Osiander; " Inst.," Lib.
ii. cap. xii. 2-7.
vol. 1. — 27

41 8 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
does not cease to act in the progressive realization of his arche
typal ideal and the revelation of his love, but in the fulness of his
love comes into humanity in Christ to rescue men from sin and
bring them back into harmony with himself in obedience to the
eternal law of love. Here his action in realizing his ideal takes on
the distinctive atoning significance, in the facts that it is designed
to bring sinners back into conformity with the law ; and in doing
this he reveals himself in Christ acting, under human limitations
and conditions, in good-will regulated in righteousness, in obe
dience to the supreme and immutable law even unto the death on
the cross. Thus he maintains and vindicates the law in the
redemption and forgiveness of sinners. Therefore it is not the
sinners, rejecting and crucifying the Christ, who make the atone
ment. On the contrary, they do all in their power to hinder
God's redemptive action and to frustrate his gracious influences.
Therefore the atoning significance of the work of Christ is only a
peculiar application of principles in accordance with which God
always acts, of the character which God reveals in all his action,
and of the authority of the principles and laws of eternal Reason,
in accordance with which God has constituted and is evolving the,
universe, both in its physical and its moral systems.
God in Christ, revealing the fact that the likeness of man is
eternal in God, demonstrates that the true knowledge of God
must be in important respects anthropomorphic. All science
rests on the postulate that the universe is constituted in accord
ance with the principles and laws of reason, the same in kind with
the reason of man. Physical science is simply the exposition of
this fact. Every discovery which marks its progress is a discovery
of a new instance of this accordance of the constitution of the
universe with the reason of man. The progress of physical science
is a continuous demonstration that reason in the creator and
orderer of the universe is the same in kind with the reason of
man. And man finds in his own constitution witness to the law
of love which God reveals as the universal moral law. The science
both of nature and of man is a continuous demonstration of the
likeness of man as a rational and moral being to the God who
created and constituted the universe. In Christ God comes into
humanity and reveals himself in the likeness of man, and man in
the likeness of God. Therefore, any true idea of God is neces
sarily anthropomorphic as to the essential attributes and elements

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 419
of a personal spirit. God's likeness to man in these attributes
and elements is a fundamental reality of the universe underlying
all physical science and all knowledge of the moral obligations of
man and of the moral constitution and ordering of society. This
likeness of God to man in the essentials of the personal spirit
accounts for the tendency of uncultivated people to ascribe to
God the form and members of the human body and other non
essential accompaniments and conditions of personality. It also
accounts for and justifies the rhetorical and poetical anthropo
morphism of the same kind. But these need not mislead, for they
are easily distinguished from the true anthropomorphism of philo
sophy and of the highest revelation of God.
The relation of the God in Christ to all orders of spirits in all
worlds, throws light on another fundamental fact already noticed.
The spiritual underlies the physical as the deeper reality, and is
co-extensive with it. Even here in the organic life of the mortal
body, all our science consists in reading the spiritual imprinted
in the physical, and in knowing ourselves and our fellow-men in
our rational and spiritual personality, and in our relations to God
and to one another in the moral and spiritual system. Even here
God presents himself in our consciousness, and touches us with
spiritual and divine influences, and we are made aware of him as
the God in whom we live and move and have our being. As
Jesus when on earth tenderly touched the sick whom he healed,
not excepting the unclean lepers, so now by his unseen Spirit
he touches sinful souls with his saving grace, and they feel
his presence and arise to newness of life. Thus even here
we discover that the universe is the temple of God, and the
physical in it is the veil which hides while it reveals the Holy of
holies in which are the mercy- seat of God and the ark of his cove
nant with men. At death the veil of sense . drops off, and with
open spiritual vision man sees his spiritual environment. He is
conscious of God present and revealed in all the graciousness of
his likeness to men and his love for them. He feels God's
presence and his gracious touch in closer contact and more vivid
perception than when rapt in his loftiest experience on earth.
His consciousness of the present God will be analogous to his
consciousness on earth of the outward world of sense ; it will be
the vision of God, the knowledge of him face to face. But the
God in Christ, thus presented to the open spiritual vision of the

420 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
human spirit, cannot be limited to a single place. The apoca
lyptic vision of the glorified saints around the throne of Christ in
heaven reveals the great truth that God, in the likeness of men
and in the fulness of his love for them, will be immediately present
to their spiritual consciousness as if in open vision, and will bring
them into spiritual union and communion with himself, and into
participation in his work and his blessedness. But the form of
the vision is an incidental peculiarity, not the essential reality
which the vision reveals. In the light of modern science we
assume that rational beings may have existed and been either
redeemed from sin or educated in their state of immaturity with
out sin, in innumerable worlds and through immeasurable ages.
These cannot all be gathered around a person sitting on a throne
at one definite point of spacer Jesus, as he drew near to death,
says to the Father in prayer, " I have glorified thee on the earth ;
I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now,
O Father, glorify thou me, with thine own self, with the glory
which I had with thee before the world was" (John xvii. 4, 5).
Since the revelation of the Son of God in Christ, acting through
a human nature and under human limitations and conditions, was
completed, he lives in the glory which he had with the Father
before the world was, revealing humanity itself glorified in him in
God's likeness to man and his redeeming love for him. Thus the
glorified Christ is not limited in space nor confined to any one
spot ; for the glorified Christ is the eternal Son of God. Wher
ever the glorified spirit of any finite rational person may be, he
will see the glorified Christ, the Son of God, revealing the per
son's own likeness to God, and God's likeness to him and his love
for him ; revealing the human side of God and his affinity for all
his rational creatures. And with spiritual vision every glorified
spirit will see the glorified Christ revealing himself to him, as was
foreshadowed in ancient times, when " Jehovah spake unto Moses
face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend " (Ex. xxxiii. n).
And so Paul represents' it, " Now we see in a mirror, darkly ; but
then face to face ; now I know in part, but then shall I know even
as also I have been known" (1 Cor. xiii. 12). Wherever and
whenever the veil of sense drops off, there bursts on the spirit the
vision of the all- environing God in the likeness of the finite spirit,
and effulgent with divine and Christlike love. The same divine
humanity which in Jesus was revealed to the eye of sense, the

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 42 1
same gracious one who in the unseen Spirit of holiness has touched
and healed our souls on earth, will be immediately seen through
the eye of the glorified spirit of man, with clearer vision, with
deeper insight, with larger comprehension, and with closer inti
macy, stronger love and ecstatic joy.
Here it is asked, if Christ was God, how could God be acting
elsewhere while he was in Christ, and when he was dying on the
cross. The question implies that God is limited in space, that
when he is acting in one place he cannot be acting in another.
It would be as pertinent to ask, If God is immanently active in
the sun or in a growing lily, how can he be acting anywhere else ?
When the Son of God became man, he did not cease to be
God nor to exercise the power of God in sustaining and adminis
tering the universe. Some Christian thinkers have pushed their
conception of the humiliation to the extreme of supposing it to
involve this cessation. Thus the Rev. Dr. F. D. Huntington says :
"At last, when all the purposes of the propitiation are accom
plished, this incarnate Head over all things to the church will
render up the kingdom to the Father, and resume his place in
the co-equal Three, the indivisible One." x But this conception
involves insuperable difficulties. It supposes that the Son vacated
his place in the Godhead and resumed it again either at his
ascension or at the end of the earthly history of man when the
work of redemption is completed. But this is impossible. God
is indivisible, not composed of parts. No part of him can be
removed for a season. No one of his essential attributes, powers,
or modes of being, can for a moment be vacated. It is also in
compatible with the teaching of Christ and the New Testament.
Christ declares his presence and action in heaven while in his
humiliation on earth : " He who descended out of heaven, even
the Son of man, who is in heaven." He claims omnipresence
even while on earth : " Where two or three are gathered together
in my name, there am I in the midst of them " ; and before his
ascension he gives his promise for all time : " Lo, I am with you
alway, even unto the end of the world." 2 Accordingly Augus
tine teaches that the Son did not lay aside the form of God
either in the sense of divesting himself of his divinity, or in the
sense of a total non-use of it during the humiliation.
1 Christian Believing and Living, p. 367.
2 John iii. 13; Matth. xviii. 20, and xxviii. 20.

422 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
The Son of God takes humanity in Jesus as the medium of his
revelation of himself on its highest plane. He reveals himself
acting in the forms of humanity and under its conditions and
limitations. Yet in his divine essence he transcends these limita
tions and conditions and this medium of revelation.
Thus we have further insight into the fact that the coming of
God into humanity in Christ, as the highest plane of his continu
ous and progressive revelation of himself, is not anything extran
eous, accidental, or abnormal. It reveals in the rational and free
personality of God an essential and eternal likeness or prototype
of the personality of man and of all finite, rational, and personal
beings. It is included in the divine and eternal archetype of the
creation. In its essential elements and significance it is necessary
to the perfecting of finite personal beings of all orders and in all
worlds, and to the gathering of them, in unity with God and with
one another, into the kingdom of God, which is the end for which
the universe exists and the progressive realization of which is the
revelation of God and the declaration of his glory. The likeness
of God to man revealed in Christ is a real likeness eternal in God.
Otherwise God could not have revealed it in revealing himself.
It is this which those who are redeemed by God in Christ and
glorified, will see in the glorified Christ. This divine in the
human and human in the divine will be as real to them and as
clearly seen as it was seen in Christ when he was on earth ; and
as much more so as man's spiritual knowledge and life in glory
will be greater than the same in its inferior development in the
earthly life.
3. The God in Christ reveals, not only the personality, but
also the character of God. The pre-eminent revelation of him
self which God makes in Christ is the revelation that God is
love. In Christ, he gives us assured certainty that God is love. In
nature and in man is evidence justifying the belief that the uni
verse is constituted and progressively developed in accordance
with the law and for the realization of the ends of wisdom and
love. But we are perplexed and distressed by finding in it sin,
suffering, and death. Now further debate and argument are
needless. In Christ, God himself has come into the world to seek
and to save the lost. We see him entering into humanity, shar
ing in the lot of men, meeting the temptations and assaults of the

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 423
powers of evil, enduring suffering and crucifixion to save men
from sin, opening to them the way of return to God, and bringing
upon them the influences and agencies of divine wisdom and love,
to draw them away from sin to put their trust in him and thus to
attain their highest perfection and blessedness. " God so loved
the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life."
In Christ, God reveals his love to man as a self-renouncing or
self-sacrificing love. The spirit of self-renunciation or self-sacri
fice is of the essence of the love required in the law of God. At
first sight it is not obvious how this can be a characteristic of
God's love. We see indeed, on further reflection, that God's love
is essentially self- renouncing, because his action is always a giving,
a forth-putting. In creating and continuously upholding and
evolving the universe, he is the Absolute putting forth of his ful
ness in the finite, the Highest coming down to the lowest to lift it
up. He receives nothing in supply of wants. He opens his hand
and all creatures are filled with good. But in Christ, at once
divine and human, God reveals the fact that his eternal love,
exercised under human limitations and conditions, is self-sacrific
ing, to the utmost degree of possible human self-sacrifice, in sav
ing men from sin, and therein realizes the highest manifestation
of itself as the love that is eternal and unchanging in the God.
For we must bear in mind that it is the Son of God who is acting
under human limitations and conditions in Christ revealing the
very heart of God, in his kindly intercourse with men, taking
their little children in his arms and blessing them, weeping with
them in their sorrows, ever ready to help them in distress, indig
nant at wrong-doers, bearing their sins as in the anguish of Geth
semane, — as a mother bears the sins of a wayward son, seeking to
save him from his sin, in the anguish at once of disapprobation
and compassion, — suffering the assaults of the wicked even unto
death. God in Christ reveals also the fundamental fact that in
self-renouncing love man realizes the divine in his humanity, and
attains his own highest perfection and well-being in the likeness
of the ever blessed God and in union with him. " He who findeth
his Ufe shall lose it ; and he who loseth his life for my sake shall
find it" (Matth. x. 39).
In Christ, God reveals his love as entirely disinterested and
self-moved. He is not dependent on men for his perfection or his

424 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
blessedness. He seeks them before they seek him. Man is not
required to do anything to kindle lovingkindness in the heart of
God. If lovingkindness and mercifulness are not eternal in God,
nothing which man can do could create them there. He might
as well suppose that it depends on him to kindle sunbeams in the
sun. God's love in its overflowing fulness pours forth like the
sunshine, illuminating and quickening the universe and therein
revealing God. It is for man to trust God thus revealed, to
receive of the fulness of his love and be illuminated and quick
ened by it in the knowledge, love, and service of God. God
commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet without
strength Christ died for the ungodly ; while we were yet sinners,
while we were enemies, Christ died for us and we were reconciled
to God.1
In Christ, God reveals his love, not as a mere sentiment, but as
an energizing and serving love. Every man is the object of God's
redeeming love. He tasted death for every man ; here is the
singular number with the distributive pronoun. To every human
being come the influences and agencies of redemption through
Christ. From him the Spirit of God is poured out on all flesh,
drawing men everywhere to be reconciled to God, knocking at
the door of every heart, calling to every one to open the door
that he may come in to purify and bless. And every one may
have all the riches of God's grace without impoverishing any
other. This is characteristic of God's giving; as each person
¦may have the full power of the sun without taking away from any
other ; as every flower and every blade of grass is served and de
veloped in its growth by all the cosmic energies of the universe,
concentring on it as if it were the only one.
In Christ, God's love is revealed as universal good-will regulated
by righteousness. Righteousness is not in antagonism to love nor
even in antithesis to it ; it is included in love. Love is benevo
lence regulated by righteousness. A disposition to promote hap
piness unregulated by righteousness defeats itself and does evil
instead of good. In Christ, God reveals his benevolence regu
lated by righteousness. The object for which he came was to
save men from their sin, to bring them back to a perfect con
formity with the law of love, even to that complete conformity
with it in its utmost strictness which he himself showed in his
1 Rom- v. 6, 8, io.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 425
own obedience to it even to the death on the cross. This is the
great light which dawned on the world in the coming of Christ,
the universal love of God. This is the predicted sun of righteous
ness rising with healing in his beams ; righteousness and good
will combined in love, like light and heat in the sunshine.
Immortal love, forever full,
Forever flowing free,
Forever shared, forever whole,
A never-ebbing sea.
Blow winds of God, awake and blow
The mists of earth away ;
Shine out, O light divine, and show
How wide and far we stray. — Whittier.
The record of this love of God in Christ is itself proof of the
historical truth of the record. Man out of his selfish heart could
not invent so grand a conception. Wondrous as it is that God
should thus in Christ reveal his love to his creatures, and what
ever difficulties the Incarnation presents to the understanding, it
is easier to believe that God has so revealed his love to the world
than to believe that this grand conception has been created out
of nothing by the imagination of man. If it was so created, how
insignificant in comparison with it are all the greatest creations of
human genius.
4. God in Christ reveals the law of self-renouncing love as the
supreme, universal, and inviolable law of the universe. He de
clared the law, " If any man will come after me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross and follow me." But God in
Christ, who proclaims this law, himself obeys it. In his humilia
tion, in his sinless obedience on earth, in his suffering and death,
he obeys this law, and is the perfect exemplar of the self-sacrific
ing love which it requires. God in Christ also makes the fullest
proclamation of the law. In the sermon on the mount, and in all
his teaching from his human lips of tenderness and love, he pro
claims it, as it was never proclaimed before, in its breadth, its
spirituality, its heart- searching requirements, its inflexible severity,
and its inviolable authority. All his life long in fidelity to it he
confronted the powers of wickedness, resisted them in the burn
ing brightness of his love, and meekly bore the suffering they in
flicted. But most of all on the cross he asserted and maintained
the universal and inviolable authority of the law and sealed his

426 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
witness to it with his blood. Here he proclaims it, in grandeur
and majesty more awful than all the thunders of Sinai, as the
fundamental law of the universe ; the law by which the destiny of
every rational being must be decided ; the law of God with its in
exorable award of the blessing and the curse ; the law of love, in
disobedience to which no rational being, anywhere in the universe
or at any time in all the ages of its existence, can live a life of sel
fishness and attain any real good, or in obedience to it live a life
of love and miss the highest and true good. It is the proclama
tion, as the universal law, of the great secret which Jesus had dis
closed in his teaching, " He that findeth his life shall lose it ; and
he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." 1 In Jesus Christ
and him crucified, God reveals that a sinner can be forgiven and
restored to the divine favor only by such action of God as fully
asserts and maintains the universal and inviolable authority and
obligation of the law of love, and on condition of the sinner's re
turning to God in loving trust, and thus turning from the life of
sin to obedience to God in the life of love.
In this assertion, maintenance, and vindication of God's law is
the atoning significance of Christ's humiliation, obedience, suffer
ing, and death. Those who do not recognize this atoning sig
nificance and deprecate its implied relation to law and justice,
and sometimes deprecate the idea of law itself as antagonistic to
God's love and obscuring its manifestation, forget that the law,
whose universal and inviolable authority is asserted and vindi
cated by God in Christ, is itself the law of self-renouncing love,
and the righteousness, which God reveals and satisfies in Christ
in order to the justification of the sinner, is itself an essential ele
ment in the love required by the law. God maintains and vindi
cates the law by the punishment of transgressors. He has so
constituted and is evolving the universe that every one, who lives
in selfishness and so in violation of the law, deprives himself of
perfection and well-being. This is God's vindication of the law
by the punishment of persisting sinners. But the punishment of
sinners is not the only way in which God maintains and vindicates
the law. He does it also by his loving influences in righteousness
to draw sinners away from sin to obedience to the law in love, by
his own obedience to the law to its utmost requirement in all that
he does in Christ to redeem sinners from sin and to reconcile
1 Matth. x. 39.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 427
them to himself, and by the fact that in all his action in redemp
tion his object is not to save men from the law but to it, in obe
dient recognition of its authority and the exercise of the love which
it requires. " Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to
every one who believeth" (Rom. x. 4). All God's action in
creation, providential and moral government, and redemption is
in good-will regulated in its exercise by righteousness in exact
accord with all principles, laws, ideals, and ends of eternal Rea
son. As such, in it all he maintains and vindicates the law. So
all his action in its relation to the acceptance and forgiveness of
sinners, who return to him in penitential and loving trust and ser
vice, has atoning significance. His prime demand is not for the
punishment of sinners, but for their obedience in the love which
the law requires. When, under his loving agency and influence,
the sinner returns to God and begins the life of love and is ac
cepted as a child of God and forgiven, not only God's action in
Christ in redemption, but his entire action in good-will regulated
by righteousness, is his vindication and maintenance of the au
thority of the law. If in resistance of all God's gracious influences
the sinner persists in sin, the universe itself, expressing in its
constitution and evolution the thought of God, vindicates the law
by making well-being impossible for the sinner persisting in sel
fishness and in opposition to God. There is more than poetry
suggested in God's appeal through his prophets, " Hear, O
heavens, and give ear, O earth ; for the Lord hath spoken, I
have nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled
against me. . . . Hear ye, O mountains, the Lord's contro
versy, and ye strong foundations of the earth " (Isa. i. 2 ; Micah
vi. 2).
To correct a common misapprehension, an explanation is neces
sary. The doctrine that God in Christ asserts, maintains, and
vindicates the law, does not mean that his action in so doing is
something put on for effect to make men respect the law. It
means that God's action in so doing is the spontaneous expres
sion of his essential character as God ; he simply acts out what
he is as God. Thus he reveals to men what he essentially and
immutably is, and so asserts, maintains, and vindicates the law be
fore all men. This he does in all his action constituting and
evolving the universe, physical and moral, in exact accordance
with the principles and laws of eternal Reason and in the pro-

428 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
gressive realization of its ideals ; in the punishment of persistent
sinners and the blessedness of the righteous, expressing his good
will, regulated in exact righteousness, through the very constitution
and evolution of the universe ; pre-eminently in Christ under hu
man limitations and conditions in exact obedience to the law of love
even unto death in redeeming sinners from sin and condemnation ;
and in his offer of acceptance and forgiveness only on condition
that the sinner himself yield to the drawing of God's love and re
turn to God in penitential and loving trust and service and so into
conformity with the law. In all that God does in the redemption
of sinners, as in all his action in the finite universe, he acts forth
spontaneously his essential and immutable character, and so re
veals himself to men ; thus he asserts, maintains, and vindicates
the supreme and universal authority of the eternal law of love.
In this assertion, maintenance, and vindication of God's law in his
redemption of men from sin is the atoning significance of Christ's "
humiliation, obedience, suffering, and death.
Here we find further evidence of the unity and continuity of
God's revelation of himself, in the fact that God in Christ reveals
the law in accordance with which he has always acted in his
revelation of himself in the universe. His whole action has
accorded with the one great spiritual law revealed, asserted, and
maintained in Christ. In the God in Christ the highest descends
to the lowest to lift it up. And this has been the law according
to which God has, as a matter of fact, always been acting in the
universe. From his ineffable grandeur as the Absolute Being he
goes down to the finite to create worlds for intelligent beings to
live in ; he is immanent in the universe, energizing to elaborate
its material into higher form, and whenever it becomes suscept
ible of receiving and manifesting a higher power, he is always
there, waiting, as it were, and ready to cause the higher power to
appear. After rational persons have been brought into being, in
the spiritual system he is always present with spiritual influences,
waiting to impart blessing. When the world is prepared for his
coming the Saviour long foretold comes and God is in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself. After Christ is glorified, God
in the Holy Spirit is still in the world with his all-pervading
influences, to raise men from their ignorance and immaturity and
even from their sinfulness, and to develop them to the highest
spiritual life, waiting to enter every willing heart, to renew to the

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 429
life of love every one who is willing to receive his grace, — as he
was in the physical world bringing in a higher order of being
whenever the material was prepared to be the medium of its
manifestation. Thus the prophecy is ever in fulfilment : " There
fore will Jehovah wait that he may be gracious unto you, and
therefore will he be exalted that he may have mercy upon
you" (Isaiah xxx. 18). Thus the Word becoming flesh, the
God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, reveals the
most fundamental law of the universe, that the higher should go
down to the lower to lift it up ; or, as our Lord worded it,
" Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant."
This fundamental law of the universe is the law of love. The
universe reveals the inexhaustible love of God. The lower his
love descends the more it discloses its god-like character. In
every grade of being in the universe, even to the lowest, God
is immanent, energizing to lift it higher. Therefore, when the
Lord of glory came into humanity, " he took upon him the form
of a servant " (Phil. ii. 7). And this is the highest expression
of his infinite love, progressively and continuously realizing in
the finite the archetype of his perfect wisdom, always the highest
going down to the lowest to lift it up. God coming down into
humanity is revealed in the form of a servant. By the serving of
God and man in self-renouncing love the divine in man is
revealed and he is lifted to the moral likeness of God and to a
participation in his blessedness.
5. God in Christ reveals the end for which he works in the
universe and rests not through all the ages. He came to seek and
to save the lost, to reconcile the world unto himself, to quicken
men to newness of life, and thus to bring forth a new and
spiritual humanity and to establish the kingdom of God on earth.
In that kingdom as it goes on forever is the realization for man
of all that is true, right, perfect, and good, — of all the highest
possibilities of his being. As we look back on the successive
epochs of God's action in the universe we see that in fact they
have all been preparatory to this result and necessary to its
realization. From epoch to epoch the material world has been
prepared to be the home of rational beings and furnished as a
school with the apparatus for their education, discipline, and
development. Then, when the world has become ready for
him, so that he can exist in it, rational man appears. Then the

43° GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
process of education, discipline and development under moral
government goes on till in the fulness of time Christ comes and
the kingdom of God appears in its predicted Messianic form, and
then is progressively developed under the divine Spirit. The
establishment, extension and perpetuation of this kingdom is
revealed by the God in Christ as the end to be accomplished in
the creation and development of the earth and man. And this is
the end for the realization of which the action of God in the
universe from the beginning, so far as this earth is concerned,
has, as a matter of fact, been directed. The whole is one process
from epoch to epoch preparing for the coming of Christ and of
his kingdom and realizing its progressive development. We are
justified in inferring that the development of the same kingdom of
God in its more comprehensive meaning has been the grand
design of God in the creation and evolution of every world and in
the historical education and development of its rational in
habitants ; whatever may have been the particular method and
details of his action revealing himself among them in their
historical development. The language of the Talmud is not too
strong : " The world was created only for the Messiah." 1 And
Paul says of the Son of God revealed in Christ, " All things
have been created through him and unto him ; and he is before
all things and in him all things consist " (Col. i. r6, r7).
6. In this revelation the God in Christ is at once the revealer
and the revealed. It is remarkable that in his earthly life Christ
made himself the subject of his own preaching. He proclaimed
himself the founder and king of the kingdom of God. Therein
God reveals himself in him. For the kingdom of God is the
great end for which the world was made; in its progressive
development God is making the revelation of his glory ; and in
it he is to realize the highest results of his infinite wisdom and
love. The founder and king of God's kingdom must be God.
Since it is God who reveals himself in Christ, Christ is the
exponent to us under human limitations and conditions of what .
God is. What Christ says and feels and does is just what God
would say and feel and do, if acting in the form of humanity and
under human limitations and conditions. When he expounded
the law it was God's exposition of the law uttered by human
lips. When Christ exposed and rebuked wickedness, when he in
1 Edersheim, " Life of Jesus,'' vol. i. pp. 162, 163.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 43 1
love stood in opposition to all the powers of evil, when he gave
up his life in maintaining the sanctity of the law, redeeming men
from sin and Satan, establishing his kingdom and declaring its
character as a kingdom of righteousness and of the spiritual life
by faith in God, in opposition to the ambitious designs of the
rulers of the Jews, it was God in humanity, antagonizing in
sacrificial love all the powers of wickedness and overcoming evil
with good. When Christ wept over Jerusalem he revealed the
heart of God, — ¦ not revoking the doom of the trangressors, brought
on themselves by their persistent rejection of their covenant-God,
but weeping as he declared the inevitable ruin, and yearning over
them in sorrow because they had resisted all his efforts to bring
them back to the life of faith in God and love to God and man.
It is God who is revealed in Christ. And this is what man needs.
The glad tidings is not that a remarkable and unique man,
named Jesus, lived a holy life, realized the ideal man, and died a
martyr in Palestine eighteen hundred years ago. That in itself
alone would be a concrete revelation in an actual life of the holy
law of love, which would condemn all other men as coming short
of it in sin. But it avails little for us that one man in ancient
times showed in his character all the rich and beautiful humanities
which can adorn a human life, all that can be worthy and admir
able in a man. What we need to know is that these beautiful
humanities have their archetypes in God ; that he is touched with
the feeling of our infirmities ; that he has come to us in the beauty
and glory of the divine love drawing us to him to make us
beautiful and glorious in his likeness. And this is the glad
tidings of great joy, that all in Christ which is pure and strong in
righteousness, which is tender and sympathizing in compassion,
which is beautiful, attractive and winning in love, is the revelation
of God himself as he comes to seek and save the lost.
II. God in Christ the Reconciler of Man unto God. — God
reveals himself in Christ. He makes this revelation in his action
in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.
1. God in Christ is the redeemer of men from sin and con
demnation, the reconciler of men to God. Redemption is the
action of God. It is all which God does to deliver man from
sin. The reconciliation of man to God is the result which
redemption is designed to effect.

432 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Sin in its essence is the apostasy and alienation of man by his
own free act from God. As such it introduces contradiction into
the life and development of the man. He renounces his condi
tion as a creature of God always dependent on him, and sets him
self up in self-sufficiency. He takes up into his inmost being
this contradiction, that a finite and dependent creature is suffi
cient for himself in independence of God. His whole life
becomes a ceaseless and unavailing struggle to realize this con
tradiction and absurdity. Thus he is always in conflict with him
self, with his fellow- men, with reason, with the constitution of the
universe and with God. Necessarily, therefore, in seeking his
life he loses it. His life becomes a perpetual disappointment, a
torment of never-ending and always fruitless struggle, a dissatisfac
tion driving to despair, a life wasted and thrown away. He is a
lost man. And, continuing in his self-sufficiency and self-seeking,
there is for him no escape or deliverance. As our Saviour de
clares, though he gain the whole world, he loses himself and is
cast away (Luke ix. 25). In redeeming men from sin God in
Christ is the Reconciler. He effects the reconciliation of man
to God. In accomplishing this he removes the contradiction
and conflict from the man's being ; he brings him into harmony
with himself, with his fellow-meri, with reason, with the constitu
tion and law of the universe, and with God.
It is the thought of some that the practical significance of
Christ's person is found in the fact that he is the ideal man, per
fect in moral and spiritual character, and in all the attributes of
man in his earthly life. But such an ideal man of himself alone
could bring no help or hope to other men, bitterly aware in the
light of reason and conscience that in sin they have already
missed the ideal and failed to realize the end of their being.
Though this ideal man himself should stand steadfast unto death
under the assaults of the powers of evil and rise triumphant to
the heavenly glory, yet he would not break a way to be forever
open for sinful men to follow him to God and eternal bliss, nor
bring the love of God and the divine influences and energies of
redemption to rescue them from the powers of evil, to quicken
them to new spiritual life, and to restore them to God's favor and
reunite them to him. But God in Christ is himself with divine
energy using the resources of his wisdom and love in redeeming
men from sin. He in humanity and for us men makes atone-

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 433
ment for the sins of men ; opens a way for sinners to return to
God ; insures forgiveness and acceptance as. children of God to
all who will come to him in penitent and loving trust ; he is vic
torious over sin and death; he rises and reigns in heaven, all
power given unto him in heaven and on earth ; he prepares in
his Father's house the many mansions for his redeemed ; he
sends from the Father the Holy Spirit to take of the things of
Christ and show them unto men, to convince them of sin and to
renew them to the spiritual life. The Redeemer of men is not a
man alone, however perfect ; he is not God alone, however other
wise revealed to the intelligence. He is the God in Christ, the
highest ideal of the human, the lowest condescension of the
divine. He is the redeemer of men from sin and the reconciler
of men to God.
2. God in Christ is the mediator between God and man. Be
cause he is redeemer he must be the mediator. He is mediator
in the sphere of knowledge. As we have already seen, it is
through him that God makes his highest revelation of himself,
and through him that man attains his highest knowledge of God.
He is the mediator through whom we come to God in worship,
communion and service. In him God comes to man ; in him
man comes to God. It is the meeting-place of the human and
the divine. God is above man by the whole distance from the
infinite to the finite, and from the holy to the sinful. But in
Christ, God reaches down from the height of his glory to man,
and man from his finiteness and sin reaches up to the divine ; in
him the divine and the human are connected and brought into
free communication, the circuit is completed ; through him the
electric and quickening power of God's love comes down upon
men quickening their faith and love ; and the faith and love of
men reach up to God and return to men in blessing.
Here it should be noted that Christ as Mediator is not a third
person between God and man. He is God himself coming into
humanity and disclosing his likeness to men and his interest in
them ; bringing on them gracious divine influences to quicken
them to the new life of universal love, and to draw them to him
self in penitential and loving trust, and so to bring them into
communion and union with himself, and to transform them into
his own moral likeness. Thus in Christ God comes to men, and
in him men have access to God. In fleeing to Christ, the sinner
vol. i. — 28

434 G0D, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
flees to God in him. As the old divines used to say to sinners,
in the consciousness of sin and fearing the wrath of God, " If
you would flee from God, flee to God."
3. It follows that God in Christ is to man the object of the
faith through which he is justified, and the object and inspiration
of his love and service. Hence our Lord presents as the distinc
tive motive to Christian enterprise and self-denial in the service
of love: "Do this for my sake " ; and in instituting the Lord's
Supper as a sacrament to be always observed in his church, he
says : " This do in remembrance of me."
III. God in Christ the Revealer of Man. — In him is the
fullest revelation of what man is, and of what are the highest
possibilities of his being.
r. The God in Christ reveals the dignity and worth of every
human being in his individual personality, and thus reveals the
highest possibilities of his being.
He reveals the spiritual in man, and therein his superiority to
sense. He reveals man as a personal spirit in the moral and
spiritual system under the government of God, and the object of
his redeeming grace. It is often asked why Christ did not reveal
to men the inventions of industrial art, and thus give them at once
all the advantages of modern civilization. An obvious answer is
that, if he had done so, he would have taught that the highest
interest of man is in the things of sense, that the knowledge of
wealth-producing agencies is the highest revelation God could
make to man, worthy to have the Son of God come into human
ity to communicate it. On the contrary, Christ came to reveal to
man his spiritual powers and interests, his relation to God, his
membership in the moral and spiritual system, his alienation from
God, and the redeeming and reconciling grace of God opening
the way for man to return to union with God, and seeking to
draw him from sin back to himself to union with God in the life
of love and to the privileges of the children of God. A further
answer, bearing, however, only indirectly on our present line of
thought, is that it is essential to man's development, education,
and progress, that, by the energies of his own intellect and will, he
discover what the physical system is, and win the mastery of its
resources and powers.
In Christ, God discloses also his own estimate of the greatness

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 435
and worth of man. He esteems him of so great worth that he
seeks him even in the debasement of sin to reclaim him to himself ;
he comes into humanity in Christ making atonement for sinners ;
in the Holy Spirit he approaches men with heavenly influences
and dwells in every heart, opened to admit him, with life-giving
and purifying power. An apostle says : " Ye are bought with a
price." God reveals his estimate of the value of a man in the
price he pays for his redemption. As another apostle says : " Ye
were redeemed, not with corruptible things as silver and gold,
but with precious blood, even the blood of Christ."
Christ reveals man's greatness and worth as a personal spirit
in the form of the finite, in the likeness of God the eternal
Spirit. It has been shown already that Christ reveals in God
the essential elements of personality like that of man. He equally
reveals in man personality like that of God. If God is like man,
man is like God. If God is human, man is divine. And he
comes into humanity to redeem man from his sinfulness and
alienation from God, and so to enable him to become like God
also in moral character and the spiritual life of love and to attain
his normal condition of union with God. As Athanasius says :
" The Logos became human that we might become divine." x
Christ reveals the greatness of a man in the fact that through
him every one may be admitted to intimacy of communion with
God and may be a worker together with God in the advance
ment of the designs of his eternal and universal love. And this
is the privilege of every one without the intervention of any
priest or mediator except the God in Christ alone. Christianity
is intensely individualizing. It emphasizes the worth of every
person in himself. Christ tasted death for every man. Every
one has equal privilege of access to God through him. The
promise of justification is to every sinner on the sole condition
of his personal faith in Christ. Every person of every condition
and in every place may enter into his closet and shut the door
and there in the immediate presence of God and alone with him
pour out his inmost soul before him and receive his grace.
Christ reveals also the immortality of man and thus discloses
his greatness in the life eternal above all that is mortal and
transitory. 1 AutJij 7&p iirt\vQp&an\asv, Xva ripels 8eo-7roH)0£,uej'. " Oration on the Incar
nation," c. 54, Works, vol. i. p. 192 ; Patrologia Graeea, vol. xxv.

436 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
2. Christ revealed the highest possibilities of man collectively
in the kingdom of God and the gradual transformation of
human society into it. In revealing the greatness, dignity, and
worth of man, Christ revealed the sacredness of his rights in
herent and inalienable in his personality, the equality of
men in their equal rights and privileges before God in Christ,
and the brotherhood of men, not by race or blood, but by their
common relation to God their common Father in heaven and
their common redeemer through Christ, who " is the propitiation
for the sins of the whole world" (i John ii. 2). These great
ideas, which have been so powerful in modern political and
social progress as well as in the development of the individual
man, have all entered into human history as effective factors
in the progress of civilization from the God in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself.
Christ reveals the ideal of the constitution of society. This
is contrary to a common practical error that Christianity is
designed only to save some individuals from hell and to get
them safe into heaven, and that the renovation of society, the
betterment of political and social institutions, laws, and usages
are entirely beneath its scope. But Christ proposes to realize
this renovation and betterment in the kingdom of God, into
which through the influences and agencies of redemption human
society on earth is to be transformed, and which is to be perpetu
ated under new conditions in heaven. In this the true good
of man is to be attained and the ideal of humanity organized
in its collective life is to be realized. Christ is declared to be
the Head of a new humanity, the second Adam. The renova
tion of man is not effected merely by man, of his own free will
reforming his conduct and developing a new character. Man
as a created being and dependent on God cannot attain. a right
character in self-sufficiency, independent of God. All right
character in finite persons must begin and continuously go on
in faith in God. In redemption the Holy Spirit, proceeding from
the Father and the Son, brings the love of the Father which
was revealed in the Son upon the hearts of men, and, under
the gracious offers and influences of redemption, quickens men
to love like Christ's; and with his abiding and indwelling in
fluence permeates the life of the man and transfigures him into
the likeness of Christ. Thus begins and goes on the life of

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 437
God in the soul of man. The man thus born of God develops
into his father's likeness. The eternally human in God, of which
man in his constitution as personal is the likeness, now through
the indwelling spirit is revealed in the man, growing in him, in
the forms of human finiteness, into the complete moral likeness
of God, the likeness of his love in Christ. All thus renovated
to the life of faith and love and united as the spiritual children
of God through Christ their common Saviour, constitute the
kingdom of God. For the complete or divine humanity is not
fully revealed in the individual, except in the Christ ; but in
mankind collectively as regenerated through the Spirit and nur
tured under divine influence, and progressively developed in
the kingdom of God. In this sense Christ is the Head or
source of the new renovated spiritual humanity, as Adam was
of the race in its organic unity.
Christianity is the religion of promise, hope, and progress. It
must be so because it is in its essence the glad tidings of God
in Christ redeeming men from sin and reconciling them to him
self, and of his continued gracious agency in the Holy Spirit.
This promise came down with increasing clearness and fulness
from the beginning of human sin in Eden through the whole
history of God's kingdom in the Old Testament till it reached
its fulfilment in the coming of the Christ; and since his com
ing it has opened out into a wider reach of promise for all
peoples and for all time. Thus, with the expectation that the
future will always be better than the past, Christians in every
age and nation, through faith in the God in Christ, are strong
in courage and hope to work and pray for the advancement of
Christ's kingdom. They attempt great things because they ex
pect great things. Christ said that whosoever in Christian love
should give a cup of cold water only, should not lose his reward.
Accordingly, every one who in Christ's spirit and in his name is
working and praying for the relief of human misery and the supply
of human needs of whatever kind, for the reformation of abuses
and the suppression of wrong-doing, for the removal of ignorance,
for the promotion of the well-being of any person, the least or
the lowest, is working and praying for the advancement of the
kingdom of God, — for that comprehends the realization of all
which is true, and all which is right, and all which is beautiful
and perfect, of all well-being of man, and of all which is implied

438 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
in his normal relations toward God. And because God in
Christ has come into humanity and his Spirit is " poured out
on all flesh," it is no Utopian dream to expect that at last human
society will be transformed into the Kingdom of Christ, and that
love like Christ's will rule in all hearts and lives and find expres
sion in all the institutions, laws, and usages of society.
3. Christ is the revealer of man to himself as a sinner. It is
only in the knowledge of God in Christ that man attains a full
knowledge of his own sinfulness and ill-desert, and takes the
gauge and dimensions of the evil and guilt of sin. His sin is
measured by the whole distance from the ideal of humanity in
Christ to the actual character of the sinful man. In Christ, reveal
ing man's privilege of union and communion with God as his normal
condition, is also the revelation of the man's wilful alienation from
God and his renunciation of him as the supreme object of trust
and service, and his setting up for himself in self-sufficiency, self-
will, and self-seeking. The brighter the light, the deeper is the
shadow. Christ also reveals the evil and enormity of sin as resist
ance and rejection of God's infinite love, whose height and depth,
and length and breadth are indicated in him, surpassing all human
measurement and conception. Here also is the revelation of the
inevitable doom of the persistent sinner to failure, misery, and
ruin, involved in the attempt to attain the rational ends of human
existence in a life founded on contradiction and endeavoring to
realize absurdity.
4. Christ reveals that man is in his normal condition only in
union with God by faith or trust receptive of his free grace. God
is man's spiritual environment. Man can grow and bear fruit in
the spiritual life only as he is continually receptive of God's gra
cious and heavenly influences. This is as essential to man's spir
itual life, development, and productiveness, as it is to the life of a
plant that it be continually receptive of nourishment and quick
ening from its physical environment. By sin, as we have seen,
man alienates himself from God, shuts out his heavenly influences,
and sets up for himself in self-sufficiency, self-will, and self-seek
ing. His right spiritual life and productiveness therefore neces
sarily cease, as the life and fruitfulness of a branch cease when it
is torn from the tree. But in order to the reunion of the sinner
with God, there must be, not only the sinner's willingness to trust
God and receive his gracious influences, but God must be willing

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION. 439
to receive him and must first come to him with the offers and in
fluences of his grace. This he does in Christ, making atonement
for the sinner, opening the way for him to return, and drawing
him with the influence of his Spirit to come to him in trust and
receive his offered grace. Thus Christ reveals the fact that man
can attain his true development and productiveness, can realize
the highest possibilities of his being, only in union with God by
faith and the continuous reception of his gracious quickening and
support. And it is in Christ that God brings his gracious offers
and influences to men, environing them with his love, as a
plant is environed by the air and the sunshine, to quicken and
induce them willingly to receive the offers and influences of
his grace. Thus he reveals the futility of all schemes for the
renovation of men and the progress of society by scientific en
lightenment, by moral rules, by education and culture, by change
of laws and institutions, without God. " The Jews require a
sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom ; but we -preach Christ
crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block, and unto Greeks foolish
ness ; but unto them who are called, both Jews and Greeks,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. i. 22).
5. God in Christ reveals the ideal of humanity. This is sim
ply summing up what has been said, that he reveals the highest
possibilities of man both as an individual and in society, the
greatness of his sin, and his normal condition in union with God
and the possibility of attaining it through Christ.
It is objected that because Christ is divine, because he is the
redeemer of man from sin and the founder of God's kingdom, he
is so different from other men that he cannot be the ideal man.
This fact must be recognized. We do not properly say that in
any given case we are to do just what Christ would have done in
the same circumstances. As the divine redeemer of men his
action in many particulars must be different from that of ordinary
men. Living in a distant country and age, with a becoming
conformity to the peculiar customs, he would do what it would
not be becoming to do now. It is nevertheless true that he has
revealed in its essentials the ideal of man. We are to act in his
spirit of self-renouncing love and in accordance with the prin
ciples which regulated his action. And the fact that he is divine
reveals that man, when perfected in love, does attain the moral
likeness of God. The ideal of man perfected is in the personal-

440 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
ity and character of God. " Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your
heavenly Father is perfect." " Like as he who called you is
holy, so be ye yourselves also holy ; because it is written, Ye shall
be holy, for I am holy." "When Christ shall be manifested we
shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And every one
who hath this hope set on him purifieth himself even as he is
pure." And Paul presents the humiliation of the Son of God in
becoming man as the type of all Christian self-renouncing love.1
IV. Uniqueness of Jesus as the Ideal Man. — Because
Jesus in his earthly life presents the ideal of humanity in the sense
explained, he must be unique and above all other men. The
truth which I now propose to set forth is, that this very unique
ness of Jesus by which he is distinguished from all other men
does itself bring him near to all men, make him intelligible to
them, and enable them to feel his affinity for them and to see
their own humanity perfected in him. For God in Christ pre
sents the essential elements of the personality common to God
and all finite spirits. Hence this very uniqueness of the person
ality of Christ, this revealing of the finite personality as in all its
essentials in the likeness of the divine, this lifting of the finite
personality above all the accidental peculiarities of individuals
and revealing it in its divine likeness, in its perfect and eternal
ideal, is precisely what makes it intelligible to every finite per
sonal spirit as the revelation of his own personality in its perfect
ideal. Therefore in him every finite person finds the ideal of his
own spiritual personality, free from the peculiarities by which he
is distinguished and separated from others, and thus knows him
self in his likeness to God and to all finite personal spirits.
I propose to illustrate this truth by presenting three character
istics of Jesus by which, as the ideal man, he is distinguished from
all other men ; and then to show that by these same character
istics he is brought near to all men and made intelligible and acces
sible to them.
r. Jesus presents the ideal of humanity in its essential and
universal elements, in its completeness and harmony, and in its
moral and spiritual perfection.
The first characteristic to be mentioned by which Jesus is dis
tinguished from all other men is this : He presents the uni-
1 Matth. v. 48; 1 Pet. i. 15, 16; 1 John iii. 2, 3; Phil. ii. 5-8.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 441
versal and essential elements of humanity, common to all, rather
than the peculiarities by which men are distinguished and sepa
rated. In proportion as a man is individualized by peculiarities
of constitution, race, acquisitions, and circumstances he is sepa
rated from other men, made unintelligible to them, thrown out of
their sympathy, and often made positively repulsive. These
peculiarities fence off our common humanity into private lots,
and we usually notice the fences which divide more than the
common ground of humanity on which they stand. Hence, in
intercourse with another, one is often aware of something not
understood, something interrupting complete sympathy and hold
ing them asunder. It is not so with Jesus. Because he was
man, he must live in a definite time and place ; he must have his
own peculiar condition and circumstances. But in him it is the
elements common to humanity which are prominent, not the
peculiarities which distinguish and separate. In reading his life
his private peculiarities and relations do not obtrude on us,
hedging him about and shutting us away from him. We think
of him only as man ; he stands on the open common of humanity
accessible alike to all.
He is not separated by differences of race or country. In an
Englishman, a Frenchman, an Irishman, a Chinese, the national
peculiarities are obtrusive. But we never think of Jesus as a man
of another country or age. The life of Jesus has been read in all
ages and countries ; yet neither to Gentile nor Jew, neither to
ancient nor modern, neither to American, Asiatic, African, nor
European,' neither to the civilized nor the savage, does his life
suggest the idea of an outlandish man, a man separated and
made unintelligible by difference of race, age, country, or civiliza
tion, — but only the idea of a man, accessible, intelligible, in
sympathy with themselves.
He is not separated by peculiarities of his age. A few great
geniuses rise above the limits of their age and in all generations
interest the cultivated few who study them. But evert in them
the ignorance, the errors, the peculiarities of their age, obtrude
and often make it difficult to understand them. Hence every
age must create its own literature. Scarcely a book is read a
hundred years after it was written. But Jesus rises clear of all
the superstitions and errors of his age, as a great mountain rises
clear in the distance above all the inequalities around it. His

442 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
teachings are never antiquated. The record of his life and doc
trine are in all ages the text-book of the learned and the home-
book of the people.
Jesus is not separated from us by difference of education and.
culture. The ignorant are repelled from the learned, and the
learned from the ignorant. But neither ignorance nor learning
repels any one from Jesus. He is always on a level with the
weakest capacity ; he furnishes material for the most profound
scholarship and for the most earnest thought in every age. The
world has travelled far in its civilization since he walked the hills
and valleys of Palestine, but he is still in advance of it, the source,
the light and the goal of all its moral and spiritual progress.
Jesus is not separated from us by difference of rank or condi
tions. He realized in himself the highest and the lowest condi
tions of life. He was of royal .descent, yet he was cradled in a
manger and in his public ministry had not where to lay his head.
Taking humanity in its noblest blood and holding it in its lowest
conditions, he confounded -all claims of privilege and honored
humanity itself. He identified himself with no distinct class of
men. Though he was poor, he did not identify himself with the
poor as a class. When a man becomes an advocate of the op
pressed, he usually appears as a partisan in their behalf, he draws
them about him into a party, he inflames them with animosity
against other classes. His party appropriates him. They say :
He is our advocate ; we have an exclusive interest in him. Jesus
makes no such impression. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea
approach him as freely as the blind beggar. No man ever
thinks of his own condition as either privilege or bar to approach
ing him. All class privileges melt away before him. Even the
privileges of the Jews, which God had given, cease. " There is
neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, bar
barian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ is all and in all"
(Col. iii. n).
Nor is there anything in his work which separates him from
any class or nation. He is not the hero of any nation. He is
the Saviour of man. And his work was not in any line of action
which could separate him from some and bring him near to
others. He was not a great scholar, nor a great discoverer or
inventor, nor a great orator, or poet, or painter. He did not
devote his life to the reformation of any particular abuse. Any

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 443
such limited achievement, if it had constituted the staple of his
history, would have set him apart from universal humanity. The
interest in him would have been partial, not universal. But he
was man, the Son of man. His work was for mankind, — to re
deem man from sin, to establish the kingdom of God, the king
dom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, and
to make it prevail over sin and evil throughout all the world,
and thus to insure reformation of all abuse and wrong, and the
right development both of the individual and of society.
Hence he taught that though he sustained private relations,
they were to him symbols of his relation to mankind. " Who is
my mother, and who are my brethren ? And he stretched forth
his hand towards his disciples and said, Behold my mother and
my brethren. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father who
is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother "
(Mark iii. 35).
A second characteristic by which Christ is distinguished from
other men is that he presents humanity in its completeness and
harmony, as distinguished from all narrowness, angularity, one-
sidedness, and inconsistency with himself. We have seen that in
all his earthly history it is the essential and universal elements
of human personality which stand out to view, rather than his
private relations and conditions. It may be thought that, thus
conceived, the humanity presented in Christ would be colorless
and commonplace, without distinctive character, or energy, or
points of interest. We are now to look at another aspect of the
ideal of humanity in Christ, complemental to that. Through all
his peculiar and private relations, conditions, and actions, we see
in him the completeness and harmony of all the essential and
universal elements of human personality. We see fulness, com
pleteness, and harmony of life and energy in his manhood as a
whole, and in every one of its essential elements.
Man is many-sided. He is not equably developed. He has
deficiencies and weaknesses. He is even self-contradictory, and,
from different sides of his being, inconsistent with himself. It
is necessary to conceive of many men put together, in order to
a conception of what humanity fully developed may be. Great
men are usually great only in a single line ; a great poet, a great
inventor or discoverer, a great general or statesman, a great
orator. .But we never think of Jesus so. Though he revealed

444 G0D> THE 0NE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
the elements of a system of religious truth, simple and compre
hensive, which the human mind has never been able to supple
ment or amend, yet we never think of him as a philosopher or
theologian.' Though he spoke as never man spoke, yet we never
think of him among the great orators. Though he founded a
spiritual kingdom which has outlived the convulsions of the ages,
and though he was the author ofthe thought and life which have
determined the history and quickened and guided the progress
of mankind, yet we never think of him as a statesman or a re
former. No one of these things stands out as the distinctive
characteristic of his greatness. Where all is great and all har
monious, we cease to be astonished at any one. This seeming
absence of great and brilliant genius and of a great career in his
earthly life, makes more wonderful the power which history dem
onstrates to have been in him ; and the more because his public
ministry continued less than four years. It compels us to accept,
as the only reasonable explanation, the biblical revelation of what
he was.
The same completeness appears in his character. A novelist
distinguishes his hero by giving him one or two striking traits,
which are always conspicuous. We know the character of a
neighbor by some marked trait which is the key to it. Jesus
reveals the love which is comprehensive of all right character.
But no one trait in that comprehensive goodness stands out pre
dominant over all the rest. Hence all attempted delineations of
his character fail to satisfy. There are no inequalities, no great
elevations and depressions, giving to the picture strong contrasts
of light and shade. It is all thrown up into a great table-land,
lofty but level. It is like the white light, not so striking as the
seven colors of the rainbow, for the reason that it combines
them all.
Jesus exhibits the lowest traits of a pure humanity with the
highest. He had a body weak as ours, needing sleep and food,
subject to weariness, pain, and death. He had all the natural
instincts of humanity, the domestic affections, susceptibility to
resentment, all the inferior affections common to man with the
brutes, which are springs of joy and sorrow, inlets to temptation,
motives to action in human life. He had also the higher spiritual
capacities which ally men to the angels and to God. He who sat
by Jacob's well, wearied with his day's travel, thirsty and hot under

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 445
the beating sun at noon, he who exemplified the beauty of friend
ship in his intimacy with the family of Lazarus, he who came
"eating and drinking," interested in all the ongoings of life and
mingling sympathetically in scenes of joy and sorrow, — he also
is the same who reached the loftiest flights of devotion, and -ex
hibited a godlike love in heroic toil and sacrifice for men, even
unto death.
We find in him also the most opposite qualities, ordinarily
marking seemingly incompatible types of character. In him
is manliness in all its strength, but beautified and refined with
gentleness, tenderness, and purity. In him is the union of
innocence and power. He is " holy, guileless, undefiled, separate
from sinners, made higher than the heavens." How inoffensive,
how humble, how childlike he is, — a celestial childlikeness. Yet
in him what strength, the majesty of power in sublime repose. He
is at once the Lamb of God and the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
He is beautiful as the rose of Sharon and as the lily of the valley,
but with an energy of love that transfigures the world.1 In him
the conscious need of human love and sympathy is joined with
the most commanding self-reliance. Not having where to lay his
head, he sought rest and refreshment from the ministrations of
friendship. He drew John closely to himself, " the disciple whom
Jesus loved." He said to his disciples, " With desire I have de
sired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer " ; yearning for
one more Passover with his disciples, as a father drawing near to
death might yearn for one more interview with his family. In
Gethsemane he came again and again from the solitude of his
agony, seeking the sympathy of his disciples too sleepy to give it.
Yet with what calm and majestic self-reliance he stood before
Pilate. What an impression his life makes on us that he is not
the receiver of pity and help, but the giver. "You have not
chosen me, but I have chosen you. The Son of man came not
to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom
for many" (John xv. 16; Matth. xx. 28). In him were united
the tenderest compassion, even for sinners, with inflexible antago
nism to sin. His soul moved at every breath of sorrow, as a lake
ripples at every breeze. Yet was there none of that complaisance
1 In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me.
Julia Ward Howe.

446 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
to transgressors which is often a weakness of man's compassion.
When he rebukes persistent, self-righteous sinners, he seems to
sit already in the majesty of the eternal judge, and all the heavens
seem to blacken and thunder with his condemnations. He was
humble. His whole life was an abasement of himself; and at his
last supper with his disciples he girded himself with a towel and
washed his disciples' feet. Yet there was sometimes a grandeur
in his look before which officers and soldiers, sent to arrest him,
went backward and fell to the ground, and infuriated enemies,
crowding to kill him, gave way and let him pass unharmed. He
exhibited both the passive virtues and the active. He was a
sufferer. All his life was one sorrow, and every act of his life a
separate sorrow, separate billows in an ocean of woe, — "a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief." And all the passive virtues
of a life of sorrow he exemplified. But equally was his a life of
action. He "went about doing good." Bearing his sorrow, he
worked without ceasing. Illustrious in all the passive virtues of a
life of sorrow, he is equally illustrious in the active energies of
a life of achievement.
Jesus combines in himself four distinct types of character, often
separated among men. "The Son of man came eating and drink
ing." He lived a natural, healthy human life. He was a spiritual
man ; but his spirituality was thoroughly human. He was not a
recluse. He lived among men. Crowds thronged him day by
day. He participated freely in the scenes and intercourse of pri
vate life. He accepted invitations to the tables of both Pharisees
and publicans. Now we find him participating in the joy of a
wedding, then weeping at a grave with the bereaved, or speaking
words of sympathy at a funeral, or taking little children in his
arms and blessing them, or refreshing himself in the privacy and
intimacy of friendship. Everywhere he mingled with the people,
giving cheer and help as opportunity offered. Here is the type
of the large-hearted man, disclosing all the natural and innocent
human affections and propensities beautified with spiritual love,
living in the midst of men and busy in the affairs of human life,
with the heart full of benignant interest for all, and the hand
always ready to help. But thus living among men, every day
crowded with active and fatiguing work, Jesus was capable of
the loftiest flights of devotion, and spent whole nights in prayer.
While in the world he lived above it in communion with God.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 447
Here is that type of a spiritual character which absorbs the whole
life of the devotee. Besides this, he itinerated in circuits from
village to village preaching righteousness, calling men to repent
ance, announcing himself as the promised Messiah and the de
liverer of men from sin, proclaiming the kingdom of God on
earth, awakening men to spiritual life. Here is the type of char
acter and work marking the evangelist, the missionary, the apostle,
the prophet. And besides this, his life was one of continued pri
vation and self-denial ; as he said, cautioning one who proposed
to follow him, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air
have nests, but the Son of man has not where to lay his head."
Here is the type of character which absorbs the whole life of
the ascetic, — in fact, so absorbs it that the self-denial excludes
the self-sacrifice, and the zeal for self-mortification and pen
ance excludes the Christian love. But Jesus never, like the
founder of Buddhism, took the bowl and the yellow robe
and proclaimed himself a professional beggar ; he never es
tablished in his kingdom an aristocracy of beggars, nor taught
nor practised the absorption of the soul for years in spiritual
meditation in order to attain the vision of God and the transforma
tion into a Buddha or divine being; nor gave any encouragement
to the asceticism which seeks suffering for its own sake or values
it as a penance insuring merit in the sight of God. His self-
denial sprang from the self-sacrificing love which inspired his
whole life. He showed his love not in excluding himself from
the world, but in seeking men in their sin to save them from
their sin. His privation, suffering, and self-denial were never
sought for ; they were incurred only as they were incidental to
the accomplishment of the great work of his love to man. These
four types of character exist together in Jesus, and by their union
the character escapes the one-sidedness and deformity incident to
each of the four when isolated from the others.
In thus revealing the essential elements of a pure humanity in
its completeness, Christ reveals them also in their harmony. In
him the contradictions which present themselves in the conscious
ness of sinful men do not exist. The elements counter-working
in ordinary men are seen in him to be complemental, each neces
sary to the perfect development of the man, each in its full strength
without weakening the other ; and the ordinary one-sidedness and
narrowness of man is in him rounded out into full-orbed and har-

448 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
monious completeness. Thus Christ is the exemplar to us of a
complete, harmonious, and comprehensive humanity, which every
man may and should aspire to realize in himself. Like Christ, we
may reveal the godlike in the human ; tenderness with strength ;
sympathy with the lowest, manifesting inward union with the high
est ; indignation against wrong-doers without personal passion or
revengeful hate ; moral enthusiasm without sentimentality ; grace
and beauty of character with heroic self-sacrifice, energy, and
achievement ; saintliness with manliness or womanliness ; inter
est in the unseen world inspiring, broadening, and guiding in
terest in this world and in the people among whom we live;
communion with God drawing us into closer and wider union
and communion with men. As man approaches this ideal, the
saint will not be the ghostly and ghastly impersonation of other-
worldliness ; the hero will not be the rude impersonation of
strength ; but the saint and the hero will be united in one
and the same man in the ideal of complete and harmonious
humanity revealed in Christ.
It remains to notice a third characteristic of the ideal of hu
manity in Jesus by which he is distinguished from other men.
He presents humanity in its moral and spiritual perfection.
This has been questioned by few who have known his history.
I shall not debate the question. The denial of the sinlessness of
Jesus has usually been an after-thought, not suggested by the facts
of his history, but rendered necessary to maintain consistency with
other previously avowed opinions. Theodore Parker argued that
Jesus was sinful, as an inference : because Jesus was a man he
must have participated in the moral imperfection common to all
men. Mr. Hennel supports his denial of Christ's sinlessness by
special pleading of rare ingenuity, the necessity of which is proof
that the facts in our Saviour's recorded history cannot be easily
made to suggest moral imperfection. It is enough for my present
argument that for nineteen hundred years the life of Jesus has
been more widely and intimately known and more earnestly studied
than any other human life, and for nineteen hundred years has
made the impression of perfect moral loveliness, as a rose in
bloom impresses all comers with its sweetness and beauty; and
not only so, but in all these ages it has aroused impassioned ad
miration and self-renouncing devotedness in innumerable multi
tudes of men and women. He is the ideal man. He is the divine

• PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 449
law revealed in the concrete in a human life, — a perfect child
hood, seeming like a pure beam of heaven's light gliding down to
earth, unsoiled, as the sunshine is unsoiled by earthly contact, — a
perfect and celestial childhood unfolding into a perfect manhood,
— a man who never utters a confession of sin even to God, who
never utters an apology or regret for word or deed. In any other
man a piety without confession of sin, a life without apology or
regret for mistake or wrong-doing, would be an impertinence.
But in Jesus his whole life vindicates it and justifies his own chal
lenge, "Which of you convinceth me of sin?" Even Renan
declares, "The character of Jesus, so far from having been
embellished, has been diminished by his biographers."
As morally and spiritually perfect, Jesus stands in antagonism
to all the ignorance and prejudice, the narrowness and bigotry,
the selfishness and sin by which men are brought into antagonism
to one another. But also because he is perfect, he always pre
sents humanity in all its breadth and completeness, the elements
and characteristics of humanity in its perfect development. Thus
he lays hold of humanity in its essential constitution and thereby
draws all men to himself.
He is, then, the ideal man. I have said that it takes many men
put together to make one complete man. We may go further.
It takes the whole of humanity, from its beginning to its final
and highest consummation after ages of progress, to show all
the powers and attainments that exist potential in man, waiting
development and manifestation. Jesus as perfect is the ideal
man and as such is the representative man. As the New Tes
tament calls him, he is the Second Adam. He is the represen
tative of man in the full development of all his moral and spiritual
potentialities. He is also, in his earthly life, the representative of
man in his weakness and suffering, in his condemnation and de
liverance, in his conflict with sin and evil, and in his death. It
is only as he is exalted in the heavenly glory that he represents
humanity in the complete development of all its potentialities
and its complete restoration to its normal character and con
dition. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, when dying, saw the
Son of Man in the opening heaven, bearing his human nature
glorified (Acts vii. 54, 55). Heaven, therefore, is not to extin
guish human nature, but to perfect it, — all that is gross and mortal
dropped, but human nature still, in its likeness to the divine. In
vol. 1. — 29

450 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
heaven we shall not see about us ghostly beings, so changed that
the human characteristics will no more be recognized. But we
shall see "the spirits of just men made perfect" (Heb. xii. 23).
Heaven, therefore, will from the first seem home-like.
What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven ; and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.
Here we see a foundation for the fulfilment of Christ's wonder
ful promise, " The glory which thou hast given me I have given
them ; " and for the words of John, " 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 as he is" (John xvii. 22 ; 1 John
iii. 2).
2. These aspects of the ideal man by which Christ is distin
guished from every other man also make him intelligible and
accessible to all men, and are sources of his moral and spiritual
influence and power in all ages. In proportion as any one by
great genius, goodness, and service raises himself above other
men and distinguishes himself from them, he belongs to mankind
and is appropriated by all men ; he can no longer be appro
priated by any people in provincial exclusiveness. This is pre
eminently true of Christ. The uniqueness of Christ as the ideal
man is itself a part of the attraction by which he draws all men
unto himself. This is exemplified in the peculiar practical signifi
cance and power of each of the three aspects of Christ as the
ideal man which have been presented.
First, the fact that the Saviour presents the essential elements
of humanity common to all men, rather than the peculiarities
which distinguish and separate them, reveals the dignity and
worth of men in their individual personality, the sacredness of
their rights, their equality and brotherhood, and the obligation
to serve them in self-renouncing and universal love. In the
most degraded outcast, in the most helpless victim of oppression,
the nature that lies crushed and agonizing beneath human injus
tice is the same nature which the Son of God took and in which
he suffered the cruelty of the wicked, and realized the ideal per
fection of man. Therefore the crushed victim of wrong-doing
can look to him for sympathy, and appropriate to himself in their
full significance the words : " He was in all points tempted like

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 45 1
as we are, yet without sin. . . . For in that he himself hath suf
fered being tempted, he is able to succor them who are tempted."
Here is revealed the worth of man as man and independently of
his condition. Here is the sacredness of human rights, bound
up in the very nature of man, inhering not in the accidents, but
in the raw material of humanity, and declared in the life of Christ,
the Son of Man. Here also is the significance of the equality
and brotherhood of man. In the presence of Jesus all privileges
and distinctions disappear. Before him all men stand on the
same level, — men before the Son of God, who ennobles their
common nature by being the Son of Man, — sinners coming for
mercy to their common Redeemer, who tasted death for every
man, — children of God before their common Father, and Christ
their elder brother. Then, when they look away from him
into the faces of each other, they no longer see Europeans,
Asiatics, Africans, Americans, rich or poor, high-born or low
born, learned or ignorant, but men of the same nature with
themselves and brethren in the family of God, their common
Father in Heaven. And here is the spring of true philanthropy
and of all missions to save men from sin : " For my sake."
"Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even
these least, ye did it unto me." To repudiate the fact of the
rights and brotherhood of man, to repudiate our obligation as
"debtors" "as much as in us lies," "both to Greeks and to
barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish," is to repudiate
the essential fact of the Christian religion, the fact which makes
pur religion to be Christianity, the God in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself. And to repudiate this essential fact of Chris
tianity, the historical Christ, is to repudiate the grandest demon
stration of the worth of man, of the sacredness of human rights,
and of universal brotherhood, and the mightiest influence in giv
ing to these truths practical efficacy in human civilization. And
to hold the Christian idea of man as related to God and of the
life of love, while rejecting the historical Christ, is to expect to
use the water of life after destroying the springs from which it
flows. In this respect other religions are in direct contrast to Chris
tianity. Caste is a legitimate development of the pantheistic
religions of India, and in their sacred books are found pronun
ciations of the divine displeasure and ' punishment on any one

452 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
who should teach the sacred books, to one of the lowest caste.
A similar exclusion of the common people appears in the inner
mysteries of the religion of Egypt. Plato taught that the knowl
edge of the one only God is so difficult to be attained that it
can be communicated only to those of high intellectual culture.
Cicero said : " It is difficult to find that parent of this universe,
and when you find him it is wrong (nefas) to make him publicly
known." The Roman patricians held that they alone as " fami
lies " had Penates or Lares. A plebeian, since he could not
found a " family," could have no household gods. In the same
spirit the Pharisees in Christ's day said : " This multitude, that
knoweth not the law, are accursed." One of the "masters"
among the Kabbalistic Jews taught that they who are not sealed
as sons of God by circumcision " are not the sons of God but
the children of uncleanness. Wherefore it is not lawful to con
tract familiarity with them or to teach them the words of the
law." Another said : " Whosoever instructeth any uncircum-
cised person, though but in the least precept of the law, doeth
the same as if he should destroy the world and deny the name of
the Holy Blessed One." We see in contrast the profound sig
nificance of the words of Christ, when he presented it as dis
tinctive of Christianity and a decisive evidence that he is the
Christ, that " the poor have the gospel preached to them."
Secondly, because the Saviour took human nature in its com
pleteness and harmony he consecrated all that is human. The
tendency has been to regard secular life as unconsecrated and
profane. When the soul awakes to eternity and its interests, it
is not strange that it should turn away from all finite things as
trifles. What is time in comparison with eternity? What is
man in comparison with God ? What is this world in compari
son with heaven ? Let me refuse earthly enjoyments, let me turn
my back on earthly interests as impertinences ; let me shut my
self up in solitude to thinking of eternity, to prayer and prepara
tion for death and the life beyond. But the human life of Christ
rebukes this tendency. It hallows human life itself and all its
interests. In him the light of the spiritual and the eternal pours
on humanity, not to wither and scorch it, but to beam all over
it like the sunshine over the earth, and to warm and quicken it,
as sunshine warms and quickens the clodded ground into fruit
fulness and beauty.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 453
In a human nature and a human life Jesus exercised the lofty
capacities by which man is capable of being rapt in devotion, like
the saints that worship before God's throne ; by which he is able,
like the flaming angelic ministers, to go on divine missions of love
to men ; like the prophets and apostles, like the reformers and
the martyrs, to illuminate the world with God's truth, to be
illustrious by heroic deeds and sacrifices, to effect reformations
which constitute epochs in history. But he took also all the in
ferior qualities of human nature, the instinctive propensities which
play so beautifully in life, the very weaknesses inseparable from
humanity. Joys, tears, work, weariness, compassion, filial and
friendly love, pain, death, all qualities of sinless humanity, were
his. Thus he has hallowed all that belongs to humanity and to
human life. Palestine is called the Holy Land, because there
the Saviour lived and died. But what he consecrated and made
forever sacred was not the country over which he walked, but
rather the human nature and human life in which he lived the
perfect man. Thus all which belongs to humanity is hallowed.
The thought should inspire and ennoble us every day and in
every act. In every condition and act of life a man may be like
Jesus. In pain and sorrow he may think, So Jesus suffered and
through pain and sorrow revealed at once the perfection of man
and the graciousness of God. In work, whether in the shop,
or the counting-room, or on the ship's deck, or in the nursery or
the kitchen, we may remember that Jesus, who wrought the
redemption ofthe world, labored with his own hands, took little
children in his arms and blessed them, cared for his mother, and
alike in a childhood of obedience, an early manhood of handi
craft, and a public ministry as the spiritual teacher and Saviour of
men, he showed forth the ideal perfection of human character,
revealed the fact that man in his right moral and spiritual develop
ment is in the likeness of God, and that man may be god-like in
character and action and realize his highest moral and spiritual
development in any sphere and under any conditions of life.1
We are to consider, thirdly, the practical influence of the fact
that Christ is the ideal man, realizing in himself man's moral and
spiritual perfection.
1 Gregory of Nazianzen says of Jesus : " Perchance he sleeps in order to
bless sleep; perchance he is weary in order to sanctify weariness; per
chance he weeps to give dignity to tears."

454 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Its first influence must be to reveal to us our imperfection and
sin. For in him the law of God is presented in the concrete with
the greatest clearness and power.
But in him the law does not come revealing only our sin and
condemnation, a power to menace and alarm us and drive us to
despair ; because in him we see the ideal of the law realized in
a human nature. He presents himself as the ideal which we also
may realize ; he draws us to himself that we may become like
him, and brings the glad tidings of God's grace sufficient to re
ceive and to help every sinner who would turn from sin to God
and struggle upward to the realization of the ideal of perfected
humanity in the life of faith in God and love to God and man.
In him are at once our pattern and goal, our inspiration,
guidance, and strength. He reveals man to himself while reveal
ing God to man. Beneath man's sensuality, impurity, and
worldliness, he reveals the germs and potentialities of spiritual
life. Beneath even man's sin, his self-sufficiency, self-will, self-
seeking and self-glorifying, he reveals unsuspected capacities for
self-sacrificing love, for self-forgetting service of others, for purity
and spirituality above the life of sense, for rapt devotion and
communion with God, for generous friendship, for childlike
simplicity and innocence, for peaceful faith in God, the germs
and potentialities , of heaven within the life on earth. By his
heavenly touch Christ awakens man to the consciousness of his
spiritual capacities and relations, and quickens him to look at the
things not seen and to live to realize the highest possibilities of his
spiritual being.
It may be objected that this view of the life and influence of
Jesus is due to Evangelical bias. It may be answered that many
writers, who can never be suspected of Evangelical bias, have
recognized the fact of the wonderful and unique life and influence
of Jesus. Even from the facts which they recognize it seems
legitimate and necessary for every theist to infer that they can
be accounted for only if Jesus was pre-eminently the revealer of
God to men, the revealer of man to himself, and the mediator
between God and man, who brings to man the true religion
and the true knowledge of God, who is establishing and advanc
ing his true kingdom on the earth, the reign of righteousness
and good-will, and in whom God is reconciling the world unto
himself.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 455
The following are a few of many testimonies of this kind which
might be cited : —
Goethe : " I esteem the gospels as thoroughly genuine ; for there shines
from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the per
son of Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have
manifested on earth." — " Conversations with Eckermann," iii. 371.
Lecky : " The Platonist exhorted men to imitate God, the Stoic, to fol
low reason, the Christian, to the love of Christ.. The later Stoics had
often united their notions of excellence in an ideal sage, and Epictetus had
even urged his disciples to set before them some man of surpassing excel
lence and to imagine him continually near them; but the utmost the Stoic
ideal could become was a model for imitation, and the admiration it inspired
could never deepen into affection. It was reserved for Christianity to pre
sent to the world an ideal character, which through all the changes of
eighteen centuries, has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned
love, has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments,
and conditions, has not only been the highest pattern of virtue but the
strongest incentive to its practice, and has exercised so deep an influence
that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of
active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the
disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists. This
has indeed been the well-spring of whatever is best and purest in Christian
life. Amid all the sins and failings, amid all the priestcraft and persecution
and fanaticism that have defaced the church, it has preserved in the char
acter of its Founder an enduring principle of regeneration." — " Hist, of
European Morals," vol. ii. p. 9.
Theodore Parker : " As Jesus spoke for eternity, his truths ride on
the wings of time; as he spoke for man, they are welcome, beautiful,
and blessing wherever man is found, and so must be till time and man shall
cease." J. S. Mill : " It is the God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or
of Nature, who, being idealized, has taken so great and salutary a hold on
the modern mind. And, whatever else may be taken away from us by ra
tional criticism, Christ is still left, a unique figure, not more unlike all his
precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of
his teaching. . About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of
personal originality combined with profundity of insight, which, if we aban
don the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very
different was aimed at, must place the prophet of Nazareth, even in the esti
mation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank
of men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this
pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest
moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed on earth, reli
gion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as
the ideal representative and guide of humanity ; nor even now would it be
easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of vir-

456 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
tue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that
Christ would approve our life." — " Three Essays in Religion," pp. 254, 255.
Renan : "Jesus has founded religion in humanity, as Socrates founded
philosophy in it, as Aristotle founded science. . . . We have not left behind
us, nor shall we leave behind, the essential idea that Jesus originated. He
has fixed for all time the conception of pure religion. Jesus has founded
the absolute religion. . . . Whatever transformations dogma may undergo,
Jesus will still be the author of pure sentiment in religion. The Sermon on
the Mount will not be superseded. . . . Christianity alone remains in pos
session of the future. . . . The world will ever be religious, and Christianity,
in a large sense, is religion's last word. . The foundation of the true
religion is his work. After him there is nothing more but to develop and
fructify. . . . Let us, then, place the person of Jesus on the highest sum
mit of human grandeur. . . . Marcus Aureiius left behind him delightful
books, an execrable son, a transitory world. Jesus remains to humanity an
inexhaustible source of moral regenerations. . . This sublime person, who
each day still presides over the destinies of the world, we may call divine, . . ,
in this sense that Jesus is that individual who has caused his species to
make the greatest advance toward the divine. . . Whatever may be the
surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will
grow young without ceasing ; his legend will call forth tears without end :
his sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that
among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus." — "The
Future of Religion" in "Studies of Religious History and Criticism,"
Frothingham's Trans., pp. 352, 353, 354, 384 ; " Life of Jesus,'' Wilbour'S
Trans., chap, xxviii. pp. 365, 368, 370, 375, 376.
De Wette : " This only I know, that there is salvation in no other
name than in the name of Jesus Christ, the crucified; and that nothing
loftier offers itself to humanity than the God-manhood realized in him
and the kingdom of God which he founded — an idea and problem not
yet rightly understood and incorporated into the life." — "Comm. on Rev.,"
p. vi. third ed.
Author of " Supernatural Religion " : " The teaching of Jesus car
ried morality to the sublimest point attained or even attainable by humanity.
The influence of his spiritual religion has been rendered doubly great by the
unparalleled purity and elevation of his own character. Surpassing in his
sublime simplicity and earnestness the moral grandeur of Chakya-Mouni,
and putting to the blush the somewhat sullied, though generally admirable
teaching of Socrates and Plato and the whole round of Greek philosophers,
he presented the rare spectacle of a life, so far as we can estimate it, uni
formly noble • and consistent with his own lofty principles, so that the ' Imi
tation of Christ ' has become almost the final word in the preaching of his
religion, and must continue to be one of the most powerful elements of its
permanence." Matthew Arnold: "Try all the ways of righteousness you can think
of, and you will find no way that brings you to it except the way of Jesus;
but that does bring you to it."

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 457
Author of "Ecce Homo": "The story of his (Jesus') life will always
remain the one record in which the moral perfection of man stands revealed
in its root and unity, the hidden spring made palpably manifest by which the
whole machine is moved. And as, in the will of God, this unique man was
elected to a unique sorrow, and holds as undisputed a sovereignty in suffer
ing as in self-devotion, all lesser examples and lives will forever hold a
subordinate place and serve chiefly to reflect light on the central and
original example."
3. In this exhibition of the ideal of humanity in Jesus Christ
we have a striking confirmation of his historical reality and of
the truth of the narratives of his life recorded in the New Tes
tament. The portraiture of him as there presented is explicable
only as the portraiture of a real character, a portraiture drawn
from life. The presentation of him is explicable only as his
torically true. The fact that such a person and such a life are
delineated in the New Testament is proof that such a person
actually lived that life.
The spirit of man is so great that his ideals surpass the realities
about him. Visitors to Niagara at first find the Fall less than
they had imagined. We find no finite object, however grand
or beautiful, that equals the ideals of grandeur and beauty which
the man can create within his own soul. We know no human
being, however good, but the mind can form a conception of
a higher goodness. If one would love another, his love must
hide the imperfections of its object in order to love with un-
mingled admiration and devotedness. It is proverbial that love
is blind. And the scripture says : " Love covereth a multitude
of sins." Love idealizes its objects, by its own radiance investing
them with the perfection it admires. The Highland Mary of
Burns is no longer a peasant girl but an ideal of tenderness and
beauty. Dante's Beatrice is no longer an ordinary mortal, but,
transfigured with a heavenly glory, is the type of womanhood
appointed to quicken and purify man in the spiritual life and
to lead him to see the heavenly glory. But in the story of
Jesus we find a character in which the reality surpasses the
mind's conceptions ; a character not illuminated with poetical
crektions but delineated in the simplest narrative of the events
and actions of a human, life. And yet it is a character which
is the archetype for our ideals of moral and spiritual perfection,
and by the study of which we amplify and complete our con
ception of the ideal man. Such a conception of perfect humanity

458 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
no mind had created before Jesus appeared ; and no human
imagination has been able to amend or improve it in all the
centuries following. The progress of eighteen hundred years
finds him still in advance, — the standard of moral and spiritual
perfection which humanity in its progressive improvement is
always approaching but has never attained.
It must be added that the profoundest thinking of philosophers,
in ignorance or forgetfulness of him, has never been able to
delineate in the concrete the conception of such a character,
and has even declared such a conception unattainable. Cicero
said the perfect man had never been found, and alludes to
the- disagreement of philosophers as to the conception of what
the perfect man would be, if he should appear. They could
agree in some more or less clear recognition of the law of love
as the principle of right character, but not in the details of its
concrete expression in life. Kant says : " To realize the ideal
in an example given in the world of experience, — for example,
to delineate in a romance the character of a perfect man, — is
impossible. Nay, more, there is something absurd in the attempt.
And the result must be little edifying,, as the natural imperfec
tions which would continually break in on the perfection of the
idea, would destroy the illusion of the story, and make the idea
itself appear ridiculous." x And yet the ideal man, the delinea
tion of whom, in the concrete, philosophy has declared impossible,
is all at once delineated by four unlettered men, — and that in
the most difficult manner, not as an abstract conception but
in the actual details of a life and without the slightest attempt
at philosophical analysis or poetical illumination, — and that in
four narratives, differing as to details, yet all making the same
impression that Jesus is the perfect and ideal man. The simple
fact that these four lives of Jesus are written is demonstration
of their historical truth. They must be narratives of a real life
and the portraitures of a real person.
4. This conclusion is confirmed by the benign and mighty
influence which Christ has exerted through all the centuries
since his death. On this vast subject I must confine myself to
a few suggestions.
The unprecedented power of spiritual quickening and renova-
1 Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, Book II. chap. iii.
sec 1.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 459
tion, which went out from Christ into the world and has been
energizing in it ever since, began to reveal itself with wonderful
energy within a few days after Christ's ascension. It cannot be
accounted for as the natural outgrowth of the age. The age in
which Jesus lived on earth, was, perhaps, of all ages the most
barren of spiritual life. Polytheism had decayed into skepti
cism ; Judaism had degenerated into the formalism of the
Pharisee and the unbelief of the Sadducee. Jesus was in all
particulars unlike his age and contrary to it. And not only
this, — he introduced into it a new life and commenced its trans
formation into his own likeness. The world lay like a burned
field, nothing visible but the blackened cinders of skepticism
and the scorched and hollow stubble of empty profession.
Jesus came ; and life, verdure and fruit appeared. There went
forth from the very publicans, Matthews ; and from the very
Pharisees, Pauls. From that ungodly age there went forth godly
men and women, confessors and martyrs, a living church of God,
a power of faith and love, which have been the admiration of all
succeeding ages. Demonstrably, here was not a life sponta
neously developed from humanity of itself, but a life coming
down on humanity from above, an energy of God's redeeming
grace entering as a new and renovating power into the life and
history of man.
This argument may be developed by examining in detail the
rise of Christianity as narrated in the New Testament. Lyttle-
ton's argument for the truth of Christianity from the conversion
an4 life of Paul is an example. The indisputable facts in the
life of Paul are explicable only on the admission that Christianity
is true. Similar evidence forces itself on our notice at every
point in the history.
Further evidence is found in the prevalence of Christianity
after the events recorded in the New Testament until the recog
nition of Christianity by Constantine. Our Lord said to his
disciples : " Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of
wolves." It was a few sheep among many wolves. And when
the sheep conquer the wolves, it is evident that there is a power
working for them above that of the sheep. The conflict of
Christianity with heathenism, as related by Uhlhorn or any
trustworthy historian, makes the irresistible impression that the
Saviour's comparison of the sheep among wolves was not an

460 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
overstatement, and that nothing but the truth of Christianity and
the reality of the divine presence and power which it claimed
can explain its triumph.
Another line of evidence is found in the persistence of Chris
tianity through the revolutions of the ages, the changes of civili
zation, the progress of science and art, and the reconstruction of
society, and its continued power, under all changes and progress,
to awaken and develop the spiritual life in man, and to satisfy
the awakened spiritual aspirations. Like all things human, the
Christian church has sometimes fallen into error of thought and
corruption of life. But there has always remained in it the power
of revival. In its deepest corruption the coals have been living
beneath the ashes, ready to kindle anew into the living fire. And
as the ages have passed on, it has never been without living wit
nesses, the thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thou^
sands, who have attested in their own experience its spiritual
truth and power.
Still another line of this evidence is the influence of Christianity
on the progress of civilization. In the decay of the Roman empire
and the irruption of the barbarians, there was a dissolution of
society which made necessary a reconstruction of the nations and
the creation of a new civilization. In this terrific transition, Chris
tianity contributed more than any other agency to preserve and
reconstitute society and to give a right direction to the progress
of civilization. Says Lecky : " The great characteristic of Chris
tianity, and the great moral proof of its divinity is, that it has
been the main source of the moral development of Europe, and
that it has discharged this office, hot so much by the inculcation
of a system of ethics, however pure, as by the assimilating and
attractive influence of a perfect ideal. The moral progress of
mankind can never cease to be distinctively and intensely Chris
tian so long as it consists of a gradual approximation to the
character of its Christian founder. There is, indeed, nothing
more wonderful in the history of the human race than the way
in which that ideal has traversed the lapse of ages, acquiring
new strength and beauty with each advance of civilization, and
infusing its beneficent influence into every sphere of thought and
action." 1
It is remarkable that, in the modern progress of man, we find
1 History of Rationalism in Europe, vol. i. p. 312.

PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INCARNATION 46 1
in Christianity the principles which the progress expresses, and by
which it is inspired and guided. When any great movement
begins, in which man rises to a higher plane of life, if we examine
it as it advances, we see the principles which are moving and
directing it, deposited, like seeds for subsequent growth, in the
life and teachings of Christ and the revelation of God in him as
recorded in the Bible.
Certainly there is nothing in the life of Christ as a mere man
that is adequate to account for these wondrous results. He was
born in a despised village in a remote province of the empire,
worked till the age of thirty as a carpenter with his father, had
but a limited education, as the Jews asked with surprise, " How
knoweth this man letters, having never learned ? " (John vii. 15) ;
his whole public ministry was less than four years, and ended in
his crucifixion as a malefactor. If any one had then suggested"
that he was to exert an influence mightier than that of the Roman
emperor, was to be the object of loving trust and service to mil
lions of men through all subsequent centuries, and the mightiest
spiritual power in advancing the progress of men in virtue and
religion, the suggestion would have been laughed at. The whole
history of Christianity shows that there was nothing in Jesus as a
mere man which can account for his historical power and in
fluence in the world.
In view of this great personage and his wonderful life among
men, revealing the grand possibilities of humanity and bringing
into human history the loving energy of God to quicken men to
the realization of these great possibilities, what shall we say of
those who deny that Jesus Christ ever lived, or who insist that he
was a mere man ? It is like seeing the river of life flowing through
human history, and the trees of life along its banks, and insisting
that there is no fountain or spring from which it flows. And if
there was no historical Christ such as is presented in the New
Testament, who invented him? Who could have invented Sir
Isaac Newton? Only one who could discover the law of gravi
tation and be the author of his mathematical calculations and
astronomical discoveries by which he verified it, — only one
who could write the " Principia." It would take a Newton
to invent a Newton. Who could have invented Jesus the
Christ, the author of so grand and divine ideas, the revealer
of God and man, the source and ever- energizing power of all

462 GOD, THE ONE ONLY ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
Christian progress? It would take a Christ to invent a Christ.
Verily there is no other name under heaven given among men,
in which we can be saved. His is the name above every
name, the God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself;
and every tongue must confess that he is Lord, to the glory of
God the Father.

PART II
GOD THE CREATOR

CHAPTER XII
THE CREATION
I. The Doctrine of Creation. — The doctrine is that God
is the cause of the being or existence of the universe, and not
merely of its arrangement or evolution. The doctrine of God's
preservation of the universe is that, while God has given to the
universe being distinct from himself, it has reality only as con
tinuously and progressively realizing God's thought, as always
dependent on his power, and revealing his presence. The two
doctrines are inseparable ; God cannot create a being that can
exist independent of himself. The two doctrines will therefore
be treated together. The significance of the two is that God is
always the causative antecedent of the universe, and that the uni
verse is always dependent on him, and is always revealing him.
The universe is all that is conditioned. The Creator is the Un
conditioned and the All-conditioning.
The doctrine distinguishes theism from dualism, whether in the
form of the eternity of God and of matter, or in the form of the
eternity of two personal beings, the Good and the Evil. It also
distinguishes theism from monism, pantheistic or materialistic.
And, by its doctrine of preservation and God's immanence in the
universe, it distinguishes theism from Epicureanism and deism,
which recognize God only as the First Cause, who created and
completed the universe at a stroke, and thereafter is not active
in it.

464 GOD THE CREATOR
God's action in creating and preserving the universe, is the free
action of his will. Thus theism is distinguished from Gnostic the
ories of necessary emanation through successive aeons. Creating
and preserving by the action of free will is everywhere the scrip
tural representation : " He spake and it was done, he commanded
and it stood fast." And it was shown in the discussion of God's
attributes that, from the very essence of his being as absolute-
Spirit, all his action in creating and evolving the universe must
be free, as the expression in the finite of his own free choice or
self-determination eternally in harmony with the truths and laws,
and progressively realizing the archetypal ideals and ends eternal
in himself, the absolute Reason. And this enlarges and enriches
our idea of the creative action of God. It is no longer an exer
tion of naked almightiness, creating something out of nothing.
It is God, the absolute, personal Reason, eternally self-determined
to energize in harmony with the eternal principles and laws of
absolute Reason, expressing, in the forms of space and time and
finite personality, the archetypal thought of his reason, and real-
izing'the archetypal ideals and ends of perfection and good. It
is God realizing in the finite the thought of perfect wisdom in the
action of perfect love. Novalis said that force is the infinite
vowel, and matter the consonant in the book of nature in which
God expresses his thought. It is true that even in the physical
world of matter and force God is expressing his thought, and its
deepest reality is in the thought which it expresses, not in the
symbols or letters through which it is expressed. But it is in
personal beings, in the moral and spiritual system, that we read
most plainly the tnought of God, and understand the significance
of the universe and the ends for which it has been created, sus
tained, and developed.
Creation is the act of God alone. No increase of finite power
could bring it any nearer to creative power. It is a power differ
ing not in degree only but in kind from all power of finite beings.
The nearest analogy is the power of creating an ideal in thought
and then realizing it on the canvas, or in a building or a machine,
or in any concrete reality. Or a man may be said to create his
own character by the free action of his will. But these are not
creative acts, for they originate no being. Hence any attempt of
the human imagination to picture the creative act of God must
always be inadequate. The creative action of God may be known

THE CREATION 465
as a fact, but it can never be fully comprehended by the finite
mind. Creation is compatible with any subsequent process of arrange
ment or evolution. Professor Haeckel and others have claimed,
with an air of triumph, that evolution disproves creation. But it
is not so. Evolution gives no explanation of the origin of the
homogeneous stuff itself, nor of the beginning of motion in it. It
leaves the necessity of a creation as imperative as it was before.
And without God immanent in it the evolution cannot account
for its own continuance and for the higher orders of being which
at successive epochs appear in the universe. Evolution is incom
patible only with the doctrine that God completed the universe
at a stroke in one creative fiat of his will, and then left it to go of
itself. On the contrary, the theistic conception of God, as realiz
ing and expressing his thought in the universe in the forms of the
finite, demands an evolution of some sort always going on. It is
only when God expresses his thought in the finite that eternity
discloses itself as time measured by events. And God fills all
measured time with action in the finite. This continual action of
God in the universe is the only supposition on which the funda
mental maxim of physical science is possible, that the sum of all
force potential and energizing must be always the same. This
cannot be true of a finite force, but only of power that is absolute
and infinite. When God creates he does not add to his power,
ne only reveals it by realizing his thought in a finite form. And
should he annihilate a finite being, he would not annul the power
which had been revealed in it ; he would only recall it into himself.
It is only the absolute that cannot be made greater by addition nor
less by substraction.
That God is the creator of the universe is clearly recognized
everywhere in the Bible. It is needless to cite particular texts.
So far as the universe, in the constitution and course of nature
and the constitution, experience, and history of man, reveals the
existence of God, it equally reveals him as distinct from the
universe and as its creator. The existence of God, the absolute
Reason, expressing his thought in the universe which he creates,
and which is always dependent on him, is further made certain
by the fact that this alone removes the difficulties and contra
dictions otherwise insuperable in both empirical and philosophical
science. VOL. I. — 30

466 GOD THE CREATOR
II. The Cosmogony in Genesis. — The forms in which truth
is presented in the opening chapters of Genesis are similar to
those in which the Semitic peoples, from among whom the Hebrews
had originally emigrated to Canaan, had expressed their traditional
conceptions of God and of his relations to the world and to man.
This is one of the points established by recent researches into the
traditions of these peoples and the deciphering of inscriptions
found among the ruins of their ancient cities. The conceptions
of God and of the supernatural expressed in these traditional
forms were pagan and polytheistic. But in the opening of Gene
sis, while these familiar forms are retained, they are divested of
the false conceptions of God, and are used as the medium for
conveying the revelation of the one only living and true 'God, of
his creation of the universe, and of his real relations to it, and to
man from the beginning of human history.1
If it is asked why these forms were used, the answer is obvious.
Always, if truth is to be understood by any person, it must be
communicated in language and forms of thought with which he is
familiar. If truth respecting God is to be communicated to a
child or to a savage, it can be done only in the words of their
meagre language and in conceptions and forms of thought famil
iar to their undeveloped minds. For the same reason truths
1 Religion is a common characteristic of mankind. It is the response of
the human spirit to the presence of God revealed to all in the constitution
and course of nature and in the constitution and history of man, as well as
in the experience of individuals. Thus all men attain more or less true ideas
of God, of the spirit of man, and of the supernatural. But in interpreting
these revelations to their own minds, men form conceptions of God and of
his relations to men, which, notwithstanding whatever truth there may be in
them, are defective, fanciful, and erroneous. These perpetuated by tradi
tion, come to be expressed in various legends, myths, and superstitions.
Hence arose the accounts of the creation and of the early condition and his
tory of man, the forms of which are used in Genesis to declare the doctrine of
monotheism. Some of these ethnic legends and myths are doubtless remi
niscences, more or less faded, embellished by fancy and etherealized into
myths, of momentous events or of remarkable heroes, " the mighty men
which were of old, men of renown " (Gen. vi. 4). The tradition of the flood,
for example, has been found among almost all races and tribes of men. It
is doubtless the reminiscence of a great catastrophe of that kind in the
regions inhabited by the primitive men. This, indeed, the modern theories
of geology show to be not only possible but probable. Such traditions, as
well as the incontrovertible historical evidence of events discovered among
the inscriptions and other remains of these peoples, confirm the historical
trustworthiness of the biblical narratives.

THE CREATION 467
respecting God and his relation to the world and to man were
declared in that remote age to the Hebrews in forms of thought
already familiar and probably venerable for their antiquity when
Genesis was written.
This fact must be recognized as of fundamental importance in
every attempt td answer the questions respecting the form in
which truth is presented in these chapters, whether these ques
tions arise from the point of view of literary and historical criti
cism or of modern science.1
I do not propose, however, to discuss these questions here. I
shall confine myself to presenting some of the great and funda
mental truths or realities here revealed, the revelation of which in
these chapters remains indisputable, whatever theory criticism or
science may adopt as to the form in which the truth is presented.
The revelation stands independent of the form in which it was
made. Whether this ancient document, as to its form, consists
of one code or of more than one, whether it is regarded as a lit
eral narrative, or a poem, or a panoramic word-picture, or a vision,
or a symbolic or allegorical representation, on any theory what
ever as to its form, it still remains indisputable that it recognizes
and suggests, and for the most part clearly reveals the great and
fundamental truths or realities which I shall point out. And the
proper use to make of the document is in studying the realities
which it reveals. If one has a telescope he does not occupy him
self in taking it to pieces to see how it is made. This is properly
done now and then by an optician, whose business it is to make
and inspect telescopes. But for the rest of us, we are to look
through it and see what we can see. If we see heavenly bodies
which the naked eye of man never saw, and can see more clearly
those already known, we conclude it is a real telescope and use it
to extend and confirm our knowledge. So we are to look through
this revelation of God. If it reveals great truths, great realities,
now undisputed, which apart from this revelation man was not
acquainted with till ages after Genesis was written, and which
have now become, as the revelations of the telescope have be
come, the common knowledge of mankind, then we justly con-
1 For example, the cuneiform inscription recording the Babylonian tradi
tion of the flood presents points of diversity similar to those in the biblical
narrative, from which critics infer in the latter two distinct and incompatible
codes. — See article by Prof. John P. Davis, " Presbyterian Review," July,
1889, pp. 415-431.

468 GOD THE CREATOR
elude that it was a real revelation of God and we thankfully and
joyfully use it to clarify and extend our knowledge of him.
The objects of all human knowledge are included in the three
spheres, Nature or. the physical system, God, and Man or the
moral system of finite personal beings under the government of
God. The three opening chapters of Genesis declare great and
fundamental truths or realities in each of these spheres of knowl
edge. This makes these chapters, irrespective of all claims to
inspiration, more significant and wonderful than any portion of
ancient literature outside of the Bible. Nor does the form in
which it presents these truths detract from the value and impor
tance of the truths nor from the evidence of its authority as a
revelation of God.
i. First to be considered are the truths here recognized
respecting nature or the physical system. But before mention
ing these it is necessary to attend to some preliminary considera
tions pertaining to questions as to the harmony of Genesis with
modern physical science.
The original creative action must have been wholly in the
sphere of the supernatural. God, the creator, was the only ob
server and his own wisdom his only counsellor. It was entirely
beyond the range of human observation. Therefore human
science is incompetent to describe it. On this point the student
of physical science can speak with no more authority than any
other person. As to the evolution of the universe after it is
created science has unrestricted right of search. Theology ac
cepts all facts and laws which science has fully established, but by
no means all speculative theories and hypotheses which the imagi
nation of scientists may invent.
The narrative in Genesis is written in popular, not in scientific
language. It presents things as they appear without attempting
scientific analysis and description. Modern scientific nomencla
ture and terminology, if used, would have been unintelligible.
The scientific names and forms of that day, if there had been
any, would long ago have lost all significance. But popular lan
guage, describing things as they appear to men in all generations,
is always and everywhere understood.
Theories of cosmogony propounded by scientists are receiving
frequent modifications. The theories of one generation are re
jected by the next. The Wernerian or Neptunian theory that the

THE CREATION 469
rocks were deposited from water, gave place to the Huttonian or
Vulcanist theory, which gave prominence to the action of heat
and the cooling of melted matter. The theory of catastrophes,
with which Hugh Miller and President Edward Hitchcock at
tempted to reconcile Genesis, has given place, since Lyell wrote,
to the theory of uniformity. All cosmogonies are taken up and
modified by the theory of evolution ; and already it has been pro
posed to modify this theory itself by giving more prominence to
the formation and action of meteoric dust and its condensation
into meteoric masses. It is idle to attempt to reconcile Genesis
with the cosmogony of science, so long as the latter is immature
and changing in the process of growth.
It must also be borne in mind that these chapters in Genesis
were not written to instruct man in physical science, but in the
knowledge of God. They were not written to reveal the facts
and laws of physical science, but to reveal God. To study them
as designed to teach physical science would be like dissecting the
Madonna di San Sisto of Raphael, subjecting the coloring matter
to chemical analysis, determining how many grains of each kind
of material were used, and so trying to prove that the picture
reveals some facts of modern science and is in harmony with it,
forgetting that what it really reveals is the genius of the painter
and the ideal which he had created and revealed on the canvas.
And it must be remembered that Genesis is here the record of
God's revelation of himself in its beginning. Because God can
reveal himself only in the finite, and in his action on and in the
finite after it has been created, this beginning of revelation must
be incomplete and its literary and scientific setting must be also
incomplete and inadequate. As he continues to reveal himself in
his action in the physical universe and in the course of human
history, and as, under God's continued revealing of himself, man
advances in development, God's revelation of himself becomes in
itself clearer and fuller, and the media for communicating it, the
setting in which it is presented to man, become more adequate.
Mr. Huxley has presented a dreadful picture of strangled theo
logical serpents lying around the cradle of every science, like the
serpents of old around the cradle of the infant Hercules. But
the theism cradled in the first chapters of Genesis, in its life and
growth through all generations, has survived multitudes of perish
ing forms of science. Instead of Mr. Huxley's conception, it

470 GOD THE CREATOR
would be nearer historical fact to represent theology and physical
science as having both been once in their cradles, and both as
having strangled many an error, as they forced their way to larger
and clearer knowledge of the truth. For there is no real antagon
ism and no necessary occasion for controversy between them.
While the account of the creation in Genesis was not designed
to teach physical science, it does recognize important facts and
principles pertaining to the physical system.
It recognizes in it order, continuity, and law. It recognizes it
as a system. The Bible nowhere intimates the existence of chaos
in which innumerable atoms were driven about by chance and
nothing was orderly under law. That was a fiction which had
some currency among the Greeks and afterwards among the
Romans; but it is entirely absent from all records of Hebrew
thought. On the contrary, the creation of the universe and its
development through successive epochs are presented as caused
by the intelligent action of God proceeding in an orderly way
from epoch to epoch, and bringing into existence a vast and com
plicated universe in which all parts are fitted to each other in a
reasonable and orderly system. The fact that the writer resolves
all the nature-gods of the heathen into mere objects and powers
of nature, themselves created by the one only God, and compre
hends the whole universe in a strict monotheism, necessarily im
plies its unity, order, and continuity in a system.
The narrative also declares the efficiency of second causes.
The sun, the moon, and the stars are real agents giving light to
the earth ; the earth brings forth grass ; the herb yields seed
after its kind, and the trees bear fruit wherein is the seed thereof
after its kind. So throughout the Bible created beings are recog
nized as real beings exerting efficiency, on which as objects and
through which as agents God acts. This shuts out pantheism,
which allows no real being or efficiency to the finite. It shuts
out polytheism, banishing the divinities from the trees, the moun
tains, the rivers, and all the powers of nature. Nor is it deroga
tory to God, nor incompatible with his almightiness, that he is
immanent in the universe which he has created, and acts on and
through it according to the laws of his own reason and in the in
variable sequences of nature which those laws determine.
The cosmogony of Genesis also represents the universe as pro
gressively developed. It was not created and completed by sr

THE CREATION 471
single fiat of the divine will. Six epochs are mentioned in its
progressive evolution. God is also recognized as immanent in it,
developing at the successive epochs a more diversified arrangement
of the material and higher types of being. At last, when the earth
has become fit for human habitation, he brings man into being.
This cosmogony is singularly free from mythical and puerile
conceptions like those common among the ancient nations. Here
is no trace of the sun-myth in any of its many forms ; no teach
ing that the world rests on a tortoise ; or that it floats in a sea of
milk ; or that, like the primitive shelter of the lowest savages,
consisting of the branches of a tree pulled down and fastened to
the ground, it is built around and supported by a tree, from which
the Scandinavian conception of the tree Yggdrasil probably origi
nated ; or that the sun laboriously forces his way every night by
difficult and intricate passages through the foundation of the
earth ; nor does it mention a river of fire winding about the earth,
of which, with several other equally mythical conceptions, Plato
tells us in the " Phaedo."
While the account of the creation was not intended to teach
science, it does present a remarkable agreement with modern
science. Its recognition of the progressive development of the
universe has been already noticed. Its declaration that light ex
isted before the sun, which used to be urged as proof of its con
tradiction of science, is now a remarkable instance of its agreement
with it. When the deep was waste and void and in darkness, the
spirit of God moved upon its face. This naturally indicates the
beginning of motion, which must have been first in the develop
ment of the matter of the universe, in whatever form it first
existed. And the beginning of motion may have been the mole
cular vibration of the all-pervading ether which causes light.
And thus light would be the first thing produced in the distribu
tion and arrangement of the material of the universe. " Firma
ment " in English, like the Latin word from which it is derived,
means something firm and stable. The same is the meaning of the
Greek word by which it is translated in the Septuagint. But the
Hebrew word translated " firmament " means simply an expanse.
Various other agreements have been pointed out by skilled scien
tists. The following, from Professor Haeckel, of Jena, is in striking
contrast with the flippancy with which many, inferior to him in
scientific ability, have ridiculed the account of creation in Genesis :

472 GOD THE CREATOR
" Two great and fundamental ideas, common also to the non-mira
culous theory of creation, meet us in this Mosaic hypothesis of
creation with surprising clearness and simplicity, — the idea of
separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive develop
ment or perfecting. Although Moses looks on the results of the
great law of organic development ... as the direct action of a
constructing creator, yet in his theory there lies hidden the ruling
idea Of a differentiation and progressive development of the origi
nally simple matter. We can therefore bestow our just and sin
cere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into
nature and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without
discovering in it a so-called divine revelation." 1 How, then, is it
to be accounted for that in an antiquity so remote these far-
sighted suggestions are found in this document?
2. Here also great truths are revealed respecting God. No
sentence ever written or spoken in human language declares
truths more fundamental and momentous than the first sentence
of Genesis. To the fundamental truth here revealed all physical
science, all speculative, ethical, and aesthetic philosophy, all science
of government and law, and all religion must go back for their
ultimate foundation, for their possibility and their right to be.
For if the universe, with all its beings, forces, truths, and laws, is
not the product of power guided by rational intelligence for the
realization of rational ends, if it is not ultimately grounded in
reason, then there is no ultimate foundation for the reality of
human knowledge, the obligation of virtue, or the possibility of
religion. That which is revealed in this sentence is, The one only
living and true God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. It
is worthy to be the first sentence in the record of God's revela
tion of himself. The first words, " In the beginning God," pre
sent him as antecedent to the universe. The next words, " created
the heavens and the earth," declare that he is not merely the
antecedent, but is also the intelligent, originating, creative power,
who gives being to the universe. Here is declared the creation
of the material of the universe. The succeeding verses declare
the progressive distribution, arrangement, and development of the
original material through the brooding energy of God's spirit, and
the bringing in, at successive epochs, of vegetable, animal, and
rational life. 1 History of Creation, Trans, vol. i. p. 38.

THE CREATION 473
These opening chapters of Genesis clearly and distinctly teach
monotheism. In them God is revealed as distinct from the uni
verse and its creator, transcending it, yet immanent and active in
it. He is revealed as the personal God. His whole action as
here set forth is in self-consciousness, and in rational intelligence
and freedom. He creates by his own free will, and each succes
sive act reveals the progressive realization of a rational plan. He
creates and develops the universe by the immediate volition of
his will. God said, " Let light be and light was." God's rest
ing on the seventh day reveals at least that he is not acting
under necessity, but acts in the finite, or refrains from acting, as
he will. He is also revealed as the one God. He is one. The
Hebrew word here translated God is in form plural, but the
verbs of which it is the subject are singular. This use of the
plural (Elohim) to denote the one only God prevails through
out the Old Testament. It is used even in the explicit assertion
of the oneness of God : " Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our Elohim is
one Jehovah" (Deut. vi. 4). No valid argument against the
oneness of God can be founded on this use of the plural name of
God, for it is a well-known peculiarity of the Hebrew language.
Gesenius says that this name of God is used in the singular form
only in the poetic style and the later Hebrew. And the whole
narrative shows that it denotes here the one God. As the poly-
theists in their inscriptions had used the word in the plural, this
writer uses the word in the same form and treats it as singular,
teaching what they had worshiped as many is in reality one God.
And he is here revealed as the only God and the God over all.
He was in the beginning, alone, the only God. All besides him
is created and dependent being ; it is not God. This excludes
every form of polytheism. God is sharply distinguished from the
universe. He is not evolved into the universe and identified
with it. He is its creator. As creator he is distinct from the
universe and transcends it. This excludes every form of pan
theism. Yet God- is also revealed as immanent in the universe
and energizing in its progressive evolution through successive
epochs in time. This excludes Epicurean and deistic conceptions
of God as a mere first cause excluded from the universe. Thus
in the opening of Genesis is recognized the harmony of the
seeming antinomies in the conception of God, of the diversity of
his attributes and the variety of their manifestations with the

474 GOD THE CREATOR
unity of his being, of his transcendence of the universe with his
immanent action in it. The study of these antinomies has occu
pied the profoundest thought of man in all ages, and aside from
the biblical revelation has issued in one-sided conceptions, in
polytheism, or in Epicureanism or deism, or in pantheism.
We find also in these chapters of Genesis a revelation of the
moral government of God. The sixth and highest epoch is the
creation of man " in the image of God." Here is the revelation
of God's providential care both for man and beast in providing
for their needs. But the narrative plainly shows that rational
man as a subject of moral government is the chief object of inter
est. To him God gives dominion over the earth, to subdue and
cultivate it and to possess and use its powers and resources. In
all the successive steps in the development of the material of the
world, the ruling design evidently was to prepare it for the habi
tation of man. For this even the sun and moon were made.
Whatever other ends they subserve, the narrative says they were
made " to give light upon the earth." Thus the representation
is that the whole action of God in creating and developing the
physical system was subordinated to the higher ends of the moral
system in which man appears under the moral government of
God. Accordingly man is at once recognized as a responsible
free agent, is put on probation under moral law and government
and subjected to a course of moral discipline and education.
God cares for him with paternal love and admits him to free
communion with himself.
It is said repeatedly at the successive epochs, " and God saw
that it was good " ; and at the completion of the work it is said,
" and God saw everything that he had made and behold it was
very good." Here God is pictured as rejoicing in his work.
This excludes all pessimistic conceptions of the universe, and all
Zoroastrian and Manichaean ideas of an evil being co-eternal with
God. It is common to praise the ancient Greeks for their bright
and sunny lives. Here in the beginning of Genesis we find God
himself taking a bright and sunny view of the universe and re
joicing in it as very good. What a contrast to Buddhism, the
fundamental principle of which is that all finite existence is in
itself an evil and the only redemption of finite beings is in the
cessation of their conscious individual existence.
It is objected that God does not here declare the law of love

THE CREATION 475
nor a code of moral precepts, nor make a full revelation of his
own character as love. The answer is that every finite person
must begin without moral development, and must develop his
moral capacities and form his moral character by his own free
action. In no other way are moral development and the forma
tion of moral character possible or even conceivable. And for the
undeveloped person, whether an infant or a savage, moral educa
tion and development must begin with specific rules requiring or
forbidding specific acts. Therefore the method of dealing with
the first man and woman, as here pictured, is accordant with the
principles of true ethical philosophy, and with all experience in
moral education and development. And the narrative shows that
God from the beginning did show his love for the first pair and
his kindly care for them. And we shall see that afterwards, when
they had sinned, God did make a grand revelation to them of
his redeeming love.
The truth respecting God recognized in these three opening
chapters of Genesis is the more surprising when contrasted with
the religions of all the peoples surrounding the Hebrews in their
earlier history. The gods of these peoples were themselves
objects and powers of nature. But here in Genesis it is revealed
that not only the trees and animals which some of them wor
shiped, but the stars, the moon, and even the sun, the highest
object of nature -worship, were themselves created by the one true
God and were dependent on him, — that he is the God who is
above all the powers of the universe and on whom they all de
pend for their existence. Accordingly we find a wonderful con
trast in this respect between the account of the creation in the
ancient inscriptions, so far as they have been deciphered, and the
record of the creation in Genesis. In the former the earth and
heavens are represented as generated from the great deep, and
the first beings thus generated are the gods themselves.1 No
1 •' At that time, above, the heaven was unnamed ; below, the earth by
name was unrecorded ; the boundless deep also (was) their generator. The
chaos of the sea was she who bore the whole of them. Their waters were
collected together in one place, and the flowering reed was not gathered,
the marsh-plant was not grown. At that time the gods had not been pro
duced, any one of them ; by name they had not been called, destiny was
not fixed. The (great) gods also were made; the gods Lakhmu and
Lakhamu were produced (the first), the gods Sar and Kisar were made
next. The days were long: a long (time passed), (and) the gods Anu,

476 GOD THE CREATOR
creation of the universe by a God antecedent and superior to it is
recognized ; but the material of the universe is first, and the gods,
as mere powers of nafure, are generated from it. The same contrast
appears between the narratives of the first ten chapters of Gen
esis and their heathen counterparts. In the latter are found only
nature-gods. In the former are found only the most distinct
monotheistic conceptions of God like those in the first three
chapters.1 The true and sublime idea of God in the beginning of Genesis
is the more surprising in view of the fact that during the many ages
from the time when this was written to the coming of the Christ,
in the most civilized nations as well as the uncivilized, the He
brews alone excepted, the mass of the people had not attained
the conception of the one personal God here so distinctly pre
sented. Polytheism prevailed in all the nations. Even the more
profound thinkers, who attained the idea of the one personal God,
thought it an idea difficult to be attained and not to be com
municated to the common people, and therefore held it occult
in their " mysteries," or they regarded him as too great and
pure to soil himself by intermeddling with earthly affairs. To
the question how this conception of God in these first three
chapters of Genesis is to be accounted for, the only reasonable
answer is, that God imparted it by his revelation of himself.
And the earlier the date assigned to the composition, the
more decisive is the internal evidence that it is the revelation
of God.
It is said by superficial critics that God is represented here as
a man going in and out and conversing with Adam and Eve, and
that this indicates a very low conception of God, belonging to a
very low type of paganism and to a barbarous people. To this
it may be replied that these chapters do not ascribe a human
form to God, and do not inform us precisely in what way God
made himself known. If the narrative implies that it was in a
human form, this may be accounted for as belonging to the old
type of representation which the writer has purposely chosen in
order to convey the truth respecting God in sharp contrast with
(Bel and Hea were born of) the gods Sar and Kisar." (" Chaldean Account
of Genesis," by George Smith, revised and corrected by A. H. Sayce, pp.
57.58.) 1 Lenormant, " Beginnings of History," trans, pp. 337-342.

THE CREATION

477

the heathen representations. * But, whatever the form in which
God is here represented as revealing himself, the grand ideas of
God and of his relations to man here presented remove this nar
rative far away from all heathen conceptions, and make it impos
sible to regard it as the product of the thought and religion of a
barbarous and idolatrous people. And the same may be said of
all theophanies of the Old Testament. The Old Testament
assumes throughout that God is making special revelations of
himself to man. These revelations are represented as being
made through a great variety of theophanies, all of which are rich
in spiritual significance. Whatever explanation may be given of
the forms in which the revelation is made, the revelation of God
actually made in them is worthy of God and vindicates its claim
to be a true revelation of him.
3. These three chapters disclose fundamental facts and truths
respecting man.
Here the great truth is clearly indicated that the essential ele
ments of personality are the same in man and in God. Man was
created in the image of God. And not only is this phrase signi
ficant, but the man and the woman are represented and treated
throughout the whole history as rational, personal free agents, re
sponsible for their actions under God's moral government and
discipline, and admitted to intimacy with him. Many Christian
theologians have held theories of free will which logically imply
and sometimes explicitly assert that God is not a free agent.
Mohammedism presents a view of God which logically involves
the denial of free will in man and reduces God practically to a
blind fate. But the whole narrative in this ancient document in
Genesis rests on the assumption that God and man are alike
personal free agents, that the essential elements of rational free
personality are the same in both. Man as thus constituted is
represented as a supernatural being. He is above nature. This
is recognized by God in giving him lordship over nature (Gen. i.
26, 28). God appoints the man to have dominion overall the
earth and over every living thing upon it. The heathen regarded
the gods themselves as included in nature and generated by it.
But in Genesis not only is God in the beginning the creator and
above nature, but man himself, though a creature of God, is like
God in his rational free personality, and thus is supernatural,
above nature and having lordship over it. And this implies, as

478 GOD THE CREATOR
we have already seen, that the earth and all in it, the sun, moon,
and stars, the whole physical system, exist for the moral system
and are subordinate to its uses and to the realization of its moral
and spiritual ideals and ends.
Man is also represented as knowing God and communing
with him. He is under God's law and government ; thus he
is on probation and in such a way as is compatible with
his undeveloped capacities and character. He is by his own
action to form his own character and to determine his own
destiny. Here also is the recognition of marriage as the union of one
man with one woman, and of the perpetuity and inviolability of
the marriage relation. " Therefore shall a man leave his father
and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife ; and they shall be
one flesh" (Gen. ii. 23, 24).
Here also is the recognition of the fact of sin ; a fact which
has been demonstrating its actuality every year and day and hour
in the history of man ever since the first sin was committed. It
is like Niagara in its fulness, its power, and its continuance. At
the Falls one is awed by its continuity and, as it were, its omni
presence ; wherever you are, in every waking hour of day and
night you hear its roar and are conscious of its presence and
power. It overpowers the mind with awe to think of that tre
mendous torrent pouring down in all its fulness every moment,
unexhausted through all the years and all the centuries. Like
that is the torrent of human sin. Look into the history of man
in whatever age or country, and you find sin pouring through it
with appalling power. We hear its roar, nearer or more distant,
in the news of every morning. There can be no true philosophy
of human history which fails to recognize this fundamental fact.
This we find recognized in the opening of Genesis ; and the
recognition of it is essential to any correct understanding of the
history of man and of the action of God revealing himself in
human history.
In this narrative also the essential characteristics of all sin are
disclosed. Sin is supreme selfishness in its several forms of self-
sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking, and self- glorifying. These es
sential characteristics of sin are exhibited here. The temptation
was not addressed, as commonly supposed, to the appetites and
lower propensities of the man and the woman, enticing to a life

THE CREATION 479
of sensual indulgence. It was explicitly addressed to their higher
and nobler impulses, promising them the immediate realization
of their highest development and greatness, if they would disobey
God and take the forbidden fruit. " Ye shall not surely die ; for
God doth know that in. the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes
shall be opened and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil."
The tempter here presents a legitimate object of human aspira
tion. Man in his rational free personality is " in the image of
God." He legitimately aspires to the increase of knowledge, to
the development of all his powers, and to the attainment of like
ness to God in moral character, that is, in universal love. The
same promise, "Ye shall be as God," is renewed in the gospel on
the authority of Christ. God in the life and work of Christ re
veals man's likeness to God in his constitution as a personal be
ing, and opens to him the way in which, after he has sinned, he
may be restored to his normal condition of union with God by
faith, may be accepted as a child of God and renovated in char
acter into the likeness of God in love. " He hath granted unto
us his precious and exceedingly great promises ; that through
these ye may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet.
i. 4). This is the old promise "Ye shall be as God," given anew
by God himself. The deception by which the tempter misled
man at the outset was as to what the promised greatness of being
as God really consists in and as to the methods by which it must
be attained. His promise implied that all which hindered their
attaining the highest knowledge, power, and development was
their subjection to God. He insinuates that God is jealous of
them and knows that, if they break away from their subjection to
him, they will be his equals, and he will be unable to control them
any longer. He suggests to them, If you eat this forbidden
fruit, you will then not need to depend on God for directions
what to do and for rules for the wise conduct of your lives ; you
will know of yourselves what is good for you and what is evil, and
can determine for yourselves, independently of God's commands,
what desires it is best for you to gratify. He urges them, there
fore, to disobey God, to declare themselves independent of him ;
to set themselves up in self-sufficiency, no longer trusting in God
as dependent on him ; in self-will, disregarding his law ; in self-
seeking, becoming great by grasping for themselves and indulg
ing themselves as they please in the gratification of their desires.

480 GOD THE CREATOR
And he assures them that in so doing God will be unable to
punish them, and that they will realize the highest possibilities of
their being, becoming equal with God. " And when the woman
saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to
the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise,
she took of the fruit thereof and did eat." Here, in yielding to
the temptation, she beguiles herself with an enticement which the
tempter had not mentioned. She seems to say to herself, If I
set up for myself in independence of God, I shall not only get
for myself the highest knowledge and power, but I shall at the
same time be gratifying my natural desire for agreeable food, and
shall delight my eyes with beauty, and so I shall achieve great
ness in the way of self-gratification and self-indulgence. And she
may have reasoned, as sinners still continue to reason, "Why
should I not follow my nature? Why am I made with these
appetites and desires, if not to gratify them ? "
Here, therefore, in this original transgression we see the essen
tial elements of all sinful character. It is acting in accordance
with the primeval lie of the serpent. It is setting one's self up
in self-sufficiency, renouncing dependence on God instead of
trusting him ; in self-will, making one's own will his law, and
renouncing allegiance to God and obedience to his law ; in self-
seeking, endeavoring in all the activity of life to gain the highest
power and good by grasping and getting for self, by indulging
self in the gratification of desire, instead of loving God with
all the heart and one's neighbor as himself. The tempter taught
man in the outset this tremendous lie, that the way for him to
become great and powerful and to attain the highest good is by
superior force to crush the weaker when in his way and seize his
possessions, or to overpower him and compel his service. Here,
then, sin is presented in its essence as supreme selfishness, mani
festing itself in the outset, as it has always manifested itself, in
self-sufficiency, self-will, 'self-seeking, and self-glorifying. As such,
it is wilful alienation from God. Therefore the sinner misses
all true development, productiveness, and well-being as inevi
tably as the vine-branch becomes fruitless and withers when torn
from the vine.
Sin is not represented here as beginning in sensual indulgence.
But these appetites and passions are among the most obtrusive
of the natural propensities. Therefore when a person has re-

THE CREATION 48 1
nounced God and his spiritual relations and opportunities, and
sets out to live for the gratification of his own desires, it is not
surprising that he so often falls into a sensual life. Then, instead
of realizing independence, freedom, and power, he finds himself
a slave to appetite and passion and in bondage to earthly and
sensual desires. James traces the pedigree of sin back to desire,
which is the generic meaning of the word there translated lust
(James i. r4, r5). This accords with the account of the origin
of sin in Eden. Eve saw that the apple was to be desired. De
sire entices to action but is not in itself necessarily sinful. If
the will determines selfishly to gratify the desire reckless of God's
law and of the rights which it guarantees to men, then the desire
is fertilized, the seed which it bears is sin, and, when it has
ripened, is death.
Here also begins the revelation of God as the redeemer of man
from sin. God's redemptive action began as soon as man had
sinned. It began in gracious divine action and influence to
reclaim the sinners to their normal allegiance to himself. After
Adam and Eve had sinned, God is represented as immediately
seeking them, while they ran away from him. And when they
stood before him, he condemned them indeed and banished
them from Eden. But he did not banish them from himself.
On the contrary, as the subsequent narrative shows, he received
them and those of their children and children's children who
willingly trusted and served him as accepted worshipers. And
here is recorded not only the beginning of God's gracious action
toward these first of human sinners, but also the promise of its
continuance and its prevailing power. This promise is the so-
called Protevangelium, in which God says to the serpent : " I
will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy
seed and her seed ; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise
his heel." We learn from the Babylonian inscriptions that the
serpent was recognized as representing the power of lawlessness
and evil among all the Semitic peoples.1 He would, therefore, be
1,1 The goddess Nina ceased to retain her serpentine attributes and after
the era of the monuments of Tel-loh passed almost entirely out of memory ;
while the serpent became, what indeed he always seems to have been in
genuine Semitic belief, the incarnation of wickedness and guile. We read,
in the bilingual lists, of the evil serpent, the serpent of darkness, and it is
probable that the imagination of later time confounded this serpent of dark-
vol. 1. — 31

482 GOD THE CREATOR
at once recognized as such by all readers and hearers of Genesis
as soon as it was written. Therefore those for whom the story
of the temptation was written must at once have understood it
to declare that, under temptation by the power of lawlessness
and evil, man had disobeyed God and fallen under the divine
condemnation as a sinner. And it reveals, and must have been
understood as revealing, the beginning of a conflict between the
powers of good and of evil, which was to be continued through
the history of man ; and it reveals, and must have been under
stood to reveal God's promise of victory over the power of evil
which God was to win for man in some way through the seed of
the woman. This narrative shows that God's action in redeem
ing man from sin began as soon as man had sinned and that it
was to be continued to a victorious issue.
Thus in the opening of Genesis is struck the keynote of human
history, in the declaration of the two great facts of sin and re
demption. Here is recorded the beginning of the conflict of
God's grace with the powers of darkness in the redemption of
man from sin. Here also is the prediction that this conflict
was to continue as the staple of human history; and here is
the promise of victory through the seed of the woman. And
history shows that the conflict was continued with increasing dis
tinctness of significance until Christ came and the Spirit of God
was poured out on all flesh.
Less than half a century before Christ came, Julius Caesar
crossed the Rubicon and laid the foundation of the imperial
power of the Caesars who followed in long succession. Christ was
bom in the life-time of the first Roman emperor. The coming
of the Christ and the coming of the Csesar so nearly at the same
time signalize the great epoch in the progress of this conflict and
the fulfilment of this promise. Rome, in the spirit of selfish
aggression, had subjugated the whole western world. The Roman
emperor is the fit representative in history of the power of self-
sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking, and self-glorifying, — of that
ness with the dragon Tiamat, the leader of the powers of night and chaos."
(A. H. Sayce, " The Religion of the Ancient Babylonians," Hibbert Lectures,
1887, p. 223.)
Among the Aryan peoples of Persia and India the serpent was in like
manner the symbol of the power of evil. (Pressense, " Christianity and the
Ancient World," pp. 132, 133.)

THE CREATION 483
supremely selfish spirit of grasping, conquest, and domination
which is the essence of all sin. Paul describes sin, when in its
culmination it reveals in bold relief its essential character : " The
man of sin, the son of perdition ; he that opposeth and exdteth
himself against all that is called God or that is worshiped ; so
that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God "
(2 Thess. ii. 3, 4). It was the Roman emperor, claiming worship
as a god, whom Paul had in mind when he drew this terrible
picture of the antichrist, " the man of sin." John also presents
the Roman emperor as the antichrist (Rev. xiii. 11-18). It is a
fit presentation, for the antichrist is the embodiment of the spirit
of selfish aggressiveness asserting itself in subjugating men by
force and in opposition to the reign of self-renouncing love in the
process of realization in the kingdom of Christ. It was the
Csesar who not very long after Christ's crucifixion began to wield
all the power of the Roman empire to crush the Christian church.
Any Christian might have escaped martyrdom by sprinkling a few
grains of incense in acknowledgment of the Csesar as a god.
Christ was a subject of the Caesar. To human view how weak,
how utterly insignificant he was in comparison with the emperor
of the civilized world. But the Csesar represented selfish power
maintaining, extending, and aggrandizing itself by force. Christ
represented the power of love acting in harmony with the eternal
truth and law of God and realizing the ends of God's eternal wisdom
and love. He revealed and maintained the supreme, universal,
and inviolable authority and the immutable obligation of the divine
law of love. In the strength of that love and that law he con
fronted the world-ruling power of, selfish and forceful conquest,
subjugation, and domination in self-aggrandizement. The empire
ofthe Csesars crumbled and vanished from the earth. The kingdom
of Christ under the reign of love, beginning as a grain of mustard
seed, prevailed, and is transforming the world. And the scriptures
foretell that it will go on transforming human society into the
kingdom of God till the end and consummation of the earthly
history of man. Here in the beginning of this first book of the
Bible, significantly named Genesis, is disclosed the beginning of
the great conflict between the good and the evil, between love
and selfishness, between the divine and the satanic, which has
marked the whole history of man. There can be no true
philosophy of human history which fails to recognize both man's

484 GOD THE CREATOR
sin and God's continuous action among men redeeming them
from sin and establishing and advancing his kingdom of righteous
ness and good-will among men on the earth. The establishment
and triumph of this kingdom is the goal of all God's action on
earth and the highest end which can be realized in the history of
man. Accordingly, the biblical history, which begins with Paradise
lost by the sin of man, ends in the glorious vision of Paradise
regained by man through Christ, in which the categoric imper
ative of the law is transcended and perfectly obeyed in
Christian character fully developed and acting in the spontaneity of
perfect love. Thus the promise " Ye shall be as God " — by seek
ing the fulfilment of which in selfishness man brought on himself
ruin in sin and alienation from God — is renewed in Christ and
fulfilled through the renewing of sinners by the Holy Spirit into
the life of love. " Behold what manner of love the Father hath
bestowed on 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 appear, we shall be like him ; for we shall see him as
he is."
Thus in the first three chapters of Genesis we find the begin
nings of God's revelation of himself in his relation to the universe
and to man in all the aspects in which he afterwards revealed
himself more fully down to the coming of the God in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself. And the revelation of these
great truths or realities respecting nature, God, and man, remains
indisputable in this ancient document, whatever theory may be
adopted as to the form of it, whether from the point of view of
literary criticism or of physical science.
III. Speculative Objections. — It remains to notice briefly
some questions and difficulties which have arisen in speculative
thought on the creation.
1. To give real being to the finite by creation would be in
compatible with the absoluteness of God. Rothe says God can
not think of another being as not-God, because if not-God it
would be the absolute and contradictory antithesis of God.1 This
objection can be valid only against the supposition that God
1 Theologische Ethik, vol. i. p. 156.

THE CREATION 485
gives to the creature self- existent and independent being; that is,
creates another God. But this absurdity no one holds. As an
objection against the possibility of creating finite beings always de
pendent on God, it can be valid only on some erroneous idea of
the absolute as a mathematical total of all things or as the logical
universal. It is of no force against the true conception of God as
the absolute Being. What is not myself is not a contradiction of
the existence of myself, it is the object of my thought and action.
So the real being of what is not God is in no contradictory
antithesis to God, for it is created by him and ever dependent on
him. God is not limited nor his attributes contradicted by
imparting real being to his creatures ; he is revealed. If God
could not create that which is not God in the finite forms of
space and time he would be limited and his attributes con
tradicted by that very lack of power. He would be limited by
space and time because he would be shut out from exerting his
power in them. The objection, if valid, plunges us into the
abyss of pantheism. God is the unconscious and the impersonal,
eternally rolling in necessity in and upon itself. There would be
no beings on whom he could act, to whom he could reveal him
self; there would be no personal free agents, no moral system, no
distinction of right and wrong, no kingdom of God advancing on
the earth.
2. It is objected that, since nothing comes of nothing, God
cannot create out of nothing. Therefore the matter of the
universe must be eternal.
But if matter has existed eternally, as something other than
God, it is independent of God and necessarily limits and condi
tions him.
And if the existence of God is acknowledged, the maxim
" Nothing comes of nothing " has no legitimate application to prove
the eternal existence of matter. For in that case the universe
does not come from nothing, but from God. The maxim means
no more than that every beginning or change must have a cause.
Nothing cannot produce something. The maxim is fully satis
fied when God is recognized as the cause. Before he calls the
universe into being it has no existence as a finite universe. . But
the thought which is realized in it and the power which realizes
it are eternal in God. It is not thought alone ; for then the
universe would be merely ideal. It is not power alone ; for then

486 GOD THE CREATOR
the universe would be a chaos without intelligence, unregulated.
by law and incapable of being apprehended in science. This
is a sufficient answer to the objection. It is needless as well
as useless to .attempt to define more exactly how God creates
or what are the resources within himself which he uses. Two
examples of such attempts may be briefly noticed.
Schelling and others have insisted that there is a nature in
God which becomes the basis of the matter of the universe.
Some speak even of a corporeity in him. They say that some
thing which is not God must be posited in God, and thus they
would find the material for the universe. They seem to have
in view some analogy to the human body. The body is not of
the essence of the human ego or person, and yet it is a part of
the man and is animated by the soul. This leads at once to
that form of pantheism which regards God as the soul of the
universe. And if this is disclaimed, the phrase " nature in God "
is used without intelligible meaning, and is a mere bridge of
words. Others have tried to explain God's creative action as a self-
limitation of God. This idea appears in Hindu philosophy.
God is supposed to limit himself in the act of creating and therein
to show his self-sacrificing love. The dynamic conception of
nature may give some support to this suggestion. It supposes
the essence of matter to be forces in equilibrium and thus hold
ing possession of a definite form in space so that no other force
can penetrate it. Thus matter may be divine force localized.
And because God is infinite, no positing of any portion of his
force within limits in space would make the absolute amount
of force greater, and no recalling it and so annihilating the finite
thing in which it had been posited, would make the total amount
any less. This theory, however, would not be an adequate
explanation of the existence of rational, personal beings, for
they are more and other than force occupying space. Possibly
the creation of a finite personal spirit may be explained in an
analogous way, as a portion of mind-force limited in a distinct
individual consciousness and in a definite place and time. But
such speculations are unnecessary to answer the objection. It is
sufficient to know that God has in himself all the resources and
powers adequate to create without further defining how he does
it. And such speculations are fruitless. A finite being can

THE CREATION 487
never pass beyond the line of his finiteness so as to see and
delineate how it is that the absolute God realizes his thought in
the finite and thus reveals himself.
3. A speculative question sometimes asked is, What was God
doing before he created the world? "Will you be satisfied,"
says the agnostic, " with the puerile thought that God woke up
one day after the inaction of eternity, and bethought himself
that he would make some worlds ? "
This is one of those questions which demand exact definitions
of what lies beyond the limits of the finite and beyond the limits
of all finite minds. It carries us beyond all God's revelations of
himself and calls on us to define, by the mere force of our
unaided intellects, the precise mode of his eternal action of
which he has made no revelation. Our inability to answer
such a question does not invalidate the fact that God does
reveal himself in the finite in the forms of space and time, nor
the reality of our positive knowledge of him through these
revelations. The universe in its existence and ongoing is a true revelation
of God in which we know what he eternally is. If we try to
picture God's thought or intelligence as eternal, we can think
it only as one archetypal, all-comprehending knowledge. If we
try to think of God's action as eternal, we can think it only
as one all-comprehending and unchanging purpose. But the
eternal and archetypal thought and the eternal and all-compre
hending purpose are in the process of being progressively realized
and revealed in the universe and in God's action in it in time.
Plato says Time is the moving image of eternity. God's action
in the universe in time is the evolving image, the progressive
realization and revelation of God's thought and purpose, of his
action in eternity.
However time differs from eternity, it reveals it. A human
person stands unchanging in his personal identity, yet reveals
himself continuously in the successive and changing activity of
thought and will. This consciousness of unchanging personal
identity is the fixed standard by which he is able to note and
measure the succession of events and the lapse of time. If he
floated with everything else in the current he would know neither
his identity nor his motion. And God is unchanging in his
eternal identity, yet ever revealing himself by his action in time.

488 GOD THE CREATOR
Because man is finite, he knows but in part, and successive events
are known to him only as they occur. A man possesses only the
present. But what is the present? An infinitesimal moment
which departs in coming ; the unknown future always crystallizing
into the past. But God's consciousness is not limited. To
him successive events are not known merely in their occurrence,
but the past, the present, and the future are equally clear in his
knowledge. His knowledge is also an eternal fulness which has
neither ebb nor flow. But this does not deny the reality of
succession and time. The absolute does not annul the finite,
it gives it being. Almightiness does not annihilate finite power ;
it is the source of the reality of it. So eternity does not annul
time, it is the basis of its reality. On the other hand, finite
power is not contradictory to almightiness but reveals it. And
time is not contradictory to eternity but reveals it Man, the
finite image of God, stands unchanged in his personal identity
in all his varied activity and through the succession of events.
Much more may God abide unchanged in his eternal personal
identity, and yet reveal himself in the finite through his action
in time. Time, therefore, is not contradictory to eternity, but it
is its image, type, or revelation. Creation is the expression and
revelation of the divine power, wisdom, and love in the finite.
Time is the expression or revelation or exponent of God's
eternity in the finite.
It follows that time is inseparable from created or finite exist
ence. When finite beings were created time began. Should all
finite beings be annihilated and God exist alone, he would be in
eternity, and time would cease. For time is eternity measured
by the succession of events in the finite universe, and eternity is
time not thus measured. The creative action was " in the begin
ning," — that is, time itself, as measured by the succession of
events, began with the creation. Hence the act of creation, in
which time itself begins, must transcend all time, and cannot
be at any definite moment in time.
The objection is, therefore, of no force. The very asking of the
question implies an absurdity. For to say that an infinite time
must have elapsed before the creation, is to say that before crea
tion the creation itself must have existed an infinite time. Au
gustine said : " As they demand why the world was created then
and no sooner ; we may ask why it was created just here where it

THE CREATION 489
is and not elsewhere." And when the question was asked, " What
was God doing before he created the world?" he rebuked one
who answered, " He was preparing hell for those who pry into
mysteries." 1 But Luther answered this question humorously :
" He was cutting twigs in the wilderness to chastise those who
ask impertinent questions." These answers were intended to
indicate that it is an illegitimate question.
The objection under consideration is of force mainly against a
false conception of the universe as a machine completed by
a single fiat of will in the creation, and of God as so transcending
it as to be in fact separated from it and capable of acting on it
only by isolated miraculous acts in violation of its laws. It is of
no force against true theism, which regards God as the absolute
Reason, always immanent in the universe and developing it, and
the universe as plastic in his hand. Thus he is continuously ex
pressing his thought and love in it, as the spirit of man pervades
his body, and is continuously expressing in and through it his
thought, and will, and feeling. Innumerable worlds and systems
have been brought into being, which exist now in different stages
of their development, or in the past have completed their evo
lution, accomplished the ends for which they were made, and
have been resolved again into the original nebulous matter to be
developed anew. Referring to this, Professor Tayler Lewis says
of various biblical expressions of measureless past duration : " Is
there not something of this sort, laboring, as it were, for utterance,
in many parts of the Bible, and especially in the remarkable re
duplicates of them which we have been considering? Is it easy
to avoid the thought that in these swelling climaxes of ages, and
ages of ages, ever ascending upward toward the infinite, the writers
were travailing with an idea, which, though not definitely clear,
and not definitely filled up with either a real or a mythical history,
did, nevertheless, represent to their minds actual ante-terrene and
ante-Adamic periods, occupied in some way with God's works,
both spiritual and natural ? Can we believe that such language
could have come from the conception of a blank duration like
the metaphysical notion of time, or of solitary ages of the divine
existence, or still less that such a barren idea could ever have
given rise to such terms of division and plurality? " 2 According
1 Civitas Dei, Bk. xi. chap. 5; Confessions, Bk. xi. § xii.
2 The Six Days of Creation, pp. 383, 384.

490 GOD THE CREATOR
to this view, there is no need of fixing in imagination a beginning
of the universe at a definite point in time. To whatever distance
in time imagination traces back the universe, it always finds God
antecedent to it as its cause, and the universe always dependent
on him for its being. And all which is practically essential in the
idea of creation is given in the conception of God as always ante
cedent to the universe as its cause and supporting it in being, as
immanent and energizing in it and revealing himself through it,
and of the universe as always dependent on God for its being, and
always revealing his presence and power, his wisdom and his love.
This conception of the universe as created by God and always
dependent on him, has been illustrated in various ways. The
Platonists used the illustration of a foot making an imprint in the
sand. Through whatever length of time the foot continued its
pressure, it would always be the cause of the footprint. Presi
dent Edwards illustrated it from the colors of a portrait, which
are continuously created by the sunlight. It has been illustrated
from light itself. Though the sun has been emitting light for
millions of years, it is continuously the cause of the light, and as
its cause is its antecedent. But they mistake who mean by such
illustrations that the original matter of the universe is as eternal
as God. For the universe still remains an effect, and is distinct
from God and dependent on him. Thus God is always the prius
of the universe, its cause and creator.
Cousin supposes that God necessarily creates eternally. But in
saying this he sinks into the pantheism of Spinoza. When free
will is excluded from God, he is at once identified with the un
conscious and impersonal substance of the universe necessarily
evolving into all that is. And his conception is only a vain
attempt to picture the eternal in the finite forms of time.

CHAPTER XIII
god's chief END IN CREATION
In considering the attributes of God, it was shown that he is
not impelled to act by any want, but by pure' disinterested love.
He acts, not to get, but to give ; not to supply his need, but to
pour out of his overflowing fulness in blessing.
All rational action is for some rational end. The question now
arises, What is the rational end which God proposes to accom
plish by the action of his love in creating, developing, and gov
erning the universe ? What is the rational end to which all other
ends are subordinate, and in subordination to which all his action
is seen to be in unity and harmony?
The Bible teaches that all God's action is in love in its two
aspects of righteousness and benevolence. But this is not in
compatible with declaring also the rational end to be accom
plished by the action of his love. For his love must not act
blindly as a mere good nature or amiable instinctive impulse,
but he must determine in the light of reason to what end to
direct his action, in order to realize the full and complete
expression and satisfaction of his love in both its aspects.
I. The Biblical Statement. — The Bible states the doctrine
of God's chief end in three principal forms.
God is himself the end for whom all things are created. " Of
him and through him and unto him are all things." " For whom
are all things and by whom are all things." " For mine own
sake will I do it." x
God does all things for his own name's sake. " The Lord will
not forsake his people for his great name's sake." " He leadeth
1 Rom. xi. 36; Heb. ii. 10; Isaiah xlviii. 11.

492 GOD THE CREATOR
me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake." This is a
common form of expression throughout the Old Testament. God
rescues Israel from Egypt, restores them from Babylon, executes
judgment on the wicked, forgives the penitent, leads those who
trust him in the way of life, does divine works of every kind " for
his name's sake." This phrase is used in a similar way in the
New Testament. " Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we re
ceived grace and apostleship, unto obedience of faith among all
the nations, for his name's sake." " Your sins are forgiven you
for his name's sake." J It is remarkable that in the New Testa
ment this phrase is usually, if not always, applied to Jesus Christ.
This it declares to be the name that is above every name, and in
which every knee should bow. This application to him of a
phrase so commonly applied in the Old Testament to Jehovah in
distinct assertion of his absolute supremacy, is a striking recogni
tion of the God in Christ.
A third form of biblical statement occasionally found is that
God acts for his own glory. " Whom I have created for my
glory." "The heavens declare the glory of God." "The fruits
of righteousness, which are through Jesus Christ, unto the glory
and praise of God." " That every tongue should confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." 2
These three biblical forms of statement have essentially the
same meaning. The Jews called God's attributes names of Godo
It is common in the Old Testament that when God makes any
special revelation of himself, he gives himself a new name signifi
cant of what had been revealed. When written records were not
in every one's hands as now, God committed the significance of a
revelation to a peculiar name of himself in order to perpetuate
and extend the knowledge of it. This name floated out among
the people and clown through the changes and convulsions of
time, bearing from generation to generation its precious contents,
a revelation of God. For example, at the burning bush God gave
to the name Jehovah a new meaning as the memorial name of the
covenant God of Israel. The English translation of the Bible and
its revisers, by substituting the general name Lord, which is not in
the text, for the specific name Jehovah in most of the passages
where it occurs in the Old Testament, have blotted out this sig-
1 i Sam. xii. 22 ; Psalm xxiii. 3 ; Rom. i. 5 ; 1 John ii. 12.
2 Isaiah xliii. 7; Psalm xix. 1 ; Phil. i. n and ii. 11.

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 493
nificance, and so have dropped out of God's Word one of the
most significant and important of God's revelations of himself in
the Old Testament. Many other instances of names of God, sig
nificant of his perfections and his relations to men, are familiar,
and need not be mentioned. In this way, the names of God be
came identified with his perfections as revealed to men, and the
phrase " name of God " came to denote his Godhood or Deity,
and sometimes God himself, especially as the object of wor
ship. " How excellent is thy name in all the earth ; " " Save
me by thy name;" "Thy name is near." Of the angel of
the covenant he says, " My name is in him." And of the
temple he said, " My name shall be there ;¦ to hearken to the
prayer which thy servant shall pray." And Isaiah says, " Behold
the name of Jehovah cometh from far, burning with his anger
and in thick rising smoke." J And the whole of the divine
perfections is called the glory of God. " The heavens declare
the glory of God ; " " His glory is above the earth and heaven ; "
"Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the
Father."2 Thus the name of God and the glory of God denote his essen
tial perfections or his Godhood, and sometimes are a periphrasis
for God himself. The biblical teachings imply that God's end in
creation and in all his action is within himself. He acts out the
Godhood that is him. King Lear was " every inch a king." All
which he did was the spontaneous expression in action of the con
scious kingliness within him. So in every act of creation, provi
dence, moral government, and redemption, God expresses the
conscious Godhood that is in him. He simply acts out the God.
But God is love. If, then, he acts out the God, he will act out
his love. Moved by his free, eternal love, his end in creating
the universe and energizing in it, is to realize in it all the perfec
tion and good which his infinite power, using all the resources of
his perfect wisdom in acts of love, can realize in a finite universe.
And by his continuous action in it he is progressively realizing
this end ; the universe is developed to higher and higher forms,
the spiritual system is brought in above the physical yet in it,
personal beings are spiritually quickened and developed into the
1 Psalm viii. 1 ; liv. 1 ; Ixxv. 1 ; Exod. xxiii. 21 ; I Kings viii. 29; Isaiah
xxx. 27.
2 Psalm xix. I ; clxviii. 13 ; Rom. vi. 4.

494 GOD THE CREATOR
likeness of God, and the universe becomes more and more the
exponent of all the riches of God's power, wisdom, and love.
God is ever energizing in it, in nature and in the spiritual system,
in Christ and his kingdom, in innumerable rational beings who,
in all ages and in numberless worlds, are brought to know God
and to be like him. Thus he is more and more realizing in it his
power, wisdom, and love. And the universe itself becomes more
and more glorious as revealing God ; it is filled with ever increas
ing numbers of personal beings knowing God and working with
him in realizing his great ideas, rejoicing in him and with him in
beholding that the creation is very good and reflects his likeness
and his glory. So the planets reflect the light of the sun ; and
the earth's atmosphere diffuses the sun's rays and becomes itself
luminous all over and through and through in the light of day ; it
refracts the rays into rainbows and the glowing colors of the dawn
and the sunset ; the earth and all things on it are beautified and
variegated in colors of countless shades ; and all organic life and
growth reveal hidden powers and resources of the sunshine in its
invisible heating and actinic energies. It is the glory of the sun
which is here seen. All these are exponents and revealers of
what the sun is. In these we see the likeness of the sun, its true
significance and power, more perfectly than in the sun itself. If
the sun were intelligent, wise, and good, its chosen end in all its
action would be to act itself out as the sun, to pour forth its own
glory through the universe, and make it glorious as the exponent
and revealer of the sun.
II. The Theological Statement. — God does all things for
his own glory. Of the three biblical representations, theology
has commonly adopted the third.
r. The doctrine must first be defined and explained, in order
to correct common misapprehensions and misrepresentations.
The glory of God is his perfections and his action expressing.
them, considered as making him worthy of the esteem and ap
proval of himself and of all rational beings. More briefly ex
pressed, the glory of God is that which makes: him glorious.
The doctrine, therefore, is not that God's chief end in all
which he does is to secure the esteem and praise of created
beings. This is a misrepresentation which is very common.
The esteem and praise of men must be distinguished from God's

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 495
perfections and their expression in action which make him
worthy of their esteem and praise. Character is what a man is,
reputation is what he is thought to be. Reputation, fame, praise,
renown, are words denoting merely what men think of a person.
To say that a man has esteem, praise, renown, among men,
whether they think well of him or not, would be using words
without meaning. The word " glory," on the contrary, denotes
that which makes a man worthy of esteem, praise, and renown
among men, whether they actually esteem and praise him or not.
It denotes the essential worthiness or worth of the man. The
same is true of the word " honor." Whether a person is glorious
or honorable or not, does not depend at all on what people think
of him, but only on his own intrinsic worthiness. A person's
sense of honor is his sense of his own worthiness.
" Say, What is honor ? 'T is the finest sense
Of justice which the human mind can frame,
Intent each lurking frailty to disclaim,
And guard the way of life from all offence
Suffered or done."
And for a man to have esteem, praise, and renown among men
for power and excellence which he does not possess and deeds
which he has never done, is not glory and honor. It is rather
shame and dishonor. And shame and dishonor denote what is
unworthy in a man, independently of what people think of him.
So the glory of God consists in his perfections and his action
expressing the same ; in his essential worthiness of the esteem,
approval and praise of all rational beings, whether they esteem
and praise him or not. It is unworthy of a rational man and
shameful to make it the supreme end of all his life and action
to win the praise of men. Much more would it be unworthy of
God. God's glory as thus defined is distinguished in theology as
essential and declarative. His essential glory is his perfections.
This is an eternal plenitude of glory which cannot be increased
or diminished. His declarative glory is his perfections revealed
or declared in his action in creating the universe and energizing
in it. In thus declaring or revealing his glory God is not seek
ing the praise of men. He is acting out the Godhood in him.
When David charged Solomon, "Be strong and show thyself

496 GOD THE CREATOR
a man," he did not mean that he should seek the applause
of the people, but that he act out the manhood which was in him
and realize in action all the highest possibilities of his being,
God declares or reveals his glory in action more and more
through all time. The universe is not complete but is the con
tinuous and progressive revelation of the glory of God. Nature
is not the hardened lava of an extinct volcano, but the glowing,
quickening and continuous efflux of God's love revealing his
eternal wisdom and power- In all scientific discovery and
mechanical invention, in all investigation of the constitution of
man, of the principles regulating his education and development,
the organization and progress of human society, in all study of
redemption in Christ and the nature and advancement of his
kingdom, we are studying the Continuous revelation of the glory
of God. And this becomes apparent in the infinite wealth of
thought revealed in everything, so that the knowledge of a
single object in all its significance and relations requires the
whole encyclopaedia of knowledge. It is apparent in the inex
haustible wealth of energy, so that the growth of a single plant
is effected only by concentring on it the mightiest agencies
of the universe ; and every plant is equally the centre of all
these agencies ; and the movement of every planet and every
pebble exerts an energy which acts through all the universe.
It is apparent also in the unity of these mighty and wide-rang
ing forces interacting in intricate and endless complications, so
that they act orderly under law, continuously and progressively
evolving a physical system scientifically exact. And, finally,
it is apparent in the greater wealth of thought, the higher order
and nobler range of power and the unity of a vaster and more
sublime spiritual system, to which the physical system is subordi
nate, and in which countless beings in the likeness of God are
made to know him, and to know one another in their likeness
and relation to him, and are united in the harmony and beauty
and power of universal love. Galileo said : " Philosophy is
written in that great book, I mean the universe, which is con
stantly open before our eyes ; but it cannot be understood un
less we first know the language and learn the characters in which
it is written." On the other hand, if we learn merely the facts
and laws of empirical science, we do but learn the letters with
out learning the divine name which they spell, and without read-

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 497
ing the revelation of God's glory which they record and which
constitutes their real significance.
As thus explained, the theological doctrine that God does
all things for his own glory has significance as follows. God,
actuated by his eternal love, creates the universe and peoples
it with ever-increasing numbers of beings like himself in the
essential elements of personality and capable of knowing him,
of communing with him, of becoming like him in character, and
of working with him in his work of love, and so of participating
in his blessedness. In thus creating and sustaining the universe
and in all his works in it of providence, moral government, and
redemption, God's action is regulated by the principles and laws
eternal in him, the absolute Reason ; and the end which he
aims to accomplish is the realization of all ideals of perfection
and good which it is possible to realize in accordance with these
principles and laws, and which are the archetype of the uni
verse eternal in his all-comprehending intelligence. Thus the
universe becomes a true, but ever- progressive, image and revela
tion of God, becoming more and more complete as such as
it is progressively developed. But because the universe is finite,
the expression and revelation in it of the perfection and thought
of God can never be completed, but will be progressive without
end. In brief, we may say that God's end in creating the uni
verse and in his immanent energizing in it is to realize in it the
thought of his perfect wisdom by his action in perfect love.
An analogy may be found in the action of a painter giving
reality to his ideal on the canvas, or in the action of an inventor
giving reality to a creation of his own mind in a machine. We
may suppose the end which each is aiming to accomplish to be,
not reputation or praise, not pecuniary gain, but simply the
realization of his ideal. A better analogy may be in the action
of benevolent persons. For example, an association to secure
right treatment of the Indians would be aiming, not to gain
applause nor pecuniary gain, but simply to realize their own
ideals of justice and benevolence to the Indians.
2. This explanation of the theological doctrine that God does
all things for his own glory, gives the true meaning of the three
biblical representations of God's end in all which he does.
This would be verified' by an examination of the treatment of the
subject throughout the Bible._ I will present two examples.
vol. 1. — 32

498 GOD THE CREATOR
The first is a theophany in which God revealed his glory to
Moses.1 When Israel in the wilderness had forsaken God and
worshiped the golden calf, Moses interceded for them. When
he had obtained from Jehovah the assurance that he would not
cast off the people, Moses said, " I beseech thee, show me thy
glory." The Lord in reply promised to make all his goodness
pass before him and to proclaim the name of Jehovah before
him ; and in view of his forgiving Israel as they had returned
to him from their apostasy, he emphatically affirmed his right to
be merciful to sinners and forgive their sins. Then he appointed
the next morning as the time and the top of Sinai as the place
for the promised manifestation of his glory. But he reminds
Moses that no mortal man can see his face. Therefore, he says,
" while my glory passeth by, I will put thee in a cleft of the rock
and will cover thee with my hand until I have passed by ; and
I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back ; but my
face shall not be seen." Man, with the eye of sense and within
the limits of his finiteness, cannot see God's face and know him
fully. He can know God only as he passes by, revealing him
self by his action in the universe and among and upon men in
human history. The next morning Jehovah descended in the
cloud upon the mount, Moses being already there, and proclaimed
his name, Jehovah, his memorial name, as being by covenant
the God of Israel; Jehovah God [El], a name in which the
revelation of his might was perpetuated; but still coupled with
the memorial name. He proclaims the fulness of his compassion
and graciousness, his forbearance toward sinners, the plenteous-
ness of his mercy, his truth and faithfulness to his promises, his
readiness to forgive iniquity, transgression and sin. Finally he
proclaims his retributive justice : he will by no means clear the
guilty.2 This theophany, given avowedly for the express pur-
1 Exodus xxxiii. 7-23 ; xxxiv. 1-8.
2 He adds, " visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children,'' and
thus declares a terrible feature in the essential nature of sin that it perpetu
ates its evil influence from generation to generation. This must be the
result of sin among men who are in organic unity as a race, and in a
moral system in which we are members one of another. It must diffuse
evil and perpetuate its malignant influence. It will bring evil upon the
innocent. The murderer, the robber, the swindler, must have his victim ;
and the suffering of the victim must diffuse woe through the whole circle
of those dependent on him. The constitution of the moral system accords

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 499
pose to show his glory, shows plainly that the name of God and
his glory are essentially equivalent in meaning, and that his
glory consists in his perfections and his action in which he reveals
them. It is entirely incompatible with the conception that his
glory means the esteem and praise of his creatures, and that the
assertion that he acts for his own glory means that he acts for the
praise of men.
The second example is found in the writings of Paul.1 He
speaks of God's glory as meaning the perfections of God revealed
in his action, especially in Christ and in the redemption wrought
by God in him. He refers the Corinthian Christians to the
narrative in the Old Testament, that after Moses had seen the
glory of God, his own face became radiant with the reflection of
it, so that it dazzled those who looked at him. So, he says,
Christians behold the glory of God, and reflect it back as an
image is reflected in a mirror. They are themselves changed
into the same image from glory to glory, from the glory of God
revealed to the glory reflected back in themselves. He adds
that God, who in the beginning caused the light to shine out of
darkness, has shined in our hearts, so that the glory of God
revealed in the face of Jesus Christ makes our own souls luminous
with its light. This also presents the glory of God as his own'
essential perfections, revealed in his action among men, and es
pecially in the face of Jesus Christ, and in his redemption of men
in him. It is at the farthest possible remove from the concep
tion that God does all things to gain the praise of men.
3. The theological doctrine that God does all things for his
own glory, as now explained, is a truth which is philosophically
necessary. It is a truth demanded by reason.
God must find his end in himself. This is necessary because
he is the absolute Being. If he must act for an end external to
and independent of himself, then he is not unconditioned and
independent, but he is conditioned by something independent of
himself. It is equally necessary, because God is the absolute
Reason. As such, he must find all truths and laws, as well as all
ideals and norms of perfection and good, within himself.
with all the truths and laws of reason. But when any one in it sins, the
very closeness of the unity of men in the system diffuses the suffering
caused by the sin ; and the race relation becomes the medium of conveying
its evil influence to posterity.
1 2 Cor. iii. 18; iv. 6.

500 GOD THE CREATOR
It is the only end to which all things can be subordinated in
unity. On any other supposition, the universe would be hope
lessly heterogeneous. It could never be brought into the unity
of a system either scientific or moral.
It includes in itself all other worthy ends. If it is said that
God's end should be the well-being of his creatures, benevolence
is one of God's perfections, and its full exercise and expression is
involved in his doing all things for his own glory. If it is said
that God's end ought to be the realization of the true, or the right,
or the beautiful, or the perfect, the realization of all these ends is
secured in his doing all things for his own glory. Whatever ends
reason can judge to be worthy, God's doing all things for his own
glory includes them all in itself.
Thus reason approves of God's glory as the only end worthy to
be the chief end of God in all which he does.
The doctrine also accords with, and is attested by, the Chris
tian consciousness. Every man who comes to God in trust and
penitence, feels that he exists for God, and not primarily for
himself. He feels that self-sufficiency and self-seeking, prompting
him to live by and for self, are of the essence of sin. The Chris
tian heart sees God's glory in all things.
4. From the doctrine that God does all things for his own
glory, as now explained, some important inferences necessarily
follow. God's chief end is not to show himself. His action is not
dramatic. Theologians have sometimes used language implying
this error. It has even been proposed as a theodicy that God
punishes the wicked eternally to show his sovereign power. This
can arise only from the conception of God as a capricious al
mightiness, an arbitrary and resistless will unregulated by reason.
It is incompatible with the conception of God as the absolute
Reason, whose will, by his own free choice, is eternally in har
mony with reason in perfect love. God's action expresses his
inmost thought and life with a sincerity, spontaneity, and earnest
ness as much greater than any man's as the absolute is greater
than the finite. Nor does his action express power only, or
benevolence only, or any one attribute only, but his whole
Godhood. God's chief end is not his own happiness. This error rests on
a Hedonistic philosophy which teaches that happiness is the ulti-

GOD S CHIEF END IN CREATION 5OI
mate end, and the desire of it the ultimate motive of all human
action. It is a philosophy which logically leaves no place for
moral law and the distinction of right and wrong, and destroys
the foundation of immutable morality.1 It is also incompatible
with any worthy conception of God. It conceives of God as a
great sensitive nature. His whole life is a life of desires, in the
sense of want and an effort to get something to satisfy them. It
is a life of acquiring and getting, not of forthputting and impart
ing, — a life of indulgence and self-gratification, instead of a life of
love. It leaves us no theodicy. It compels the admission that God
permits suffering and sin because they are essential to his own
enjoyment, and punishes sin with everlasting torment because he
cannot be happy without doing it. It reduces God to a nature-
god. But nature-gods belong to heathenism. God is above
nature. He is the creator of all that belongs to nature. He is
conditioned only from within himself, by the principles and laws
eternal in his own rationality. His action is not originated or
conditioned by any external condition or necessity independent
of himself. By his own free and self-moved will he is realizing in
the finite universe the archetypes eternal in himself, the eternal
Reason. We must rise above the finite, which is always depend
ent and never an original, uncaused cause, to the conception of
God as absolutely self-existent, self-directing, and self- exerting,
who determines and puts forth his own self-exerting energy in the
light of reason and for rational ends, archetypal and eternal within
himself. He is not moved by any want, nor by any desire of
happiness, for he is God blessed forever. He does not need to
receive from without himself in satisfaction of wants, but from
his infinite and never-diminished fulness pours forth energy in
self-moved and self-directing love. Some theologians have
given comparatively little attention to the idea of God as the
absolute Being, and therefore to the absolute Reason energizing
self-moved in absolute independence and freedom. This grand
conception of God has receded into the background. God is
thought of as an arbitrary, capricious, almighty will-power, or
otherwise even as a being really finite, a sensitive nature, seek
ing his own happiness as something to be got, incited to act by a
sense of want, actually suffering, as some insist, dependent for
1 The Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 193, 256-283.

502 GOD THE CREATOR
satisfaction on something external to himself. This conception
tends directly to either pantheism or materialism.
Another inference is that the doctrine excludes all favoritism
from God's action. His law and his gospel, his righteousness
and his good will, the conditions of access to his favor are the
same to all. God's action toward every being is always the
expression of his divine perfection ; it is always exactly accord
ant with eternal truth and right and for the realization of his
eternal ideals of perfection and good. He never deviates a hair's
breadth from these principles and aims in his treatment of any
of his creatures, through favoritism or partiality to any person.
God is no respecter of persons. If he accepts the righteous and
rejects the wicked, it is because each act is equally and exactly
the expression of perfect wisdom and love in the case. If he
chose Abraham and established his kingdom of redemption in its
oreparatory stages in Israel, if he made that people the medium
through whom the Messiah was foretold and from whom he came,
it was because he knew this to be accordant with perfect wisdom
and love.
God says by his prophet : " I do not this for your sake, O
house of Israel, but for mine holy name." x He does not say,
Seeing it is you, I will do this. This would have declared par
tiality and favoritism. He says, Seeing it is I, I will do it. This
excludes all favoritism and partiality. God will act here in ref
erence to Israel on the same principles on which he would act
in any other case and in reference to any other people. He will
act in perfect good will, for the realization of all perfection and
good, as he acts in every other case. So in redemption God
does not say, Because you are so good I will save you, but,
Because I am so good I will redeem you. And the way of re
demption having been opened, he says to all : Whosoever will, let
him come.
This doctrine also emphasizes the personality of God. He is
not a nature-god, but above nature, its author and director.
That which is at the basis of the universe is intelligent, rational
mind. In a theophany in which Jehovah revealed himself to
Elijah, there was a wind which rent the mountains and broke the
rocks in pieces ; there was then an earthquake, and then a fire.
But Jehovah was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in
1 Ezekiel xxxvi. 22.

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 503
the fire. And after the fire was a still, small voice. In that
Elijah recognized God, — not in the mighty forces of nature, but
in the voice which spoke to him and declared to him God's
thought and will.1
This doctrine also implies that the order of the universe is pri
marily rational ; and that the physical system is subordinate to
the moral or spiritual system. God does all things for the realiz
ation of all ideals of perfection and good, in accordance with the
principles and laws of reason. The ultimate end of all that God
does in the universe is in the sphere of the rational and spiritual.
The physical system is symbolic of thought, it gives a place for
personal beings to live and act in the spiritual system, and is sub
servient to its uses. This is poetically set forth in the Blessing
of Moses on Israel before his death. He represents the whole
system of nature as the chariot on which God rides for the help
of his chosen people ; " There is none like unto God, O
Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven for thy help, and in his
excellency on the skies." 2
III. God Glorifying Himself in Sinners. — God glorifies
himself in sinners by exercising his perfections in all his treat
ment of them. He treats them in a manner that is glorious, —
that is, worthy of the esteem of himself and of all rational beings.
It is action worthy of God. Though sinners disobey, insult, or
blaspheme God, though they sink themselves in the deepest cor
ruption, though they commit the worst crimes, God will never be
provoked into any unworthy action towards them. He will not
do them the least injustice. He will act towards them in perfect
wisdom, righteousness, and good-will. This is evident in the per
fection of his law and in the reasonableness of his entire moral
government. So God appeals to his people by his prophets :
" Come and let us reason together, saith Jehovah. O my people,
what have I done unto thee ? and wherein have I wearied thee ?
testify against me. Is not my way equal? Are not your ways
unequal? " 3 It is evident also in his whole work of redemption
and reconciliation in Christ, in which his righteousness and his
good will are equally expressed and which opens the way of
salvation from sin on equal terms for all (John iii. 16).
1 1 Kings xix. 9-18. s Isaiah i. 18 ; Micah vi. 3 ; Ezek. xviii. 25.
2 Deut. xxxiii. 26.

504 GOD THE CREATOR
It is worthy of God to institute a moral system in which beings
who are personal like God may know and trust him, may com
mune with him, become morally like him and participate in his
work of love, and thus be blessed forever. But it is of the es
sence of a moral system that it consist of finite free agents under
the moral government and law of God. It is of the essence of the
moral law that the voluntary refusal to conform to its requirement
of universal love must issue in the privation of good and subjec
tion to positive evil ; and, if persisted in, must issue in the sin
ner's final privation of all real good. It is of the essence of a
finite person that he must be the subject of development and
growth ; and this involves the possibility of sin and the inevitable
reality of probation. It is of the essence of free will that it must
be self-directive and self-exerting ; the free agent's determinations
cannot be made for him by another, nor created nor changed by
any force, not even though almighty. It is of the essence of
God as Love that he will exhaust all the resources of wisdom and
love available in the case to prevent every free agent from sinning
and to reclaim the sinner to the life of faith and love. It is of
the essence of free will that it can resist moral influences. The
sinner therefore may persist in sin until his selfishness becomes
so fixed in its self-sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking, and self-glori
fying, that God will see that no moral influence whatever will
ever be sufficient to reclaim him and that he therefore has passed
beyond the possibility of redemption. Then he is left to the
issues of his own action; the final sentence, "Depart," only de
clares the inevitable and unchangeable result of his own persist
ent alienation of himself from God through his whole existence.
In all this, God's treatment of the man will have been in perfect
wisdom and love, and in the exercise toward him of all divine
perfections. The sinner's action will have been unworthy of a
rational person, meriting the disapproval and condemnation of
all rational beings and worthy only of " shame and everlasting
contempt" (Dan. xii. 2). But his privation of all real good
brings no reproach or shame on God. On the contrary it reveals
the glory of God as eternal Love. He has constituted the uni
verse according to the law of love. Therefore it is forever impos
sible that a person be blessed who has chosen himself as his
supreme object of love, trust, and service, who has thus isolated
himself in selfishness, alienated himself from God, put himself

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 505
into antagonism to God, to the moral system and all beings in it,
and to the fundamental constitution of the universe. And if God
had not constituted the universe thus, he would have shown him
self indifferent whether his rational creatures lived in universal
love or in supre.me selfishness. Thus he would have shown that
he himself is not the God of love. Thus God glorifies himself in
sinners. It remains to notice some biblical examples of this truth which
have been much misunderstood and so have given occasion to
objections and debate.
1. The first to be noticed is the comparison of God to the
potter moulding his clay. This is used by Paul ; it occurs also
several times in the Old Testament.1 In the outset it must be
borne in mind that a rhetorical comparison is not to be interpreted
like a scientific formula ; and that an exact logical meaning is not
to be sought in separate phrases or incidents which denote what
is merely incidental and constitute the necessary drapery of the
figure. It is the main thought indicated in the rhetorical figure
as a whole which is to be sought.
As this comparison is used by Paul it evidently does not indi
cate power alone in the potter, but also and pre-eminently intelli
gence, foresight, skill, adapting means to wise ends, making a
vessel for use or beauty. The potter knows what he is doing, for
what he is doing it, and how to do it. The clay knows nothing.
How can it dispute the wisdom of the potter and say, Why hast
thou made me thus? So God works in intelligence and wisdom
to accomplish right and beneficent designs. We in our finiteness
and ignorance are not competent to dispute his wisdom and love
in what he does.
Paul says, " one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor."
The potter makes one part of his clay into a vase for the parlor
and another part into a baking dish for the kitchen and the oven.
But each is made for an important end, each is perfect in its kind
and fitted to the uses for which it was made. So of the creatures
of various orders and conditions that God has brought into being,
each is made for wise ends, each is adapted to its environment
and fitted for the end for which it exists. And though we do not
always know the reasons of his doings, we do know that in all
his action he is guided by perfect wisdom and love. In the ninth,
1 Rom. ix. 19-24; Isaiah xxix. 16; xlv. 9; Jerem. xviii. 1-10.

506 GOD THE CREATOR
tenth, and eleventh chapters of Romans, Paul is writing of God's
rejection of the Jews because they had rejected Christ, of his re
ceiving the Gentiles into his kingdom, and of the conversion of
the Jews when the fulness of the Gentiles shall have come in.
And he explicitly teaches that in all the intervening time every
Jew, willing to accept and trust Christ, will be accepted by God
on the same conditions with the Gentiles. " For there is no dif
ference between the Jew and the Greek ; for the same Lord is
Lord of all, and is rich unto all who call upon him. For whoso
ever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved " (Rom.
x. 12, 13). Therefore the lesson from the potter making one
vessel to honor and another to dishonor is that, in the diverse
treatment of the Jews and the Gentiles, God is guided in his treat
ment of each by perfect wisdom and love, and is accomplishing
wise designs in his great work of redemption and the advance-
•ment of his kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy
Ghost. Paul continues : " What if God, willing to show his wrath and to
make his power known, endured with much long-suffering vessels
of wrath fitted to destruction? " The word " wrath " is used here
anthropomorphically and means God's vindicative justice, his vin
dication of his law of love by the punishment of sin. Thus in the
presence of sin he makes known his power to vindicate and main
tain the authority of the law and the integrity of the moral sys
tem. But what is the meaning of "vessels of wrath fitted for
destruction"? A potter makes no vessel for the purpose of
destroying it. The comparison implies that God creates no
being for the purpose of destroying it. He creates only with
the design that the being created be fitted to realize its perfection
and the good end for which it was made. If a vessel begun by
the potter is marred, it is only by mistake or accident. But God
makes no mistake. If any man is fitted for destruction, it can be
only by his own persistence in sin, putting himself at last beyond
the reach of moral influence. This is exemplified in the history
of the Jews, of whom Paul is speaking. They had fitted them
selves to be cast off as a people by repeated backslidings from
God into idolatry, as narrated in the Old Testament, from which
God, in his great long-suffering, had restored them as often to his
favor when they had returned to him, and finally by rejecting the
promised Messiah when he came. In the version of 161 1 we

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 507
read "the vessels." The article would imply certain vessels
already known as fitted for destruction. But there is no article in
the Greek. The absence of the article is in harmony with the
explanation which has here been given. This explanation is also
made necessary by the fact that the apostle, leaving his figure of
speech for the moment, speaks in literal terms of God's enduring
them with much long-suffering.
We find, then, in the figure of the potter these lessons. Men by
sin may fit themselves to be cast off by God. God in divine love
endures them with much long-suffering. He compasses them
with the influences of his righteousness and his grace ; he ex
hausts the resources of his wisdom and love available in each case
to bring the sinner back to himself. None are cast off till by per
sistent sin they have fitted themselves for destruction and are fit
for nothing else ; till they have wilfully carried themselves beyond
the reach of moral influence to reclaim them. All these thoughts
are obvious in the figure ofthe potter as used by Paul. It is a gross
misrepresentation that it sets forth merely the necessity of submit
ting to arbitrary and resistless power. The figure does indeed set
forth God's power to vindicate and maintain the authority of his
government and the supremacy and unchangeableness of his law of
universal love in the presence of sin and of sinners who rebel
against him in self-sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking, and self-glori
fying. This he reveals also in the casting-off of Israel, which is
the particular topic under consideration. But from beginning to
end the predominant thought is, that in God's dealings with Israel
and the Gentiles he gives expression both to his righteousness and
to his benevolence, both to his wisdom and his love ; and that, if
he casts off sinners, it is only after long forbearance, compassing
them with divine influences to bring them to reconciliation with
himself, and all in vain.
2. A second conspicuous example of God's glorifying himself
in sinners is the Pharaoh reigning when Israel left Egypt. " For
the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise
thee up, that I might show in thee my power and that my name
might be published abroad in all the earth" (Rom. ix. 17 ; Exod.
ix. 16). This does not mean that God brought Pharaoh into
being on purpose to damn him forever. It means that God raised
up Pharaoh for his own name's sake and his own glory, the end
for which he does all his works. He glorified himself in Pharaoh

508 GOD THE CREATOR
by exercising his divine perfections in all his treatment of him ; by
treating him in perfect wisdom, rectitude, and love, in a manner
worthy of the approval and esteem of all rational beings. And
this is apparent in the history of God's dealings with him. He
lived among the most civilized people and was raised up to the
throne of the mightiest nation in the world. The judgment of
his contemporaries would have been that he was the most highly
favored man living. He had all the knowledge of the most
learned Egyptians respecting God, the moral law, immortality,
and the divine judgment and retribution after death. Moses also
had been brought up in the royal family till he was forty years
• old. Through him and the Israelites, Pharaoh must have had
knowledge of the true God. Then came the effort to secure the
liberation of Israel from slavery, a slavery more cruel than any
which has been known in this country. The effort for liberation
began with a petition ; it proceeded to renewed requests accom
panied by harmless signs ; then to warnings and signs of in
creasing severity. It was characterized by long-suffering and
forbearance. And when Pharaoh persisted in his oppression, at
last the people of Israel asserted their rights and Pharaoh was
overwhelmed in pursuing them. The same has been repeated
over and over in the history of the nations. Oppressors, who
have persisted in their oppression regardless of the cries of dis
tress and the demands of justice, have at last been themselves
overwhelmed. And the great heart of humanity has always
exulted in their overthrow and given thanks that a God of right
eousness rules in the world. The difference in the emancipation
of Israel is that in it the veil is lifted, and the hand of God and
his justice, silently working in all human progress, are revealed to
view. 3. The Bible represents God as glorifying himself in sinners by
taking their sin as the occasion of his own wise and loving action
by which his kingdom is advanced and the plans of the wicked
are frustrated. It is not the sin nor the sinner that advances the
kingdom of God. But on occasion of the sin God acts in the
exercise of his perfections in a glorious manner, and thus God's
action on occasion of the sin advances his kingdom and frustrates
the designs of the wicked. The wicked do evil. God steps in
their footsteps and does good. In this sense the Psalmist says,
" Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee." A striking example

god's chief end in creation 509
is the history of Joseph. Another is the history of Nebuchadnez
zar, as recorded in the book of Daniel. And this has been
exemplified in the whole history of the Christian church ; so that
it has become a proverb, " The blood of the martyrs is the seed
of the church."
4. The general biblical representation of God's punishment of
sinners is a further exemplification of the true significance of God's
glorifying himself in sinners.
The punishments are inflicted in an atmosphere of good-will.
Christ is as righteous on the cross as he is on the judgment-seat ;
he is as compassionate on the throne of judgment as he was on
the cross. God is as benevolent in punishing as he is in saving.
God always exercises good-will toward every creature. He exer
cises ill-will toward none. Malignity is an imperfection. It has
no place in God. It is incompatible with his divinity or God
hood. Jesus in his earthly life is the exponent to us, under hu
man limitations and conditions, of the inmost thought and heart
of God. He wept over Jerusalem while he pronounced its irre
versible doom. He said, " How often would I have gathered thy
children together, even as a hen gathereth her own brood under
her wings, and ye would not." In like manner, God's pity and
good-will toward sinners, even in their punishment, is set forth in
the Old Testament. " How shall I give thee up, Ephraim ? How
shall I make thee as Admah? How shall I set thee as Zeboim?
Mine heart is turned within me ; my compassions are kindled
together." And the reason he gives is remarkable, " for I am
God and not man." "As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, I
have no pleasure in the death of the wicked ; but that the wicked
turn from his way and live. Turn ye from your evil ways ; for
why will ye die? " 1 It is a common mistake that the Old Testa
ment presents God as all justice, wrath, and vengeance, revealing
himself only in inexorable law, and the New Testament as all
mercy and forgiveness, revealing himself only in the graciousness
of the gospel. But it is the same God who is revealed in both
Testaments ; and in the New Testament both aspects of his God
hood, both his righteousness and his benevolence, his law and his
gospel are more clearly and fully revealed than in the Old. In
the Old Testament he presents himself to his people as- their
father, mother, husband, shepherd, king, and declares his accept-
1 Luke xiii. 34; xix. 41-44; Hosea xi. 8, 9; Ezek. xxxiii. n.

510 GOD THE CREATOR
ance of all who come to him with broken and contrite hearts
and put their trust in him. Nowhere in the Old Testament is
the law of love proclaimed with such clearness, breadth, and
severity as in the Sermon on the Mount, and nowhere with such
overawing majesty as on the cross, where the Son of God gives
up his life in agony in obedience to it and in proclaiming and
maintaining its unchangeable and inviolable authority.
In the punishment of sin God declares his glory in the exercise
of his righteousness. It is as essential to righteousness that the
righteous person abhor and repel all sin and be in antagonism to
all wrong-doing, as it is to light that it must cast a shadow when
obstructed. Hell is eternally potential in the righteousness of
God, which itself is one essential aspect of his love. Whether
any person falls under God's condemnation or not depends on
the free action and character of the person. The truths and laws
of reason are eternal and unchangeable in God, the absolute Rea
son ; they regulate all his action ; they are the fundamental con
stitution of the universe. It is only in accordance with these
principles and laws that perfection and good are possible in this
universe. The perfection and good of a rational being are
possible only in obedience to the law of love, and in harmony
with God through loving trust in him. " These shall go away into
everlasting punishment " is the proclamation of this fundamental
fact that perfection and good are not possible in the universe, at
any place or at any time, to one who refuses to come into har
mony with God in the life of universal love, and who lives a life
of selfishness in self-sufficiency, self-will, self-seeking, and self-
glorifying. It is, therefore, not so much that a sinner is cast out
of heaven, as that, by his own supreme choice of self as the
supreme object of trust and love and service, he casts all that
is heavenly out of his own soul and his own life. It is not so
much that the sinner is cast into hell as that he wilfully kindles
the fires of hell in his own soul. Hell is the proclamation of the
intensity and unchangeableness of God's righteous love. Every
person of right heart must see that this absolute, inflexible, infinite
opposition to all wrong is one of the perfections which constitute
the glory of God. " Our God is a consuming fire." But the fire
is his eternal truth and love, his immutable good-will exercised in
righteousness. The Bible also explicitly affirms that God is glorious in the

god's chief end in CREATION 511
punishment of sinners. Paul exclaims, " Is God unrighteous who
visiteth with wrath ? God forbid ; for then how shall God judge the
world?" (Rom. iii. 5,6). That is, if it is not righteous for God to
punish sinners, his moral government is at an end, and there can
be no righteous judgment of the world. The writer of the seventy-
third Psalm records his perplexity in view of the prosperity of the
wicked and the adversity befalling the righteous. He was well-
nigh driven to despair because it seemed to him that God does
not punish the wicked, and that, therefore, there is no righteous
ruler of the world who maintains in it the law of righteousness.
And this has been the common source of perplexity and skepti
cism as to the existence of God. It has been the apprehension,
founded on the seemingly unequal distribution of good and evil
without regard to character, that God does not punish the wicked,
— not the belief that he does so. And, like the Psalmist, the per
plexed persons have found relief and the confirmation of their
faith in God only when they have seen that in the end his right
eous judgment will render to evil-doers just retribution. It is
neither sound, strong thought nor robust virtue which demands a
God of mere good nature, who will not maintain and enforce the
law of love by punishing transgressors.
The Bible teaches that true penitents see the glory of God in
condemning them for their sins. They see that God has always
treated them in wisdom, righteousness, forbearance, and mercy,
and that they are without excuse for their sins. They no longer
blame God, but themselves. The fifty-first Psalm is a confession
of sin which, ever since it was written, has uttered the inmost
heart of penitents seeking God's grace better than any words of
their own could do. And this characteristic of penitence is con
spicuous in it, " Against thee, thee only, have I sinned and done
that which is evil in thy sight ; that thou mayest be justified when
thou speakest and be clear when thou judgest." And the Bible
also represents that under the righteous judgment of God all sin
ners will see their own ill-desert and the glory of God in their
righteous condemnation, so " that every mouth may be stopped
and all the world may be brought under the judgment of God."
John in his visions in Patmos saw the saints in heaven praising
God and shouting, "Hallelujah; for thy righteous acts have been
made manifest ; ... for true and righteous are his judgments "
(Rev. xv. 4; xix. 1, 2). This book is a series of visions; and

512 GOD THE CREATOR
these are not visions of actual events, but of transactions symbol
izing actual events. It consists, for the most part, of visions of
symbols. Some of the symbols, especially such as refer to the
Roman Emperor, are for obvious prudential reasons ingeniously
contrived to conceal the meaning from the heathen, while prob
ably suggesting it to the Christians. As I understand it, the
book was written in a time of persecution and great distress,
probably when the destruction of Jerusalem was already imminent.
It foretells the overthrow of the persecuting power and the time
when the church, freed from oppression and persecution, was to
dwell in peace and prevail through the world. These hallelujahs
celebrate the great overthrow of the persecuting and oppressing
powers and this triumph of the church. From this point of view,
these praises of God express the natural and right exultation of
all right-minded persons at the defeat of iniquity, the overthrow
of injustice and oppression, and the triumph of truth and right.
All will understand this and sympathize with it who have ex
ulted in the defeat of intrigue and corruption and the over
throw of oppression and despotism on many occasions in modern
times. The same principles apply to the punishment of the wicked
in the other world. In this life we cannot always see the reasons
of God's doings. In respect to the punishment of the finally
incorrigible our vision is closely limited ; much remains unrevealed
and unexplained. We are perplexed and distressed. We find
peace only in trusting the unerring wisdom and the never-failing
righteousness and good-will of God. But it may reasonably be
expected that the saints in heaven will see clearly revealed what
God has done in his dealings with sinners, and why he did it.
Then doubtless they will see that all God's action toward sinners
has been glorious in perfect and adorable wisdom and love.
What a relief it will be, what a fleeing away of clouds and dark
ness, of perplexity and distress, when all which had been dark
in the fact of sin is made plain, and we see clearly, what here
we have believed without seeing, the glorious perfection of God
revealed in it all. Certainly in this discovery the glorified saints
in heaven may properly exult and praise God. But we already
know beyond all doubt, that, whatever shall actually be the final
condition of any sinners for whom Christ died, no person through
endless time will ever be blessed or realize any true good in a

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 513
life of selfishness, but only in a life of universal love, springing
from a continuous loving trust in God.
Thought is made clearer and feeling more intense by contrast.
Enjoyment of the warmth and comfort of the fireside is enhanced
by the beating of the storm without. But if in the quiet and
happy home we hear the shrieks of human beings under the
hands of robbers and murderers, the enhancement of pleasure by
contrast is overpowered and annulled by compassion for the
sufferers and horror at the crime. Much less can this principle
of contrast be applied to explain the recognition in heaven of
God's glory manifested in his righteous judgments. A good
minister, in his public prayer on Thanksgiving Day, said, it is to
be presumed by an unwitting misplacement of words : " We
thank thee, O Lord, that so many others are in want and misery,
while we enjoy the bounties of thy providence." The sentiment
which these words express seems to have been uttered sometimes
by preachers and theologians in representing the blessedness of
the inhabitants of heaven as enhanced by the sight of the suffer
ings of the wicked. Some of these representations are nothing
less than horrible. It is incredible that the writers could have
taken in the full significance of their words. These occasional
and exceptional misrepresentations, picked out from the immense
mass of Christian theology and literature through all the ages,
have been made to do service in innumerable repetitions, as if
they were the true representations of Christianity and the Christian
church. But it is impossible to believe that Christ and his glori
fied saints will ever look on sinners persisting in sin with feelings
other than those of Jesus when he wept over Jerusalem, yet did
not revoke its doom. They will praise God because they see
that in all his treatment of sinners he has acted in a manner
worthy of God, revealing, not obscuring, his glorious perfections.
Here must be noticed the so-called imprecations in some of
the Psalms. In the outset allowance must be made for the
highly-colored imagery of Oriental poetry, which often seems
extravagant to the Western mind. It must also be remembered
that the Psalms were written in a rude and ferocious age. There
fore the forms of expression do not indicate the same moral
feeling in the mind of the writer which the same expressions
would indicate now. Underneath these forms of expression are
a true principle and a right sentiment which are true and right
vol. 1. — 33

5 14 GOD THE CREATOR
everywhere and always. On the cruel persecution of the Wald-
enses in the Alps for their purer religion, Milton wrote an ode,
which from the day it was published till now has roused the
hearts of all readers to a healthy and honorable indignation
against oppression and wrong-doing, and to admiration of fidel
ity to truth and right and God, even unto death.
" Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold ;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
Forget not ; in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant ; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learned thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
This is an imprecatory psalm of modern times; and the
noblest sentiments of the human heart are in sympathy with it.
All our desires for the detection and punishment of crime, for
the pure and effective administration of justice, for the deliver
ance of the oppressed and the overthrow of oppressors are of
the same nature. He has lost half his manhood, half of the
divinity that is in him in his likeness to God, who is no longer
capable of indignation against wrong-doers, of desiring the
overthrow of oppressors and the confusion and frustration of all
schemes for fraud and corruption. If the writer of these psalms
knew that God's kingdom existed in its germ within the rough
bur of the Israehtish theocracy, and that its enemies were de
stroying the knowledge of the true God and opposing the progress
of his kingdom which was to bring the Messiah into the world,
the best impulses of his heart and the clearest judgment of his
reason would prompt him to oppose these efforts, and to desire
with all his soul the confusion of all their designs and their
complete overthrow. And so in all ages the noblest sentiments
of humanity prompt and the deepest moral principles approve
the cry of human indignation and anguish in view of the suf
fering of the helpless under overpowering and defiant wrong-

GOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 515
doing. For the sighing of the needy, for the oppression of the
poor, arise, O Lord, and render into the bosom of the wicked
the reproach wherewith they have reproached thee. And this
is the sentiment uttered in heaven by the souls of the martyrs
beneath the altar : " How long, O Lord, faithful and true, dost
thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on
the earth?" (Rev. vi. 10).
IV. Man Glorifying God. — God will glorify himself in all
men, whether they intend it or not. Whatever men do, God
will glorify himself in them. This has been thought to be a very
objectionable doctrine. But it is now evident that it is not so.
It means simply that, whatever men do, God's action toward
them will be just right ; it will be the expression of perfect wisdom
and love, — action worthy of God and in which he is worthy of
universal approval and praise. God's glory is beyond the reach
of any creature. No creature by his own action can bring any
stain on it, or provoke God to act so as to dishonor himself.
Necessarily, therefore, whatever the creature may do, it will be
the occasion of God's acting just right, and so of displaying his
glory. Why, then, are men required to glorify God? This does not
mean that they are to make him glorious, but only that they are
to recognize and declare his glory. To this a knowledge of God's
glory is necessary. One does not glorify God who worships him
under the form of a crocodile or a cat ; or who regards him as an
arbitrary and capricious will, a mere almightiness unregulated by
rational truth and law, or as a Spirit of vengeance, or of justice
not included in love and vitalized by it. The more complete and
true the knowledge of God, the more complete and full may be
the recognition and declaration of his perfections, in which and
in their wise and loving exercise his glory consists.
Men also recognize and declare God's glory by choosing him
as the supreme object of trust. All finite persons are creatures
dependent on God. All right character and life in finite beings,
whether men or angels, must begin and go on in faith or loving
trust in God. Man as a sinner is also dependent on God for
forgiveness and for the quickening of the indwelling Spirit. This
continuous trust of finite persons in God is the recognition and
declaration of their normal relation to God as dependent creatures

5 l6 GOD THE CREATOR
and of his goodness in creating them capable of knowing him and
in graciously receiving them into communion with himself. For
a man to refuse thus to trust in God is to repudiate his condition
as a creature and his need as a sinner, and to set up for himself
in self-sufficiency, self-will, and self-seeking. It is not glorifying
God, but glorifying self. But in the very act of trusting God the
man recognizes and declares God's trustworthiness and his
sufficiency for all the needs of his creatures. Thus he glorifies
God. Men glorify God also by complacency in his perfections, and
the adoration and praise in which they give it utterance. Paul
represents God in conversion as shining into the heart to give the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ. Accordingly, in conversion persons often see God's glory
in his works of creation, providence, and redemption, and radi
ating on them like sunshine from the commonest objects and
events, so that they are in a rapture of praise and adoration.
Men glorify God also by recognizing his hand in all the events
of life, by. submitting to his will as made known in his providence,
his law, and his gospel, by doing all duty as duty to God, by
loving and serving men in recognition of their relation to God
and in Christ's name and for his sake, and by seeking first the
kingdom of God. In all this men recognize and proclaim the
glory of God. Paul says, " Whether ye eat or drink, or whatever
ye do, do all for the glory of God." x Thus he sanctifies and
ennobles our most common and least spiritual acts by connecting
them with the glory of God. He exhorts Christians to " walk
worthy of God." As a father is honored by the good character
and conduct of his children, so God's glory is proclaimed by the
worthy character and acts of those whom he has made in his own
likeness as rational personal beings, and who, though they had
forsaken God, have returned to their father's house and been
welcomed by him as his children with the love and joy of a
father's heart ; " this my son was dead and is alive again ; he was
lost and is found." It is one of the instances of J. S. Mill's
astonishing ignorance of the New Testament that he insists that
Christian ethics lacks the virtues of nobleness. What ethical
basis for all that is noble in character can be compared with this,
that as children of God we are to walk worthy of him ?
1 i Cor. x. 31.

VGOD'S CHIEF END IN CREATION 517
Physical science discloses the fact that the physical universe is
constituted and goes on in accordance with unchangeable and
universal laws of reason ; that its masses, molecules, and forces are
ordered and subordinated so that it can be apprehended in the
unity of a rational, scientific system ; and that in its parts and
as a whole it is progressively realizing rational ideals and ends.
And it is possible to trace in the physical system a subordination
to ends beyond itself in the spiritual or moral system. The
heavens declare the glory of God ; the earth is full of his good
ness; all his works are done in truth. Thus in science man
glorifies God when he discovers and declares the revelation of
God's glory in the universe.
God desires to have his flame or glory known. It has been
explained that God's end in all which he does is not primarily to
show himself. His action is not dramatic. It is the" acting-out
of all which is divine in him ; the realizing of the archetype of
perfect wisdom and love eternal in himself, the absolute Reason.
His action is the energizing of eternal Reason itself, expressing
its eternal truth, in accordance with its eternal laws, realizing its
eternal ideals of perfection and good. But having created in
telligent personal beings, he would have them know him as he
really is in the perfection of his power, love, and wisdom. This
is implied in his command to men to glorify God. It is explicitly
asserted many times in the Bible. This is implied also in the
fact that in all his works he is revealing himself. Pre-eminently
his redemptive action in human history, culminating in Christ and
his Holy Spirit, is his revelation of himself to men. This fact,
that he desires men to know his glory, is not inconsistent with the
doctrine of God's doing all things for himself, his own name or
glory, as it has been explained, but is a necessary inference from
it. The universe is constituted in accordance with the principles
and laws of reason eternal in God, and for the realization of its
rational ends. Therefore finite rational beings can have no true
knowledge of themselves and of the universe in which they live
except as they know God and see his name or glory revealed in
themselves and the universe. Their true well-being is possible
only as they know God and their dependence on him ; as thus
dependent they rest on him in loving trust, and come into
harmony with him as revealed in his perfect wisdom and love and
with the universe in the constitution and evolution of which his

518 GOD THE CREATOR
perfections are revealed. Therefore it is his infinite love which
prompts him to reveal himself -to man. And so Jesus says :
" This is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true
God, and him whom thou hast sent, even Jesus Christ."

PART III
GOD THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENTIAL
GOVERNMENT

CHAPTER XIV
GOD THE LORD OF ALL : — HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC
SIGNIFICANCE
The doctrine of God's end in creation, as explained in the last
preceding chapter, is the basis for the doctrine of God's govern
ment of the universe. The clearing of that doctrine from preva
lent misapprehensions and from the consequent difficulties and
confusion of thought, gives us a basis for a clear statement of the
doctrine of God's government, free from the misapprehensions
commonly attending its discussion, and therefore not open to the
objections usually urged against it. The true knowledge of God's
government depends also on right conceptions of human person
ality, of free will as related to reason, and of moral character as
related to free will. Inexactness of language, indefiniteness of
thought, and erroneous opinions on these subjects have occa
sioned a large part of the perplexities and difficulties common
in the discussion of the government of God, and of the objec
tions and disbelief occasioned by it. In another volume x I have
presented the real significance of personality, of free will, of moral
character in its relation to free will, and of moral responsibility,
moral government, and the moral system. Those views, if ac
cepted, give precision of thought and language in discussing the
universal government of God, relieve us of much of the perplexity
and difficulty attending it, and from misapprehensions and con
fusion of thought on which the force of the objections depends.
1 The Philosophical Basis of Theism, chaps, viii., xv., and xvi.

520 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
Starting with correct and definite views on these fundamental
points, we may hope to pass through, or rather above, the laby
rinthine perplexities commonly attending the investigation of
God's universal government, into a clear and satisfactory knowl
edge of it. There will remain only the mystery always insepar
able from the action and revelation of the absolute and infinite
Being in the conditioned and finite.
The subject of this chapter is God's government in its generic
meaning. I. Definition. — In popular language, God's government of
the universe is his management or control of it. More fully
defined, God's government of the universe is his action in and
through it, continuously and progressively revealing and express
ing his perfections and realizing the ends of his perfect wisdom
and love.
In this conception of God's government the physical universe
is no longer regarded as a finished product, like an iron casting,
which can be changed only by being broken. But God's power
is plastic in it, developing it to higher forms and through succes
sive epochs. It is like a living and growing organism. The-liv-
ing power of God is progressively guiding its development to the
realization of its ideal, as the life in a tree guides all the mechani
cal and chemical energies in it to the realization of its ideal.
And as trees die and decay after dropping the seeds of number
less new growths, so particular solar systems, after they have
accomplished their ends in subordination to the moral and spi
ritual system, may be resolved into nebulous matter and evolved
into new suns and planets. But God always directs and governs
the majestic processes, progressively revealing in them his own
perfections, and realizing the ends of his wisdom and love.
It was the theory of " the illustrious Malebranche " that we see
all things in God ; and he presented this as the fundamental ex
planation of the mathematical laws of the elementary impact of
solid bodies. Of this theory Comte says : "When such a genius
in an age so enlightened has been unable finally to conceive of
any other real means of explaining a probable theory but by
formally recurring to the continuous activity of a direct and
special providence, such a verification ought without doubt to
render utterly undeniable the inevitable tendency of our intelli-

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 52 1
gence towards a philosophy radically theological, whenever we
would penetrate, under any title whatever, to the inmost nature
of phenomena, following therein the general disposition which
necessarily characterizes all our primitive speculations.'- x Philo
sophy from ancient times has recognized the fact that rational
ideas and principles underlie all physical forms and combina
tions ; it declares that physical science depends for its existence
as science on self-evident principles of reason regulating all
thought ; and that its necessary postulate is that the universe is
pervaded and ordered by reason the same in kind with the reason
of man, and regulated by the same principles and laws. Physical
science itself is the science which the mind of man finds expressed
and revealed in the physical universe ; it discovers and declares
that the physical universe is constituted and arranged along lines
and principles of thought which man finds in his own mind as
constituent of his own reason, and which, as postulated in all
scientific knowledge of the universe, must be ultimately referred
to God, the absolute Reason. In this sense it is true that we see
all things in God. And now physical science is teaching also
that the universe was not merely at its origin arranged along
these rational lines and principles and finished in an original act
of creation ; but that it is continuously evolving along the same
lines in the progressive realization of rational ideas and ends.
Accordingly, the history of human thought and the progress of
civilization are continuously disclosing the fact and confirming
the belief that the tendency of the human mind, from the time
of the primitive men till now, to find the supernatural in the
natural is the result of the primitive and constituent intuitions
of human reason ; and that the true knowledge of the universe
is possible only as it is recognized as the revelation of God, the
absolute and eternal Reason. The doctrine of God's universal
government recognizes and declares this immanence of God in
the universe, realizing in its progressive development the arche
typal ideals of his own wisdom and love.
When we think of the universe as dependent on God for its
being and continuance, we call him its creator and preserver.
When we think of him as acting in and through it in the accom
plishment of the purpose of his wisdom and love, we call him its
ruler governor, sovereign, or Lord. But we cannot understand
1 Philosophie Positive, vol. iv. pp. 663, 664.

522 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
aright his government, sovereignty, or lordship without going
back to his creatorship. In order to explain his government we
must recognize the fact that the universe depends on him for its
being and preservation.
II. Classification. — God's government presents itself in two
aspects, providential and moral.
i. God's providential government includes all God's action so
far as it is the cause, ground, or occasion, immediate or remote,
of the actuality or occurrence of events. God's moral govern
ment includes all God's action so far as it is related to rational
beings as declaring, vindicating, and enforcing the supreme and
universal law of love and presenting motives to obey it.
God's providential government pertains solely to the actuality
of events. It is not restricted, however, to his action which is
the immediate efficient cause of changes and events. It includes
all action of God which is a condition without which the event
would not have occurred, whether the action be the cause, the
reason, the moral influence, or the occasion, immediate or re
mote, without which the event would not have occurred. In
affirming the universality of God's providential government we
affirm only that the actuality of all events is directly or indirectly,
immediately or remotely, conditioned on some antecedent action
of God. No finite being can ever be independent of God, for
that would imply that the finite had itself become the uncondi
tioned and absolute.
God's moral government pertains solely to the obligation of
rational free agents to obey the universal law of love. , In affirm
ing moral government we affirm nothing as to the actuality of
events, but only the obligation of rational beings to obey the law.
In affirming the universality of God's moral government we do
not affirm that all rational beings will be obedient to it, but only
that all are under obligation to obey it. They may obey the law
of love or disobey it. But if they disobey, they do not escape
the universal obligation to obey, nor the consequent and inevit
able desert of punishment.
Providential government is of all beings ; moral government is
only of rational, personal beings.
2. This classification does not divide God's acts of government
into two classes numerically ; it presents two different aspects of

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 523
every divine act. It does not imply that some of God's acts
belong exclusively to providential government, and the rest to
moral government. Every act of God is in one aspect an act of
providential government, in another aspect an act of moral
government. Those acts of God which present themselves primarily in the
aspect of moral government disclose also on further consideration
the aspect of providential government. God's revelation of his
law is an act of moral government. But so far as its influence
actually induces persons to obey it, or sinners to repent, it be
comes the occasion of the actual occurrence of events, a condi
tion without which the events would not have occurred ; in this
aspect it belongs to providential government. The revelation of
God's grace in Christ and the Holy Spirit presents itself primarily
as belonging to moral government. But so far as this redemptive
action of God actually draws sinners to faith and repentance, it
is the ground of the actuality of the event and so belongs to
providential government.
On the other hand, acts of God which present primarily the
aspect of providential government are found to present in addi
tion the aspect of moral government. The heavens declare the
glory of God. All God's action in the physical system reveals
his perfections and is thus a motive to trust and serve him. In
this aspect it belongs to his moral government. Because the
universe is constituted according to the principles and exists to
realize the ideals and ends of God's perfect wisdom and love, it
takes up into its constitution and reveals in all its development and
progress God's government in its moral aspect. It becomes of
itself the agency which reveals and enforces the law of love. If
a person lives a life of universal love, all the agencies in the uni
verse work together to insure his realization of the highest possi
bilities of his being, and therein his highest blessedness. But if
a man lives a life of selfishness, all the agencies in the universe
work together against him to prevent his realizing his true well-
being. 3. God's providential government is subordinate to his moral
government. This has been already established, both in the ex
amination of God's attributes and of his end in creation. The
' universe is constituted in accordance with the principles and laws,
and for the realization of the archetypal ideals and ends, of

524 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
absolute Reason. Therefore providential government is subordi
nate to moral. God's chief end in his action is never in the
physical but always in the spiritual ; it is never merely to bring
an event to pass, but in and through bringing it to pass to realize
the ends of perfect wisdom and love. The conception is not of
the physical universe finished and the course of events in it de
termined, and then moral government brought in afterwards, in
subordination to the physical system, to find in it such place for
itself as it can. But in the mind of God the rational and moral
system is first and dominant, and for it and in subordination to
its laws and ends the physical system is brought into being.
Hence we find the physical system to be symbolic of rational
ideas, ordered under rational law and progressive toward the
realization of rational ideals of perfection and well-being.
This subordination to moral government is indicated in the
words providence and providential. These denote God's fore
sight in all his action, looking beyond the physical to the spiritual,
beyond the actuality of the event to the ends of wisdom and love
to be accomplished in and through it.
In this subordination of providential government to moral we
find the unity of God's government in these two aspects. A
house must be built and furnished before a family can live in it ;
and afterwards there must be continued action, insuring the
actuality of events of various kinds. But all this is subordinate
to beneficent ends in securing the support, education, and well-
being of the family ; and in this subordination the whole action,
in building the house and taking care of it, and in the manage
ment of the family, is in unity. So the actuality or occurrence of
an isolated event is never the ultimate end in the government of
God; but in and through the event in its relation to the whole
system of things God is accomplishing something in progressively
realizing the archetypal and all-comprehending thought of the
absolute Reason and all the ends of wisdom and love included
therein. Thus all God's action in one aspect of it is providential
government, and in another aspect it is moral government ; and
it is all in unity and harmony through the subordination of the
former to the latter.
III. God's Right to be the Lord of All. — It may be'
thought presumption for man even to ask what is God's right to

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 525
govern the universe. But this right of inquiry is involved in the
fact that man is capable of knowing God. Human reason is
finite, yet it is the same in kind with reason in God. Man is in
God's image and participates in the light of the divine reason.
Man therefore can know God. With this knowledge he is cap
able of judging whether God is worthy of his trust, love, and
obedience. This implies his knowledge of God's rightful author
ity to rule. It is only as he sees the rightfulness of God's author
ity, the justice of his law, the reasonableness of his commands,
that the man sees himself without excuse as a sinner, justifies
God, and in penitential trust returns to God in willing obedience.
If man is incapable of knowing the reasonableness and rightful
ness of God's authority and law, he can never know himself as a
sinner justly condemned for his disobedience. Accordingly the
penitent Psalmist takes to himself all the blame for his sin, and
declares the perfect righteousness of God : " that thou mayest be
justified when thou speakest and be clear when thou judgest "
(Ps.li.4). Reason knows itself as having authority to command. A
rational being knows that he ought to obey reason. It is the
prerogative of man, as himself endowed with reason, to ascertain
whether any assumed authority to command obedience is itself
the authority of reason. It is contrary to reason, and degrading
and demoralizing to a rational, free, personal being, to be sub
jected to arbitrary and overpowering force, or to be compelled to
obey any being whose right to command he does not know and
is not permitted to investigate.
This right of judging the rightfulness of God's authority and law
is recognized by God in his revelation of himself recorded in the
Bible. " Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord."
" Hear now, O house of Israel : Is not my way equal ? are not
your ways unequal? " 2 In the very act of revealing himself to
men in the requirement of his law, and the invitation and promise
of his grace and in all his redemptive action, he appeals to their
reason and judgment as rational beings.
God's right to govern is in the fact that he is God. It is in
volved in his Godhood. It rests both on his absoluteness and his
personality, — on the fact that he is absolute Spirit.
It cannot rest solely on his power. This is indispensable to
1 Isaiah i. 18 ; Ezek. xviii. 25.

526 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
the exercise of lordship. That God is the First Cause, the source
of all power, the Almighty, is one element in his right to reign.
The universe is dependent on him for its being. He has created
it, and has it on his hands and at his disposal. But this alone is
not sufficient to constitute his right to reign. Might cannot make
right, even though it be almighty. Almightiness may compel by
force, but it cannot govern. Even material things are properly
said to be governed only as the force that moves them is regulated
by law. Much less can the lawless compulsion of a rational being
by force be properly called government.
On the other hand, God's right to lordship does not rest ex
clusively on his wisdom and love. The mere fact that a being
is wise and good does not give him the right to govern others.
Dr. N. W. Taylor teaches that God's right to govern rests on
the fact that he is able and disposed to govern better than any
other.1 Here power, wisdom, and love are combined. But the mere
ability and disposition to govern well does not give a person the
right to rule all others. All these are essential to the right to
lordship, to the authority to govern, but they are not sufficient.
Something more is necessary.
God's right to govern is in the fact that he is God. God is the
absolute and unconditioned, the self-existent, all-originating, and
all-conditioning Being. That such a being exists is a necessary
principle of reason, and a universal law of thought. In every line
of thought, man finds the existence of this Being to be the ulti
mate basis of all reality, and of all knowledge of reality. With
out this basis all knowledge evaporates into sensationalism and
subjective idealism, and all reality disappears. If we consider
the existence of the universe and the powers energizing in it, we
are necessarily carried back to the absolute Being, the First Cause,
the self-existent source of all finite being and power, the uncon
ditioned and the all-conditioning. If we examine the spnere of
rationality and knowledge, we find that the reality of our knowl
edge rests on the existence of the absolute Reason. If we study
the first four fundamental ideas or realities of reason, the True,
the Right, the Perfect, and the Good, our knowledge of each
rests on the absolute Reason as the ultimate reality, in whom all
norms of truth, right, perfection, and good are eternal and unde
rived. All science rests on the postulate that the universe is per-
1 Moral Government, vol. i. pp. 276-349.

HIS GOVERNMENT. IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 527
vaded and regulated by Reason essentially like our own, and is
constituted in accordance with its fundamental principles, laws,
and norms. All ideals of perfection and beauty imply norms of
perfection and beauty eternal in the absolute Reason. All our
estimates of the good which we seek to acquire, possess, and use,
rest on norms or principles of reason by which we determine
what objects of pursuit and acquisition are worthy of a rational
being or have true worth. In God is the unconditioned and all-
conditioning source of all power, and also of all truth, of all per
fection, and of all good.
The same is true in the sphere of ethics. The Right is an
ultimate and fundamental idea or reality of Reason. Reason
knows itself as having authority to command. Every rational
being is conscious that he ought to obey reason, conscious of
obligation and duty, conscious of law authoritative and impera
tive, conscious that this does not originate in himself. And here,
as in the other lines of thought, the reality of all moral ideas, of
all duty and obligation, of all law, authority, and moral govern
ment, rests ultimately in God, the absolute Reason, in whom the
law of right is eternal and of absolute authority, unconditioned
and all-conditioning.
But here, also, the mere idea of the absolute, abstracted from
the positive attributes which give it content, issues in agnosticism.
We find God's right to rule only in the complete idea of God ;
only as we recognize in him the self- existent, eternal God, uncon
ditioned and all-conditioning, in the plenitude of almighty power,
the First Cause of all being ; in the perfection of eternal Reason,
the eternal seat and source of all truth, of all right, of all law and
authority, of all perfection and all good ; in the fulness of wisdom
and love, the all-perfect God.
The conception of God is unique. He is the only God. His
right to reign is in the fact that he is God. He is the one only
and eternal source of law, authority, and government. There is
no right human law which is not an expression and application of
the law of God. There is no rightful human government which
does not derive its authority from God.
It is sometimes said that God's right to govern is in the fact
that he is the creator. This is allowable only when creatorship
is understood as signifying not merely that he is the First Cause,
the source of all being and power, the almighty, but also that he

528 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
is the absolute Reason, the eternal seat and source of all truth,
right, perfection, and good, perfect in wisdom and love.
This view of God's right to sovereignty accords with God's
revelation of himself recorded in the Bible. It is not there for
mally defined and vindicated. In declaring and vindicating
God's sovereignty on different occasions, reference is made to
different aspects of his Godhood. Sometimes the reference is to
his knowledge and wisdom, sometimes to his righteousness, some
times to his benevolence and graciousness, often to the fact that
he is the creator of the universe, that it is his and at his disposal.
In each case the reference is to the aspect of his Godhood best
suited to the occasion. But the teachings of the Bible, compre
hended in unity as a whole, declare that God's right to Lordship
is in the fact that he is God. This seems to be comprehended
and declared by David, not in a logical formula, but in language
of rapt devotion : " Thine, O Jehovah, is the greatness, and the
power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty ; for all
that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine ; thine is the king
dom, O Jehovah, and thou art exalted as head above all. Both
riches and honor come of thee, and thou rulest over all ; and in
thine hand is power and might ; and in thine hand it is to make
great, and to give strength unto all." J
When the Bible refers God's right to rule to the fact that he
is the creator, it must be understood as implying that he is the
Father of spirits as well as the creator of matter and its forces,
that he is the eternal seat and source of all truth, law, perfection,
and good, as well as of all power. I have already shown that
the -comparison of the potter and the clay necessarily refers to
the rational knowledge, skill, and design of. the potter, as well as
to his power. Paul and Isaiah silenced the objector with the
question -. " Nay, but, O man, who art thou that repliest against
God?"2 But this very question has force only as it assumes
that God's right to reign is inherent in his Godhood. It is itself
an appeal to the fundamental principles of human reason to de
clare that if God exists he is the rightful and sovereign Lord of
the universe. The idea of God and it alone, carries in its essence
the rightful authority to rule as sovereign Lord of all. And this
excludes all rule or sovereignty of man over man, except as the
authority to rule is derived from God.
i i Chron. xxix. n, 12. 2 Rom. ix. 20, 21 ; Isa. x. 15, and xlv. 9.

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 529
This subject calls our attention to the rights of God. The
thinking of this age has been intent on the rights of man. The
ology has been occupied with the same. It has been busy defin
ing and defending man's freedom of will, and in scrutinizing
God's government to ascertain whether he gives to every person
"a fair chance." There is danger that, looking too exclusively
in this direction, theology may become one-eyed and one-sided.
It is necessary to large, roundabout, comprehensive thought that
we attend also to the complemental truth and give due consid
eration to the just rights of God. These are comprehended in
his right to absolute sovereignty over the universe. The govern
ment of the universe can never be a democracy, or a republic,
or an aristocracy. It must be the absolute sovereignty of the
one only God.
IV. God's Sovereignty, both Absolute and under Law. —
In the course of theological discussion the sovereignty of God has
acquired factitious meanings founded on erroneous conceptions.
In fact, it means no more than lordship or government. It is
necessary, therefore, to ascertain the real significance of these
words and clear them from misconceptions. We shall find that
God's sovereignty, lordship, or government is at once absolute
and under law.
1. It is absolute. In his government of the universe God is
unconditioned by any being, power, or law independent of him
self; he is unconditioned and all-conditioning. In this sense it
is absolute sovereignty.
It is underived. His authority is not delegated, his power is
not given, his law is not imposed on him from any source inde
pendent of himself. They are original and eternal in God.
His sovereignty is undivided. In human government there is
need of dividing the powers of government. The legislative,
judicial, and executive powers are exercised by different persons.
But in the divine government they are all united in God. There
is no being or power other than himself to whom he is responsible.
He has all power to accomplish whatever he wills. Whatever
is done or not done in his government, the reason of it is never
a defect of power or of any perfection, but is always the com
pleteness of his perfections.
These contrasts with human government help us to understand
vol. i. — 34

53° THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
the absoluteness of God's government. We sometimes distin
guish human governments as absolute and limited. But no one
of them can be absolute in the sense in which God's government
is so. 2. God's sovereign action in governing the universe is regu
lated by law. It is always accordant with and regulated by the
principles and laws, and directed to the realization of the arche
typal ideals of perfection and good, which are eternal in himself,
the absolute Reason. This has been already elucidated and
established. It has been shown that these principles and laws,
these norms and ideals of perfection and good, eternal in the
absolute Reason, determine what it is possible for power to effect,
and also what it is obligatory on every rational being to choose and
to do. They determine the sphere of power and the range of
what is possible, and also the sphere of duty and the range of
what is obligatory. They thus determine the constitution of the
universe, both of its physical and its moral systems. As thus
constituted and determining, they are the flaming bulwarks of the
the universe,1 the fixed barriers which no physical force and no
power of free will can create, annul, change, or transcend. In
the moral system a free agent has power to disobey the eternal
moral law. But he cannot annul or change the authority of the
law, nor the principles of its commandments, nor the guilt and
ill-desert of the transgressor. He cannot make it possible to
attain perfection and well-being in a life of selfishness, nor to fail
to attain them in the life of love.
Here it is objected that, while this is true of finite rational and
free moral agents, it cannot be true of the almighty God, because
it would imply limitation. One answer is that this is no limita
tion, because the principles, norms, and laws in accordance with
which he acts are not imposed upon him from without by any
power or authority independent of himself, but are constituent
elements of perfect reason, eternal and absolute in himself. In
an analogous way man, in the likeness of God as spirit, is a law
to himself in his own reason and conscience. If God were not
thus under law, he would be destitute of reason and would not
be God, but a limited and imperfect being inferior to man.
Then the universe would not be grounded in reason, nor con-
1 " Flammantia moenia mundi " (Lucretius, " De Rerum Natura," Lib.
i. 73, 1 102).

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 531
stituted, ordered, and evolved according to its principles and
laws, and for the realization of its ideals. It would be a chaos,
and science and all human knowledge would be impossible.
The objection is answered also from another point of view.
The sphere of reason is entirely distinct from the sphere of
power ; power as such cannot cause any effects in that other and
distinct sphere. To establish, change, or annul a principle of
reason is not a legitimate act of power. Power multiplied by any
number of billions could not create, change, or annul any prin
ciple of mathematics, or effect the motion of any body without
a cause, or subject virtue to the force of gravitation so that it
could be weighed and bought by the pound, or make truth solid
so that it could be chopped with an axe. If it were possible for
God by almighty power to change or annul a principle, law, or
ideal of reason, it would imply that he would divest himself of
his own rationality and would cease to be God. It would be
God's annihilation of himself. It would therefore be the annihi
lation of reason itself. Then there would no longer be anywhere
any distinction between the reasonable and the absurd, between right
and wrong, between perfection and imperfection; the universe
would slump into chaos, and science and all human knowledge
would dissolve into illusion.
Here it is objected that if God by almighty power cannot
change the eternal principles, laws, and ideals of reason, it is at
least possible for him to disregard them and to act contrary to
them. If we look at almighty power by itself, abstracted from
the eternal divine reason and character, God has power to do
wrong. He could do more evil than all finite beings together.
Here again we reply, if he should choose to disobey reason he
would cease to be God, the absolutely perfect being; and the
universe, if any could exist, would be grounded in unreason and
evolved, not in order but in disorder, in contradiction to reason.
Then science and all human knowledge would be impossible.
The conclusion is inevitable, that the consideration of specula
tive objections like these only forces us back on the principle
that the ultimate reality in the universe is not matter but rational
spirit. They compel us to see that the ultimate ground of the
universe is God, the absolute Spirit. He, in his absolute reason,
in his eternal self-determination by his own free choice in har
mony with the eternal truths, laws, and ideals of reason, in his

532 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
eternal love, is the ultimate ground of the universe, and of all our
knowledge and of all our right thinking respecting it. Our
knowledge vanishes if it does not rest on him. We cannot even
throw our thought back of him. Thought itself breaks down in
confusion and contradiction if it does not rest ultimately on God,
the absolute Spirit, the eternal Reason, the God who is Love.
The universe being thus constituted, the effect of God's action
in his government must be commensurate with the constitution,
powers, and susceptibilities of any being or system of beings on
which he acts, and also with the constitution, powers and capaci
ties of any being or system of beings through which he acts.
In view of these principles, we see that God's action in his
government is always under law. His almightiness cannot tran
scend the normal sphere of possibility as eternally determined in
the absolute Reason, nor create, annul, or change its eternal prin
ciples and laws, its norms of perfection and good, its archetypes
of wisdom and love. And in the sphere of obligation his action
is under law ; by his eternal free choice his will is in harmony
with the eternal truths and laws of his own absolute Reason, and
is realizing his eternal ideals of perfection and good in the action
of perfect wisdom and love.
3. Because God's government is in unity through the subordi
nation of the providential to the moral, and its constant accord
ance with rational truth and law eternal in the divine mind, all
God's action in the exercise of his sovereignty, whether in provi
dential or moral government, is in unity also as directed to the
realization of a rational plan or end. What this is has been set
forth in the chapter on " God's End in Creation." God's chief
end in his government must be the same with his chief end in
creation. It is the progressive expression in the universe of his
divine perfection, the progressive realization in it of the arche
typal ideal of perfect wisdom and love.
Thus his government, lordship, or sovereignty is at once abso
lute, unconditioned, and all-conditioning, and at the same time
subject to rational law and accordant with it, and progressively
realizing rational ideals and ends. The universe, in its creation,
constitution and development, is a reasonable system, revealing
the wisdom and love of God. And so it is safe under his absolute
government. Absolute power cannot safely be intrusted to men.
The absolute, undivided, irresponsible government of a human

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 533
despot may be terrible. The absolute government of an almighty
being who is arbitrary, capricious, resistless will unregulated by
reason, or who is unwise, or unjust, or unloving, is the most
terrific conception which the human mind can form. But the
absolute government of the almighty God is benign and full of
blessing, because his power is exercised in infinite wisdom and
love, in accordance with the truths and laws and realizing the
ideals of perfect reason. These are the " rainbow round about
his throne" (Rev. iv. 3).
V. Not the Sovereignty of Arbitrary Will. — The sov
ereignty of God is not the supreme reign of almighty will unregu
lated by reason and independent of its superior and authoritative
principles, laws, and norms. It does not imply that God's will
is his law, a doctrine which has exerted a wide and pernicious
influence in theology.
1. This error is precluded by the essential idea of God as ab
solute Spirit, as already set forth. It is ofthe essence ofthe true
idea of God that his will is subject in all his action to reason and
regulated by it ; he exercises his almighty power in the light of
reason eternal in himself and subject to its eternal principles and
laws ; therefore all the exercise of his power is in free will under
the eternal law of reason; by his free choice he eternally de
termines himself in all his action in harmony with the require
ments of reason and for the progressive realization of its ideals ;
thus reason and free will are inseparable ; all God's action is in
universal good-will regulated in its exercise by wisdom and
righteousness, that is, in harmony with the principles and laws
of reason and for the realization of its ideals of perfection and
well-being. Eternal in the absolute Reason are the principles,
laws, and norms in accordance with which the archetype of the
universe, eternal in the mind of the living God, is constituted,
and which determine both what is possible and also what is right
and obligatory, — which, when the possible is becoming actual in
the universe thus constituted, determine what, according to its
constitution, is possible, and what must be, and what ought to be.
The error that God's will is supreme and unregulated by law
gives a conception of God and his sovereignty contradictory at
every point to that which we have ascertained and established.
Carried out to its full significance this error implies that love

534 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
is right because God has commanded it, not that he commands
it because it is right, — that if he should command universal
selfishness, it would be right and obligatory and love would be
sin. It means that law is the arbitrary decree of an almighty and
resistless will, behind which is no reason of truth or law or right
eousness. Will-power reigning supreme above all law, imposing
its own arbitrary and capricious commands and compelling con
formity with them by resistless force, is the essence of despotism
and tyranny. If we conceive of such a ruling will as almighty,
we have a conception which is simply terrific. And this is the
real conception of God's government, if his will is independent
of reason and not subject to and regulated by its truths and laws
and its norms of perfection and well-being. The very ideas
of right and wrong, of law and obligation, disappear, and instead
remain only the idea of resistless force and the fear of torment
ing and overpowering violence. The conception of free agency
and a moral system and government disappears; the universe
is forever grinding under resistless force. The conception even
of physical law disappears, for the force is no longer that of
the universe acting necessarily according to the discoverable
laws of its constitution, but it is a living, conscious, almighty
caprice. This fundamental error has appeared at different times, modified
in various forms in the history of theological thought. Duns
Scotus is its most distinctive representative in medieval theology.1
The error survived the middle ages. It has widely influenced
the theological thought and the religious life of the Protestant
churches, and its influence has continued powerful to the
present day.
Its influence is seen in ill-considered and misleading theolog
ical definitions and propositions. Dr. N. W. Taylor says : " Law
is the will of a moral governor concerning the action of his
subjects promulgated as an authoritative and perfect rule of
action to them." 2 Professor Diman says : " If we restrict the
term to its original and proper sense, law must be defined as the
1 Pie thought it essential to God's freedom and uhconditionedness that
he create by the act of his own will what is right and what is wrong ; other
wise God would be limited by his own constitution. He exemplifies a
legitimate issue of accepting this objection as valid. Occam taught the
same error.
2 Moral Government, vol. i. p. 16.

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 535
authoritative expression of will enforced by power." J Such
definitions of law are not uncommon. Their commonness
reveals the surviving influence of the medieval doctrine of the
supremacy of almighty will. If this conception had not been
already familiar, if the truth that law has its seat in the eternal
Reason had been clearly and commonly recognized, such
definitions would not have been so commonly given, or, if given,
would not have been received without question or criticism.
It cannot be supposed, however, that these theologians
accepted or even considered the full logical significance of the
definition. Can any explanation be given why this should have
escaped the notice of such keen-sighted thinkers ? One reason
evidently is, that they failed to distinguish sharply between law
and government. Government implies the action of the will of a
governor or a lawgiver, declaring what the law is in its application
to particular cases and what shall be the penalty for transgression,
and enforcing the law by ascertaining guilt and inflicting the
prescribed punishment.2 But no government can create the
moral law in its eternal principles, nor the rightness or justness
of their application in particular cases. Government does not
create law, it ascertains what it is, declares and enforces it.
Every government, that of God not excepted, is under moral
obligation to govern in accordance with eternal law. Kant
recognizes this distinction between the enactment or authoritative
proclamation of law by a government or lawgiver and the origin
of the law itself : " The law proceeds from will. . . . He who
commands by law is a lawgiver and is the author of juridical
obligation, although not necessarily of the law itself; for if he is,
then it is a positive and arbitrary enactment. That law, which
imposes on us its unconditioned obligation a priori, may be
thought as proceeding from the will of a supreme lawgiver, that is
of God ; . . . but this does not mean that he is the author of the
law itself." 8
Another reason why theologians define law as proceeding from
will, without noticing the full significance of the doctrine, may be
found in the common definition of the freedom of the will, that
it consists in the power of contrary choice. This is a definition
1 The Theistic Argument, pp. 106, 107.
2 Philosophical Basis of Theism, pp. 188, 189.
3 Metaphysics of Ethics, Introduction.

536 ' ;v THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
of the freedom of the will by power exclusively. Thus the
essential connection of will with reason and its essential sub
ordination to reason is entirely left out of view. But in truth
this connection with reason and subordination to it are of the
very essence of will. Will is a power enlightened by reason. It
is only as thus enlightened that it can be a power of self-determi
nation, self-directing and self-exerting. If theologians once come
to recognize free will as it really is, they can never thereafter
define law as originated by supreme will ; for the supremacy of
reason and the subordination of will to its principles as law are
inherent in the essence of free will and declared in the true
definition of it.
The doctrine of the supreme reign of almighty, unconditioned,
and arbitrary will has been a prolific mother of errors, both
doctrinal and practical. However it may have been modified
and its essential significance disguised or overlooked, the infection
of evil inherent in it as the essential principle of despotism and
carrying in it the possibility of tyranny, has never been suppressed.
The common errors respecting the sovereignty of God have, for
the most part, originated in this false doctrine, or at least have
rested on it as their necessary presupposition. An example is the
preponderance in religious thought and life of the fear of God's
wrath over loving trust in him, a survival of the terrorism of the
middle ages, when Christ himself was regarded as the terrible
judge rather than as the gracious Saviour, and Mary was
worshiped as the mediator between him and the sinner. The
same false doctrine is the necessary presupposition, whether
distinctly recognized or not, of that theory of atonement for sin
which rests on the conception of God as an almighty potentate
who regards sin as a personal offence arid demands suffering and
blood as a satisfaction to his offended honor, before he can be
reconciled to the offender ; a demand essentially the same with
that of the duelist, and sometimes so described as to be nothing
less than bloodthirsty and insatiate vengeance. The same is the
necessary presupposition of the doctrine of the unconditional
election of certain persons to salvation by the mere arbitrary
will of God, without any reason of righteousness or benevo
lence for the election of one rather than another, and without
recognizing a man's free will as a real factor in determining his
own character and destiny ; and of the accordant doctrine that

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 537
God regenerates the elected ones by his almighty and resistless
power.1 2. In the reaction against the doctrine of the sovereignty of
arbitrary and resistless will we must not rush to the extreme of
denying or depreciating God's sovereignty under law, exercised in
accordance with the immutable principles, laws and ideals of
eternal and absolute Reason.
The thinking of the present day tends away from the recognition
of the sovereignty of naked arbitrary will enforcing its behests by
resistless power. In civil polity the true thinking of our time does
not reject government, but demands government under consti
tutional law. A few extremists, confounding liberty with license
and all government with despotism, reject government altogether
and become anarchists. In theology we are finding an analogous
tendency to reject the conception of God's government as the
sovereignty of arbitrary and capricious will, and to recognize it as
a government administered in strict accordance with the principles
and laws of eternal Reason and for the realization of its archetypal
ideal of all perfection and well-being. And we find also a corre
sponding analogous tendency, in the reaction from the conception
of the despotic sovereignty of God's arbitrary and resistless will,
to depreciate the idea of God's government and law and to dis
parage his revelation of himself as king and lawgiver and in the
development of his kingdom. Some, in their revulsion from the
error that God is a potentate whose will is his only law, take
positions which logically and practically involve the repudiation of
all divine law and government. In a public meeting of a Con
ference of Congregational churches, I heard a minister say that
the conception of God as king, and of his kingdom, belonged
to the Old Testament and to Judaism, and since Christ has come
is obsolete. The tendency with this type of religious thinkers is
to substitute the conception of God as Father for the conception
of him as king, lawgiver, or judge. Rev. Dr. Fairbairn and others
maintain that alike in the Old Testament, in Judaism, and in the
Gentile religions God was never known as Father before Christ
1 This is shown in an argument by which this doctrine was justified. God,
it was said, doing all things for his own glory, must reveal all his attributes.
His will is absolutely sovereign. He can reveal that sovereignty only by
arbitrarily electing some to salvation and reprobating others to damnation,
for no reason but that so he wills. " Sit pro ratione voluntas."

538 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
came, — that Christ first revealed to men the Fatherhood of
God. This view is contrary to the teaching of Christ. He continually
recognizes the kingdom of God as developed by his coming and
to be perpetuated through all ages by the ministration of Spirit.
His command is, " Seek first the kingdom of God." Through all
the Christian centuries Christ's people have been daily praying
in the Lord's Prayer, " Thy kingdom come." In his parables and
other teachings he was continually explaining the true character
of his kingdom, in correction of the misapprehensions of the
Jews. He presents himself as the Messianic king. As such he
was recognized by the apostles. The most common title by
which he is designated in the New Testament is Lord. Paul
presents him in glory as the universal sovereign to whom every
knee bows. John sees him enthroned in glory and the saints
and angels in heaven offering him their homage. In the Old
Testament God is presented as king ruling over his kingdom.
But he is presented as Jehovah in covenant with his people, ruling
in righteousness and good-will. He is also presented under a
great variety of names and aspects. Though the Hebrew is not a
copious language, it is said that it has more names and titles of
God than any other language. In the Old Testament, God is
presented as father, mother, husband, shepherd carrying the
little lambs in his arms, vine-dresser (What could I have done
more for my vineyard that I have not done in it ?) , as well as
king, lawgiver, and judge. In the Old Testament are sentences
and comparisons expressing God's parental tenderness and love
as strong and affecting as any in the New. And in the New
Testament are sentences and illustrations setting forth his
sovereignty, law, and justice as severe as any in the Old. No one
of these various representations of God is to be held to the
exclusion of the others. The inspired writers take us round to
many points of view, that we may see him in various
aspects and may gain a more comprehensive and richer view
of what he is. We miss the fulness of the revelation if we
limit our thought to any one of these names and illustrations
and the aspect of God which it designates. As to the asser
tion that Christ first revealed the Fatherhood of God, it is not
only revealed in the Old Testament, but was more or less dis
tinctly recognized in the religions of the Gentiles, as, for examples,

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 539
among the Greeks, the Romans, the Hindus, and in the All-
Father of the Scandinavians.
This recognition of the Fatherhood of God, to the exclusion of
other aspects of his being which he has revealed, tends to obscure
the unity of God's kingdom in its progressive development from
epoch to epoch. Instead of recognizing the coming of Christ as
the great epoch in the development of God's kingdom and of his
revelation of himself therein, progressive through the ages, the
tendency is to regard the coming of Christ as entirely setting
aside the law and kingdom of God as set forth in the Old
Testament and originating something entirely different in the
revelation of the Fatherhood of God.
This one-sided type of thought, with its declamation against law
and government, puts the Christian religion into flagrant opposition
to the thinking of the present day. It comes into direct antag
onism to science, which recognizes the whole universe as con
stituted and evolved in exact accordance with law, from the
smallest atom to the largest sun. Also in depreciating govern
ment under law, it is in direct conflict with the most advanced
thinking of our time as to civil polity and the constitution of
society, which demands civil government regulated under consti
tutional law. It is in the line of thought of those who send flowers
to convicted murderers and sympathize with criminals, rather than
with the government in the maintenance of law and the protection
of society from wrong-doers. It drifts towards the line of thought
of those who become anarchists, denying all law, civil, moral, or
divine, and declaring that law is merely an invention of those
who have property and power, to bar out those who have not.
Theological thinkers who follow this line of thought are wont
to dwell on the evils resulting. from constructing an idea of God's
government from the analogy of human government ; yet them
selves accept a form of human government as the type of the
divine, and that, the patriarchal, the earliest and rudest form of
human government. They teach that God is not a king, nor
a lawgiver, nor a lord or governor : he is a Father. But in a
patriarchal government the will of the patriarch is the only law.
He may personally be very amiable.. But he is a despot. And
historically it was from patriarchal government that despotism
in the State and the doctrine of the divine right of kings origi
nated. Thus they insist on a type of the divine government in

54° THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
which the ruler is a single potentate whose arbitrary will is the
only law. On the other hand, when the representation of God as
king and of his kingdom is rejected as Judaic and antiquated, the
suggestion is totally inadmissible that the government of the uni
verse is republican or democratic, and that the Republic of God
should be substituted for the Kingdom of God. For this would
imply that God derives his authority from the consent of the people
whom he has created, and rules only as their representative and
is responsible to them. This involves universal anarchy. If the
principles of right and wrong and their authority as law are not
eternal in God, if the universe is not ultimately grounded in
absolute Reason and constituted according to its eternal truths
and laws, then there is no basis for an immutable moral law of
inviolable authority, and no real authority or government in or
over the universe.
3. The doctrine of the sovereignty of God's will creating law
by its arbitrary fiat is the basis for denying the necessity of any
atoning significance ,of the redemptive action of God in Christ.
According to this erroneous conception of sovereignty, because
God creates law by the decree of his absolute will, so by a mere
act of will he can change or annul it, can release any one tem
porarily or permanently from the obligation to obey it in whole or
in part. Then, of course, there is no need of atonement in the
redemption of sinners. God can remit to any transgressor the
penalty of transgression, or deliver a sinner from guilt and sin
by a mere act of his almighty will. And there would be no
reason why he should do this in such a way as to assert and
maintain the universal and inviolable authority of his law. For
the law is his will ; it is asserted and maintained by his almighti
ness and by nothing else. Thus the denial of the necessity of
the atoning significance of the work of God in Christ in the
redemption of sinners from sin, in its true meaning, rests on the
presupposition that what is supreme in the universe is lawless
will. Then the only necessity for atonement would be, not to
maintain and vindicate the supreme and inviolable authority of
the eternal, immutable and universal law of absolute Reason, but
as a revengeful satisfaction to the offended dignity of the almighty
potentate whose will alone is law.
But if law is uncreated and eternal in the absolute Reason, if
it is therefore the constitution of the universe, constituting both

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 541
its physical and its moral order, then God, whose inmost char
acter and all the action in which he expresses it are always
subject to this law and conformed to it, in the action by which
he would redeem sinners from their sins, must reveal, assert, and
maintain the law and its universal and inviolable authority. He
must work redemption, as he does everything else, in subjection
to the eternal law of self-sacrificing love, and thus will reveal,
assert, and maintain the universality, the unchangeableness, and
the supreme and inviolable authority of that eternal law. And
precisely this is the atoning significance of his redemptive action
in Christ. The hurtful influence, both in doctrine and life of the
doctrine that God's will is his law, can never be corrected and
arrested by undervaluing or setting aside the law of God, but
only by establishing it on a deeper and immovable basis in the
eternal, absolute, and universal Reason. And this God is.
Others resolve law into the eternal constitution or nature of
things, independent of God. Thus they lose all ground for
believing in God and declare that the universe is ultimately
grounded in the impersonal.
4. In contradistinction from these speculations, God is truly
known only as the absolute and all-perfect Spirit, who is at once,
in one indivisible personality, absolute Reason and almighty Will.
In him, as absolute Reason, all truth and law, all norms of perfec
tion and good, and the archetype of the created universe accor
dant therewith are eternal. And as the almighty Will he is by
his own eternal free choice in harmony with reason in his inmost
and essential character, and also in all his action, in wh'ich he is
always progressively realizing in the universe the eternal arche
type of all perfection and well-being, in accordance with the
normal principles, laws, and ideals of reason. Thus in all his
energizing, whether in creating and developing worlds, or adminis
tering the moral government of the universe, or clothing a lily,
or feeding a sparrow, his almighty power is exercised in love
which is universal good-will regulated by wisdom and righteous
ness, in conformity with the principles and laws of reason and
for the realization of its ideals of perfection and well-being. He
does all that infinite love permits and requires. If he fails to do
anything, it is not on account of defect of power but because
perfect love exercised in perfect wisdom and righteousness does
not permit. If he does anything it is because perfect love thus

542 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
exercised requires it. At every point of time and space he does
all which perfect love permits and requires in the progressive
realization ofthe eternal archetype of the universe.1 When once
this is clearly known as the true idea of God, the conception of
his sovereignty as the reign of lawless will, and the whole brood
of errors associated with it, will disappear.
VI. Submission to God's Sovereignty. — God's sovereignty is
the ground of submission to his will as revealed both in his provi
dence and in his law.
r. The positive element in submission to God's will, whether
revealed in his providential action or in his moral law, is loving
trust in him. Faith in God, which in its essence is trust in him,
is originating and vitalizing in all right character and action of
men. The grounds of a reasonable trust in God are three : his
right to govern, the righteousness and benevolence of his adminis
tration of his government, and his power almighty to sustain and
administer it, regulated only by his own perfect love in accord
ance with the principles, laws, and norms eternal in his own
absolute Reason. The doctrine of God's sovereignty rightly
understood declares the reality of all these grounds of trust in
God. Thus it is in itself the ground of submission to God's
will as made known both in his providential action and in his
moral law, and of peace and joy in the fact that he reigns
sovereign over all. The sovereignty of God as supreme and
almighty will, which has been so widely taught, or at least im
plied, in theology, has brought terror to many; it has occa
sioned perplexity and doubt; in some it has crushed hope in
despair, in others it has aroused antagonism and led to disbelief
of Christianity. But God's sovereignty in its true significance
is divested of all these evil influences. Of itself it justifies God
in his government, it is the reasonable ground of trust and hope
in him, of submission to his will as made known in his provi
dence and his moral law, of peace and joy in the fact that he is
Lord of all, and of willing and loyal service in obedience to his
1 Could this realization be complete, the universe would be the complete
stamp or imprint (xopoKTijp) of God. But this it cannot be, because it is
finite. The Logos in Christ, by whom he makes the worlds, is alone him
self the effulgence of God's glory and the very image (xa/rairrtjp) of his sub
stance (Heb. i. 3).

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 543
commands, in following his leadership, and in working with him
for the advancement of his kingdom of righteousness, peace, and
joy in the Holy Spirit. The question of Elihu to Job is always
pertinent: "Should it be according to thy mind?" No man
is wise enough, or good enough, or powerful enough, or consis
tent and persistent enough to be safely intrusted with the inde
pendent disposal of his own life and destiny, much less with the
government of the universe. To such a being it is reason for
unceasing joy that God is Lord of all. So the Bible describes
the servants of God rejoicing in his sovereign rule : " The Lord
reigneth ; let the earth rejoice " ; " O how love I thy law ; it is
my meditation all the day. Thy law is my delight." !
The doctrine of God's sovereignty, presented aright, recalls
attention both to God's right to govern and to the righteousness
and benevolence of his government. Theology, if it is not to be
one-sided, morbid, and misleading, must take a strong grasp of
this truth.
2. We are to submit to God, not to mere almightiness. Car-
lyle says : " Manhood begins when we have in any way made a
truce with necessity ; begins, at all events, when we have surren
dered to necessity, as the most part only do ; but begins joyfully
and .hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to neces
sity, and thus in reality triumphed over it and felt that in neces
sity we are free.2 Elsewhere, carrying out the same thought, he
says : " If hell must be endured, it must." With a deeper insight
a Greek philosopher said : " A strict belief in fate is the worst of
slavery, imposing upon our necks an everlasting lord or tyrant,
of whom we are to stand in awe night and day." Subjection to
force, like that of a slave under the whip, is debasing and not
ennobling, — brutifying, not humanizing. It is not freedom, but
slavery. And if the slave has reconciled himself to his bondage,
that is not the beginning of his manhood, but his deeper debase
ment. If the universe is bound under necessity and fate, there
can be no real freedom. Fear of force and violence becomes the
only motive to submission. There remains no higher reality and
no higher motives, therefore no basis on which a man can rise
above the oppressing force in conscious superiority to it even
when it crushes him. It is true, man cannot transcend the limits
1 Psalm xcvii. I ; cxix. 77, 97.
2 Essay on Burns, in " Edinburgh Rev."

544 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
of his finiteness, and finds himself confronted with the unknowable
and the inevitable. But when the mysterious and the inevitable
come upon him, the wise great man does not weep and cry aloud
and tear his garments, as did the ruder heroes of ancient times,
whose greatness was in their brawn. He yields with composure
to evil which human skill and strength cannot avert. The ground
of this calmness and strength is above and beyond the overpower
ing necessity, in the conviction that the power that is almighty in
the universe is itself regulated by reason, that the inevitable and
irresistible, which presses on him, itself has its ultimate ground in
the eternal truths and laws of reason, is incident to the accom
plishment of its rational and worthy ends, and thus is ultimately
consistent with God's universal reign of wisdom and love ; that in
the man himself, under the resistless necessity, are powers and
susceptibilities of personality which ally him forever with God ;
that he possesses treasures of truth and right, of perfection and
good, of God's love and blessing, which no force can destroy or
take away ; that in the very act of meeting aright the adversity
that comes on him he insures his own development to the realiza
tion of the highest possibilities of his being ; that in holding fast
his Christian faith and integrity under trial, in standing for truth
and right against all opposition, in seeking and saving the lost in
the spirit of Christ's self-sacrificing love, he is in harmony with
God and with all good beings, and in harmony with the constitu
tion of the universe, so that all things work together for his good.
Thus he is victorious in his conflict with the inevitable and the
irresistible. He finds the truth of Paul's triumphant words, " in all
these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved
us." 2 This is the freedom wherewith Christ maketh free. He
who submits to God in loving trust and service comes into the
sphere of universal love and is invulnerable to all the powers of
evil. For " who is he that can harm you, if ye be zealous of that
which is good? " 2 This freedom is above that of Carlyle's sub
mission to necessity by as much as the revelation of* God's uni
versal love in Christ is above the fatalism of Islam and the hea
thenism which subjected the gods themselves to fate.
3. Submission to God must be distinguished also from submis
sion to evil. As to death, suffering, and all privation or loss of
good, we do not submit to these. We do all in our power, con-
1 Rom. viii. 37. 2 1 Peter iii. 13.

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 545
sistent with wisdom and love, to prevent, avoid, or remove them.
The ship-captain, who in a storm resigned himself to shipwreck
and betook himself to prayer and reading the Bible in the cabin,
submitted to the storm and to the raging sea, but not to God.
Submission to God would have kept him at his post doing his
utmost to save the ship. If, in spite of all our strength and skill,
the evil comes on us, we submit to God, not to the evil. We
recognize it as coming on us under his government of wisdom
and love ; we accept it as discipline for increasing our spiritual
power and perfecting us in the likeness of Christ. Thus we over
come it and are conquerors. There is no warrant in any true
conception of God's government for the principle of asceticism
that privation and suffering are in themselves good and acceptable
to God, and therefore are to be sought for their own sake or in
flicted on us by ourselves, as an expiation for sin or as a means
of making us acceptable to God. For all purposes of spiritual
discipline and development we accept as sufficient the suffering
and privation and conflict with evil which, in spite of our wisest
and best endeavors, come on us as incidental to our constitution
and condition in life, and to our faithful work in the advancement
of Christ's kingdom.
As to sin, which is the only essential evil, submission to God's
government implies that we abstain from it ourselves, and that,
when committed by others, we, to the utmost of our power and
according to our best wisdom, resist it in love, overcoming evil
with good. This overcoming evil with good means more than
treating the evil-doer personally with kindness. It means that
love is the essential opposite and contradictory of selfishness, and
it alone can overpower and extirpate it. In the exercise of this
love we must stand for God and his kingdom against all the pow
ers of wickedness, confronting error with truth, lawlessness with
the eternal law of right, sinful character with Christlike righteous
ness and good-will, the perishable treasures sought by selfish and
sinful desires with the good that has true worth, with the imperish
able treasures of union with God through loving trust in him, of
the perfection of our being in his likeness, of harmony with him
and with the constitution of the universe in universal love, and all
the happiness involved therein, described as " the peace of God
which passeth all understanding," as "being filled with all the
fulness of God."
vol. r. — 35

546 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
4. God's government being universal, submission to his will
and joy in his government are the duty and privilege of every
man always. As to God's moral law, every rational being in his
inmost character and in every act is under obligation to obey
God's law of love and to rejoice in it. And it is an essential ele
ment of a sinner's penitent submission to God that he acknowl
edge God's righteousness and good-will in the evils which, in
accordance with God's law, the sinner has brought on himself by
his sins, and of which he feels himself to be responsible author, as
well as in the blessings which, through God's redeeming grace,
sinners receive when they return to God in penitential and loving
trust and willing service.
Submission to God in his universal providential government
implies that every rational being, in every condition and in every
event should recognize God's sovereignty and rejoice in his wise
and beneficent rule as Lord of all. Men commonly recognize
God's providential government only in times of distress, when
their need of help from a power above themselves forces itself on
their attention. Harriet Martineau, giving an account of a lite
rary party at which Captain Ross was welcomed on his return
from the arctic zone, says : " Lady Stepney told me that the arc
tic voyagers had gone through hardships such as could never be
told ; but that it only proved that the Deity is everywhere, and
more particularly in barren places." J But God's sovereignty is
as real, and submission to his will and joy in his reign are as suit
able, in prosperity as in adversity. Men commonly think of their
dependence on God and their need of his help only in times of
weakness and danger. A newsboy in New York had become in
terested in a Sunday School. His teacher asked him if he prayed.
He said, " Yes, every night." But being asked if he did not pray
in the morning, he said : " No ; any smart boy can take care of
himself in the daytime." The simplicity of the boy is repeated
at least in the feelings of many of mature age. Canon Charles
Kingsley discloses unawares the same impression. In his biogra
phy he says that we should verbally recognize God in every event,
"even in the breaking of a plate." But why not equally in the
preservation of every plate which goes through the dinner un
broken ? His remark exposes also the danger of another error.
The verbal recognition of God in every little event would be
1 Autobiography, p. 281.

HIS GOVERNMENT IN ITS GENERIC SIGNIFICANCE 547
Pharisaical, priggish, and offensive. Submission to God implies
only an habitual sense of his presence and of our dependence on
and trust in him, — not the continual utterance of it.
Men commonly refer events to God's sovereignty only when
they are mysteries and they can assign no good reason for them.
This is a survival of the error that God's sovereignty is the su
premacy of his naked will. As church creeds have often said :
"God of his mere good pleasure," meaning the will acting with
out reason, the will stripped of all rationality, the will naked and
without reason, like the Gadarene among the tombs. But the
will of God is never naked, but clothed with rationality and in its
right mind. " When we do not know the reasons of God's doings
we trust the reasonableness of the doer." But events for which
we see the reasons are as really referable to the sovereignty of God.
All God's acts are for wise reasons and for the accomplishment of
wise ends, whether we know them or not.
5. It must be added, to prevent unwarranted objections, that
submission to God's government does not imply that sin and its
consequences are to be referred directly to God and submitted to
as coming from his hand. God has created free agents, and they
live together in the unity of a moral system. Therefore they act
on each other for good or for evil. Wicked men are the respon
sible authors of their own sins and of the evil which they in their
wickedness inflict on others. But God's universal government
encompasses the whole moral system. In the face of all the
powers of wickedness it insures that his is " a kingdom that can
not be shaken," 2 and that his purpose of wisdom and love cannot
be frustrated.
6. It follows that submission to God is not putting one's self
into God's hand. All beings are always in God's hand. Sinners
are in God's hand not less than saints. Sinners are in God's
hand while they fight against him. Submission to God is the
consent of the will to being in God's hand, in the act of loving
trust and confidence in him, and in willing obedience and service.
It is the consent of the will to our actual condition as creatures of
God and subjects of his law, thus coming into harmony with him,
rejoicing in his reign, and working willingly and joyously with him
in the accomplishment of his great designs of wisdom and love.
Thus the Christian's peace and joy are as immovable as the throne
and sovereignty of God on which they rest.
1 Heb. xii. 28.

CHAPTER XV.
god's providential government universal.
We have considered God's government in its generic meaning,
including both providential and moral government. We are now
to consider specifically God's providential government, — that is,
God's action on and in the universe considered as the condition,
immediate or remote, of the actuality of events. The specific
doctrine of this chapter is that God's providential government is
universal, extending to all creatures and events. The actuality of
every being and event throughout all time and space depends,
immediately or remotely, on the action of God. We are to ascer
tain the true significance of this doctrine, remove misapprehen
sions and answer objections, and vindicate its truth.
In discussing God's government in its generic meaning it was
shown that a recognition of the fact of creation, of the depend
ence of the universe on God for its being as well as for its ongoing,
is essential to a right understanding of God's government. But in
order to understand the universality of his providential govern
ment and see as clearly as we can in what sense the actuality of
the universe, and of all beings and events in it, depends on the
action of God, we must push our thought back of creation, to the
eternal purpose of God which he is realizing in the creation and
government of the universe.
Here we come upon a great question of the ages, how it is possi
ble that God purposes all events consistently with the reality of the
moral system and the free agency of man. Mystery, which the
finite mind can never wholly clear away, is involved in the very
fact that the absolute Being acts and reveals himself in a finite
universe existing in the forms of space and time. We are on this
side of the line which divides the finite from the absolute and can
never pass beyond it to observe from that point of view and with

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 549
absolute intelligence how the transition of the absolute into the
finite is made. But we know that it is made, that the finite uni
verse exists, and God continuously is acting and revealing himself
in it. We rest on the fact, though we cannot fully answer the
question of Nicodemus, How can these facts be? an unscientific
question, which our Lord rebuked ages before the Baconian philoso
phy, and which, as setting aside known facts, science now excludes.
Therefore mystery is not peculiar to God's universal providence
and purpose, but equally pertains to every revelation of himself
which God makes in the finite universe. In the preceding chap
ters we have attained a position above the old controversies on
the subject of God's universal providence and purpose and his
sovereignty exercised therein, from which we look down on the
positions occupied by each party and take up the truth and reject
the error of each. It is commonly said that the system of thought
on this subject known as the Augustinian or Calvinistic has been
abandoned under the light of modern thought. This is not true.
The essential truth which gave power to that system remains un
changed. The real change is that erroneous ways of expressing,
explaining, and defending the truth have been abandoned, and
the doctrine has been broadened by a full recognition of truth
which these errors had obscured. Neither party has been van
quished, but a way has been opened for mutual understanding
and coalescence. The fundamental truth of the Calvinistic sys
tem is the doctrine of God's absolute and universal sovereignty.
It is said, " There are theologians who accept this fundamental
fact of Calvin's theology and then repudiate its legitimate and
inevitable consequences." But usually this repudiation is not of
legitimate inferences from the true doctrine of God's sovereignty,
but only of inferences from the medieval conception of the naked
sovereignty of absolute and almighty will or from some other
erroneous representation. We do not deny God's absolute and
universal sovereignty, nor any legitimate inference from it, when
we affirm that its exercise is regulated by the eternal truths and
laws of reason and directed to the progressive realization in the
finite of the archetypal ideals of perfection and well-being eternal
in the absolute Reason, nor when we recognize the finite free
will and the essential characteristics of a moral system in their
full significance. God's plan of the universe is primarily in his
Reason. His universal purpose is simply the eternal free deter-

550 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
mination of his will to act always in accordance with the eternal
principles of Reason and progressively to realize its archetypal
ideal of all perfection and well-being possible in a finite universe
and in a moral system of rational free agents in the process of
development under the eternal moral law of love.
I. Statement of the Doctrine. — God knows eternally in his
own reason the archetype of the universe, the progressive realiza
tion of which, in the forms of space and time, will be the expres
sion of his wisdom and love and of all his perfections. It is the
eternal purpose of his will to realize this archetype known in his
reason. In this archetype he knows all events incidental to its
realization on account of the finiteness inseparable from created
being, and on account of the free will inseparable from a moral
system. It is the eternal purpose of his will so to act in refer
ence to these incidental events as to express his wisdom and love
and all his perfections. In his action in time in reference- to
these incidental events after they have come to pass, he so acts
as to make a perfect expression of his wisdom and love and all
his perfections ; he does not act otherwise than as he does, be
cause to act otherwise would not be the expression of wisdom
and love and divine perfection. The actuality of these incidental
events depends, not immediately but remotely, on the action of
God ; for if God had not proceeded to realize his archetypal idea
of the universe, these events would never have become actual.
Thus they occur under God's providential government, and are
included in his eternal purpose. In this sense God's providen
tial government is universal, and whatsoever comes to pass is in
cluded in his providential purpose. Therefore we may say in
short, that God's eternal and all-comprehending purpose is to
give full realization to the thought of his reason in the action of
his will ; or, to give full realization to the thought of his wisdom
in the action of his love.
The following are equivalent statements of the doctrine. It is
God's eternal purpose so to constitute the universe and so to act
on and in it in the exercise of his power, as to express in it his
own perfections. Or, it is God's eternal purpose so to constitute
the universe and so to act on, in, and through it in the exercise
of his power, as to realize and express in it, in the forms of space
and time, the archetype of all perfection and good accordant with

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 55 I
all rational principles and laws eternal in himself, the absolute
Reason. Or, it is, God's eternal purpose so to constitute the uni
verse and so to act on, in, and through it in the exercise of his
power, as to realize and express in it the thought of his perfect
wisdom in the action of his perfect love.
1 . God's government and his eternal purpose refer to the same
reality in different aspects. The reality is God's relation to the
universe, his action in it, and the ends which he is accomplishing
therein. When from our point of view in the universe already
existing we consider God's action in it, we call it God's govern
ment of the universe. When we think of God in his eternal be
ing before the world was made, and try to define his relation to
the universe from that point of view, we can think of it only as
his eternal purpose which he is to realize progressively in the uni
verse. And because God's government and his purpose are in
this sense essentially the same, God's purpose is distinguished as
providential and moral precisely as his government is distin
guished as providential and moral. His generic purpose is to
declare his own glory in the sense explained in a preceding chap
ter. It is to express and reveal in a finite universe his perfec
tions, his wisdom, love, and power. His moral purpose has
reference to personal beings in the moral system, to bring them
into willing conformity with his eternal law of love and so to in
sure to them their highest development and well-being. His
providential purpose is to- create and develop the universe, to
give actuality to the beings and events in it, in order to realize
the moral ends eternal in his archetypal ideal. As we have al
ready seen, personality is the only realm of ends and providential
government is subordinate to moral. So God's providential pur
pose to give actuality to the universe is subordinate to his moral
purpose to realize the reign of righteousness and good-will among
moral beings. From this point of view God's purpose is one,
the purpose to realize the archetypal idea of divine wisdom and
love in the moral and spiritual system to which the existence of
the universe and all God's action in it are subordinate. All which
he does to insure the actuality of events is subordinate to this
moral and spiritual end. God's purpose is one, through the sub
ordination of his providential government or purpose to the moral
and spiritual. Thus we exclude the old and misleading distinc
tions of God's purpose or will as secret and revealed, as decretive
and preceptive, as efficacious and permissive.

552 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
2. God's purpose is not an arbitrary fiat of naked and resist
less will. It presupposes the plan or archetype which reason
sees expressing perfect wisdom and love, and is the free deter
mination of God to realize this archetypal plan in the universe.
This has been already established. It is philosophically necessary
as demanded by reason. It is also taught in the Bible ; it is im
plied in the inspired declaration that God worketh all things after
the counsel of his will ; wisdom is declared to be the master-work
man in the creation of the universe ; x and the Scriptures through
out represent wisdom, righteousness, and good-will as guiding the
divine power in the creation and government of the universe.
Here we have the basis of fixed order and law in harmony with
freedom of will. Spinoza, seeking to account for the fixed order
and law of the universe to the exclusion of arbitrary and capri
cious will, was driven, in accordance with his pantheistic philo
sophy, to recognize necessity at the basis of all things. Some
theologians, seeking to exclude arbitrary will and to account for
the order and law of the universe, unwittingly follow Spinoza and
insist that back of the divine will there must be a necessity in
God. But we now see that the basis of the fixed order and law of
the universe is, first, the fact that God is the absolute Reason, in
whom all truth and law, all norms of perfection and worth, and the
archetypal ideal of the universe accordant therewith are eternal ;
and, secondly, that God by his eternal free choice determines all
the action of his power in harmony therewith. This excludes both
necessity or fate, and caprice, and recognizes intelligence and
freedom, wisdom and love, at the basis of the universe.
In harmony with the fixed order and law is freedom at the
foundation of all things. Duns Scotus upheld his extreme theory
of the absolute supremacy of will unregulated by law, by arguing
that otherwise God's freedom would be limited. The objection is
still urged by theologians that God's choice cannot be free be
cause it is eternal. They argue that it is essential to every free
choice that it be between different objects and be preceded by a
state of indetermination or indifference ; and this is not suppos-
able of God. This objection rests wholly upon the old and ex
ploded theory of the liberty of indifference. It precludes all
abiding choice and recognizes in the will only the function of
ictic volitions, each terminating in a single executive act and
1 Eph. i. ii, 12 ; Prov. viii. 30.

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 553
relapsing into indifference. It precludes the possibility of char
acter in the will and identifies character with necessity. But
according to the true conception of free will as power endowed
with reason and therefore self-directive and self-exertive, the will
remains free, however fixed and permanent the character ; for
character in its essence is primarily free choice. God in his
eternal choice in harmony with reason is eternally free. Thus in
God, — who is the absolute Reason and whose will is in eternal
harmony with reason by his own eternal free choice, — order, law
and freedom, wisdom and love, are the foundation of the universe
and are harmoniously active and revealed in it.1
Here also is the harmony of the fixed order and law of the uni
verse with intelligent design revealed in its evolution as a whole
and in all its parts and operations. It is of the essence of an intel
ligent plan that it is for the realization of some end ; this end may
be internal, the completion of the thing planned, or external, in
the uses for others which it subserves after it is completed. But
there cannot be external uses of the universe as a whole. All the
uses it subserves are within itself. Personal beings constitute the
realm of ends. Here is the external end for which the physical
system exists and whose uses it subserves. But the finite persons
are themselves included in the universe. God alone is external
to the universe. The only external end for which the universe
exists is to express and reveal the perfections of God, and to
realize the ideals of his wisdom and love. The universe is the
developing and growing image and expression of his wisdom, love,
and power. Herein God is accomplishing within the universe all
1 The doctrine of Augustine is that the law has its ultimate ground in
God's sapientia prima, his primitive rational intelligence; in which also* are
eternal the principles of logic, mathematics, aesthetics, and of all science and
art, as well as of ethics and the moral conduct of life. This law eternal and
immutable in God is transcribed in rational minds (transcribitur in sapientes
animos). In accordance with Augustine, Melanchthon says, " The law of God
is the rational intelligence (sapientia) eternal and immutable in God and
the norm of justice in the will of God." On the contrary, the Formula Con
cordia: says : " Law in its peculiar meaning (proprie) is the divine teaching
(doctrina) in which the most just and immutable will of God is revealed."
But in calling the will of God just, it implies its agreement with some law
behind it to which the will consents and so is a just will. The philosophy
of God's providential purpose which I have presented, though contradic
tory to much of the medieval and Protestant doctrine on this subject, is
in harmony with the philosophy of Augustine and with the best thought of
the Reformers.

554 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
the ends of perfect wisdom and love. The highest ends within
the universe are realized in the sphere of personality. Therefore
the highest end to be realized within the universe is the kingdom
of God, which includes for finite beings all that is true, right, per
fect, and good, and carries in it the realization of all worthy ends.1
Theologians, assuming explicitly or implicitly the supreme
sovereignty of naked will, have propounded doctrines disclosing
utter oblivion of free will, moral responsibility, moral law, and a
moral system, as well as of God's righteousness and good-will, in
any true significance. Bradwardine says : " Who or what reason
could have prohibited the Lord from creating, *if so it had pleased
him, from the beginning, heaven full of the elect in glory, and hell
full of the reprobate in punishment? " 2 Canon Mozley gives the
following as the common belief of the Christian Church : " The
doctrine of an eternal state of reward and punishment, which all
Christians admit, asserts the transference of human wills into a
state of necessity, both for evil and good, by an act of almighty
power ; that the wills of wicked men are, on their departure from
this life, put by this act into a state in which they are beyond re
covery ; those of the good into a state in which they are beyond
lapse. . . . Thus all God's moral creatures pass, at a particular
stage of their being, by an act of divine power, from a state in
which their wills are indeterminate and may choose either good
or evil, to a state in which they necessarily choose one or the
other." 3 Dr. Emmons taught that the only acts of the will are
1 The doctrine of God's universal and eternal purpose as thus explained
has an affinity with the Platonic philosophy. The Platonic eternal ideas, of
which the objects in the universe are manifestations and by which they can
be grouped in general notions and so designated by general names, become
in the light of Christianity ideas eternal in the mind of God, not disinte
grated, but in unity in his eternal archetype of the universe. And God's
eternal and universal purpose is simply his purpose to realize this archetype
in the universe and thus to reveal himself in the finite to finite persons, and
to develop his kingdom of light, life, and love, wherein the highest perfec
tion and well-being of his rational creatures will be insured.
2 Quoted by Canon Mozley, " Predestination," p. 280, note.
3 Mozley, " The Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination," pp. 230, 231. He
says : " We attribute to the Supreme Being, the angels and saints in their
state of reward, a necessity on the side of goodness ; but we attribute to
them the operation of a genuine will. We attribute to the evil spirits and the
wicked in their state of punishment a necessity on the side of evil, and
together with it the same genuine will." He assumes that their action is
the action of will, but that the will acts under necessity. His conception is

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 555
ictic volitions and that volitions in all men, whether right or
wrong, are created by the direct action of God.1 It is not sur
prising that men have rejected Christian theism itself when taught
to believe that it necessarily involves doctrines so contradictory to
common sense and common morality and so totally incompatible
with free agency, moral law, and a moral system. But by the cor
rection of the fundamental error of the supremacy of naked will,
on which these misrepresentations rest, and the presentation of the
true doctrine of God's providential government and purpose, the
ground is cut away from under these misrepresentations and the
objections to Christianity which they have occasioned.2
that the will is free only in a state of indifference and indetermination. He
has no conception of character in the will as abiding free choice of the object
of action ; but only as a pathological impulse or inclination resistlessly
necessitating action, in accordance with itself. But a will acting in necessity
is a contradiction. To say that necessity is freedom is as much a contradic
tion as to say that light is darkness. Freedom is of the essence of will. A
power that is not free in its action is not a will. And when he goes further
and says this necessity of the will is created by an act of external almighty
power exerted at a particular moment, " on their departure .from this life,"
this also is absurd. It is of the essence of will that it is itself the power
that determines. The conception of a will determined by external almighty
power is as absurd as the conception of an avalanche stopped in its descent
by an argument or an appeal to its pity, or of knowledge driven into a child's
head with a hammer. Canon Mozley claims that the conceptions he pre
sents are the commonly accepted doctrines of the Christian church. They
certainly have not been universally accepted. So far as they have been
held they have been a hindrance to the progress of Christianity among intel
ligent people. There is certainly no warrant for them in the Bible rightly
understood. 1 Works, vol. iv. Sermon 28, " God's Agency Universal," pp. 383, 385.
2 These errors involve a fatalism as complete as that of Islam. This is
expressed with appalling power in the " Rubaiyat " of Omar Khayyam, the
astronomer poet of Persia.
" We are no other than a moving row
Of magic shapes, that come and go
Round with this sun, illumined lantern held
In midnight by the master of the show.
Important pieces of the game he plays
Upon this checker-board of nights and days
Hither and thither moves and checks and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.
The ball no question makes of ayes and noes,
But right or left, as strikes the player, goes ;
And he who tost you down into the field,
He knows about it all — he knows — he knows." (p. 54, stanzas 68-70.)

556 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
3. God's providential purpose is eternal. He has not formed
or originated it at any point of time. His action, progressively
realizing his purpose in the forms of space and time, we call his
government of the universe. But the rational archetype which
he is realizing in time and his free purpose or determination to
realize it are eternal. Hence it is God's present as really as his
previous purpose. It is not an old program which he would now
gladly alter if he could. Hence no difficulty is removed by deny
ing God's eternal purpose in order to leave him free to determine
what to do in any emergency when it occurs. For God is free in
his eternal purpose, and he eternally purposes to act in any emer
gency just as he would purpose when it actually occurs in time, if
it should then first come to his notice. And the denial not only
removes no difficulties, but it also creates new ones. It involves
the denial of God's omniscience and of his absolute and uncon
ditioned independence ; for it supposes God to be ignorant of
events until they occur and dependent on their occurrence for his
determination of his own action and character.
4. God purposes primarily the realization of his archetypal
world-idea in the universe as a system of things, — particular
beings and events only as incidental to the system and in their
actual places and relations in it. God's purpose never termi
nates on an isolated being or event. The obvious reason is that
there are no isolated beings or events, but all are connected and
related in the unity of the universal system. Hence God's eter
nal purpose is one rather than many. And it is one also, as
already shown, in subordination of the providential purpose and
government to the moral.
This distinguishes the true doctrine from both the supralap-
sarian and the sublapsarian or infralapsarian forms of it. The
former supposes God's purpose respecting each person to ter
minate on his destiny, either his salvation or his perdition, pass
ing over his character and conduct, which are determined so as
to insure his foreordained destiny. The latter supposes God's
purpose to terminate on the character of the person, and his
destiny to be according to his character. But in distinction
from both of these, the truth is that God purposes primarily
the system of things in which he is progressively realizing his
archetypal world-idea, and the character and destiny of indivi
duals as they actually come to pass in the system.

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 557
This principle removes a whole class of errors and objections.
If a person wilfully persists in selfishness in violation of the law of
love and so misses all true good, it is objected that God created
him only to damn him. Whereas God created a moral system
under the law of love, gave this person being in it, and endowed
him with the high powers of reason and free will, therein making
him in God's image and capable of knowing God and of being
blessed in being like him and serving him and his fellow men in
love ; and God exhausted the resources of wisdom and love in
influencing him so to live ; but the person persisted in the life of
selfishness and thus deprived himself of all true good. God pur
posed the destiny of this person only as he purposed the perfect
moral system and gave to him its high powers and opportunities.
A moral system is possible only as it is composed of beings free
to do right or to do wrong.
5. So far as God brings events to pass by his own immediate
efficiency, he purposes to do so. So far as events are brought
to pass by the immediate agency of second causes, this also is
accordant with God's purpose. We have seen that God has
created the universe having real though dependent being, that
he has constituted it in accordance with the eternal principles
and laws of reason, and that it and everything in it must act
according to the constitution of its being. God will not change
the fundamental principles of the constitution, because the change
would be contrary to eternal reason. Immanent in the universe,
God acts on, in, and through the beings and agencies in it, causing
effects commensurate with the constitution of the being or agency
on, in, or through which he acts. Here are three factors in God's
providential government ; his immediate creative efficiency ; the
intermediate efficiency of created beings and agencies ; and God's
action on, in, and through these. These are also all included
in God's purpose, because he acts as he does in the full know
ledge of all the actual results, immediate or remote, of his action.
In these ways, God carries on his providential government of
the universe ; the physical system is evolved through successive
stages ; when the physical system is sufficiently evolved to make
their existence possible, personal beings appear, and their educa
tion, discipline, and development go on under moral law and gov
ernment, and under redemption. Thus God is progressively
accomplishing his eternal purpose to realize in the universe his

558 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
archetypal idea of perfection and well-being by the expression of
his own perfections and the manifestation of his wisdom and love,
so far as possible in a finite universe consistently with the eternal
principles and laws of reason.
The doctrine of God's eternal purpose implies no divine power
energizing in the universe other than that which is recognized
in his providential government. This removes various common
errors and objections founded on the idea that if God purposes an
event he must interpose his own direct efficiency to cause it.
It follows that the acts of free agents are purposed by God
only as their own free acts which he foresees they will do if
he gives reality to the moral system which reason demands and
which his perfect wisdom and love require. Therefore, it is not
properly said that it is God's purpose that men shall do as they
do, but only that they will do as they do ; that is, he knows, in
the archetype of the universe which he purposes to realize, that
they freely will do so.1
6. Whatever is in fact the constitution of things under God's
government is that which he has eternally purposed.
The relations Detween God's action and man actually existing in
the constitution of the universe are those which God eternally
purposes. If men are free agents, in fact God eternally purposes
that they shall be so. If God's action does not determine man's
action in fact, he eternally purposes to leave man to free self-
determination. If God's action is in fact merely the occasion of
man's action, he eternally purposes it to be so. If in any case
God's action affects man only in the sense that he created him
with a certain constitution and placed him in a certain environ
ment subject to certain external influences under which the man
acts freely, this is the relation between his action and man's which
God eternally purposes. If God comes to man in redemption,
and in the Holy Spirit exerts on him influences under which the
man freely returns in loving and penitential trust to God, this also
God eternally purposed.
The relations of means and end actually existing in God's gov-
1 Anselm says : " God foresees that I shall sin without necessity; . .
he foresees that the effect will occur in the way in which it -proceeds from
its cause: freely if from a free agent, contingently if from a contingent
cause, necessarily if from a cause acting under necessity." (Quoted by
Nitzsch, "Christliche Lehre," § 73, note.)

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 559
ernment are eternally purposed by God so to exist. If blessings
are obtained in answer to prayer; if they depend on human
diligence, as a harvest on the work of the farmer ; if men can
please God and win heaven only by lives of faith and love, these
conditions, actually existing in the government of God, are con
ditions eternally purposed by him. It is often objected that the
doctrine of God's purpose is incompatible with any real efficacy
in prayer and the use of means. But the contrary is true. God's
eternal purpose establishes indissolubly the connection of prayer,
effort, and right living with the obtaining of his blessing. " God
hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctifi
cation of the Spirit and belief of the truth." 1
Whatever are the reasons for which God acts in any case are
also the reasons why he eternally purposes so to act. All the
difficulties in the doctrine of God's purpose are equally difficulties
in the doctrine of his government. We escape none of them by
denying his purpose. It is a fact that the gospel of Christ has
been preached to some peoples and not to others ; that some
men who have the gospel accept Christ and others do not. The
difficulty is always in what God does, not in the fact that he
eternally purposes to do so. And whatever explains and removes
the difficulties and objections as to what God does in his govern
ment equally explains and removes those pertaining to God's
purpose. In fact the doctrine of God's purpose in itself gives us
relief and a ground of peace in the face of difficulties and objec
tions. We know it to be a purpose of perfect wisdom and love.
On this assurance we can rest in faith and peace in the presence
of difficulties which at the time we are unable to remove and
objections to which we do not yet see the answer.
A theory has been proposed, in the interest of human free
agency, that God determines the end or result, but that the
means or agency in effecting it are not included in his purpose.
But this dissolves all dependence of the end on the means, of the
result on the finite agency, and reduces not only human agency,
but that of all finite powers to an empty and illusive show. On
the other hand, in seeing results depending on their own agency,
and on means of their own devising, men are ready to forget
their dependence therein on God. A well-known preacher,
according to the printed report of his sermon, has recently said :
1 2 Thess. ii. 13.

560 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
" A merchant may attain his own ends without the assistance of
divine power, but the farmer looks to the God of the soil."
But the true doctrine is that God's providential purpose and gov
ernment extend both to the means and the end, both to the finite
agency and its effect.
II. Proof of the Doctrine. — It remains to consider the
reasons for accepting the doctrine as true.
r. Considered philosophically it is a reasonable doctrine. Diffi
culties and objections have arisen from misapprehensions of its
meaning, from identifying it with false theories and arguments in
its explanation and defence, and from attempting to define with
too minute particularity the methods and details of God's action
and purpose in his government. For example, in this country
the doctrine of God's sovereignty was supposed to involve as
essential the theory of determinism as set forth by President
Edwards in his " Treatise on the Will." So the science of elec
tricity is not to be identified with the theory either of Franklin
or Dufay, or even with the present theory of molecular action in
an ether. The facts of electricity remain though the theories
change. The doctrine of God's sovereignty, as rightly stated, is
free from these sources of difficulty and objection, and commends
itself to the reason as a clear and indubitable philosophical truth.
First, the doctrine, as stated in this chapter, is involved in the
idea of God and of his relation to the universe. It has been
shown that God's right to govern is in the fact that he is God ;
that it is essential in his Godhood and inseparable from it ; that
the fact that he is the creator of the universe, fully understood,
implies that he is Lord of all. Because he is the Creator, the
system of things which we call the universe depends always on him
for its existence. Every individual depends on God for his con
stitution and for his environment, and to a great extent for his own
peculiar condition and circumstances. And in the spiritual life
every created person is dependent on God for his gracious accep
tance and influence, and every sinner is dependent on him for
redemption and forgiveness. If God had acted differently in
creating and constituting the universe, if he had given to the
individual a different constitution and environment, if he had
brought him into being under different circumstances from those
which make his peculiar condition, if he had withheld from his

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 561
rational creatures the knowledge of his love, if he had wrought
no redemption for sinners, or having wrought it had left them
ignorant of it, — on any of these suppositions the course of the free
agent's action would have been different from what it actually has
been.1 In one or another of these ways the actuality of every
being and event is dependent on God and included in his pur
pose. And the reason why God has not changed his action in
any of these particulars is not any lack of power, if abstracted
from reason, to do it, but because he is perfect in wisdom and
love and all which he actually does in creating and governing the
universe is, by his own eternal free choice, in exact agreement
with the principles and laws of reason and the progressive realiza
tion of its ideals of perfection and good. Any change in the
actual course of God's action would be both unwise and unloving,
both foolish and wrong. Thus God's sovereignty is universal ; it
extends to every event, because every event is directly or indi
rectly dependent on God's action. Every event is dependent on
God at least in the sense that without God's action the event
would never have occurred. In this sense the free acts of men
are included under the purpose of God, as the ultimate ground of
their actuality ; but not as the immediate efficiency in causing
them, nor as imposing on the man any obligation nor establishing
any necessity so to act. On the contrary the purpose of God
insures that the man shall freely determine what he will do and
freely exert his own power in doing it.
Secondly, the doctrine of God's universal purpose is essential
as the only basis for the possibility of any free will, moral law, and
responsibility, or moral system in the universe. It is the doctrine
that the universe is ultimately grounded in rationality and free
dom, not in blind force, necessity, or fate, nor in arbitrary and
capricious will, almighty but not regulated by law nor deter
mined in wisdom and love. If this doctrine is not true, if the
universe is not ultimately grounded in rationality and freedom,
then it is grounded in blind fate or capricious almightiness. But
if rationality and freedom are excluded from the ultimate ground
of the univeise, from its first cause and origin, they are excluded
everywhere. If they do not come in at the beginning, they can-
1 Leibnitz uses the illustration that if Tarquin the Proud had been born
the son of a shepherd in Thrace, he might have spent his life in feeding
sheep and never have committed the crimes of which he was actually guilty.
VOL. I. — 36

562 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
not come in afterwards. Then the universe reveals nothing but
force acting in blind necessity ; and the darkness of atheism
settles over it all. It has been often asserted that the doctrine
of God's universal purpose involves fatalism. But, in fact, it is
the only doctrine which precludes it and establishes the supremacy
of reason and free will throughout the universe.
The practical difficulty respecting the doctrine has always per
tained to its reconciliation with human freedom and responsibility.
Neither Calvin, nor Augustine, nor Christianity originated the dis
cussion of this problem. The two facts of divine sovereignty
and human freedom have always confronted each other. The
problem of finding their harmony has been discussed ever since
philosophical thought began. The two are realities. They must
be acknowledged and held fast, whether we can or cannot show
just how they are in harmony. Men are wont to overlook or
obscure one or the other of two complemental truths ; they even
mistake them for contradictories. So it has been in this case.
The Stoics subjected the gods themselves to fate. The Epicureans
banished them from all active participation in the government of
the world. The harmony of the two will never be found by
obscuring the significance, of either, but only by holding each in
its full significance. And this is characteristic of the Bible.
It does not obscure the significance of either, but presents each,
without qualification or explanation, in its full power. It makes
no attempt at reconciling them. Its writers, under divine inspira
tion, seemed to see no occasion for explanation or reconciliation.
And when we clear these two great realities from misapprehension
and from false theories and arguments, we find, instead of con
tradiction, that God's rational, eternal, universal and sovereign
purpose is the basis of all rationality and freedom ; and that with
out it free agency, moral responsibility, law and government, and
a moral system, could have no place in the universe.
Thirdly, the universality of God's providential government is
essential to its existence as supreme and absolute government
regulated by eternal law. It is essential as insuring that no power
in the universe can be above and beyond the control of God. If,
for example, the acts of the wicked are not in any true sense
under God's providential government and included in his provi
dential purpose, then ut doing wickedness the transgressor es
capes from God's control and is no longer in God's hand. Then

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 563
in transgressing God's moral law he steps over and beyond God's
providential purpose and government. He becomes independent
of God. Then God is no longer the absolute and unconditioned
Being. The evil one is mightier than God. Then the power of
wickedness might overmaster God, overthrow his kingdom and
frustrate his purpose of wisdom and love. Then the power of
evil would be absolute and we should be driven to the old Persian
doctrine that it is eternal, self- existent, and independent. But er
ror, sin, and evil are always finite, — of time, not of eternity, of the
creature, not of God. God's government is secure above all the
powers of evil. " Why do the nations rage, and the peoples
imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together against Jehovah and against
his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder and cast
away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall
laugh ; Jehovah shall have them in derision." J If indeed any
thing exists, occurs, or is done in the universe with which God
has nothing to do directly or indirectly, then that would be some
thing independent of God, not included in his purpose nor under
his providential government. But all theists, believing in God, on
whom the universe depends for its existence, must believe, as
necessarily implied in this, that every being, power and event in
the universe is directly or indirectly dependent on God and there
fore subject to his providential government and included under
his providential purpose.
Fourthly, God's providential purpose must extend to every
event in order to insure the actuality of any event. This rests on
the facts that God's providential purpose or government is not
only absolute and unconditioned but also regulated • by eternal
law, and consequently that all things exist in the unity of system
under law. The scientific unity of the physical system under its
laws of the uniformity and continuity of nature reveals the univer
sality of God's providential government and purpose in the sphere
of physical and impersonal being. Under the laws of gravity, of
light, heat, and electricity, and of the persistence of force, every
planet responds to every energy exerted by the sun, and the move
ments of every planet are responded to by the sun and by every
other planet. And every power exerted by beings on the earth
reports itself in effects, whether measurable or not by a finite
1 Psalm ii. 1-4.

564 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
mind, in every planet. If one throws a stone or lifts his hand he
propagates a force which has come upon him from the universe
and which he transmits onward through the universe. If then
God's government in the physical system is absolute and universal,
but under law, it must extend to every being and action in the
system or it cannot extend to any. It must be co-extensive with
the reign of law. If it has been purposed that a spar floating on
the sea is to be driven ashore at Bar Harbor at noon to-day, the
purpose must have included the action on it of every wind, cur
rent, tide, and wave which has acted on it, as well as all the
antecedents which determined the precise time and place at
which it fell into the ocean.
It is equally true of God's providential purpose respecting men,
that it must extend to every event in order to insure the actuality
of any event. If the least event takes place contrary to his pur
pose it may frustrate a far-reaching plan. The cackling of geese
saved Rome from capture by the Gauls. If they had been silent
the history of the world from that time onward would have been
changed. In Mohammed's earlier life a woman attempted to
poison him in his mutton. Had. she given a little more powerful
dose, Mohammedism might never have arisen. It is a common
experience of men that seemingly trivial incidents have been the
occasion of important determinations of the course of life. On
the other hand, if God has purposed a particular event he must
have purposed its antecedents. It was foretold that the Messiah
should be born in Bethlehem. A decree of the Roman Emperor
was the occasion of the journey thither of Joseph and Mary. In
order to the issuing of that decree at that time the progress of
Rome to dominion must have been what it bad been. A single
victory changed into a defeat might have delayed or prevented
the triumph of Csesar Augustus, the decree might not have been
issued and the prophecy might not have been fulfilled.
If, however, God's providential purpose implies the supremacy
of naked will unregulated by law, it would not be necessary that
everything be included under his purpose and be subject to his
government. When the time came for the floating spar to be
landed at the appointed place, if the winds and waves were not
bringing it, God, by an immediate exercise of his arbitrary power,
could bring it, if necessary, from the Indian Ocean. If God's
will in his government were not regulated by law, the universe

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 565
would be unregulated by law, and God, by his arbitrary and
capricious almightiness, could effect whatever he purposed at any
place or time. But because his will is regulated by law, the uni
verse is regulated by law, and therefore God's purpose in the
universe is accomplished by his acting in, on, and through the
universe and the finite beings and powers in it, and in accord
ance with the laws of their constitution. Therefore his provi
dential purpose and government must be universal. For the
same reason his archetypal world-idea must be realized pro
gressively; its great epochs come, its higher orders of beings
and stages of existence are evolved in the slow movement of
cosmic agencies acting according to the laws of their being.
And in the moral and spiritual system, in the sphere of personality,
education, discipline, and development, redemption from sin and
the progress of the kingdom of God are progressive in, on, and
through finite persons and their agencies and institutions. And the
progress is slow, commensurate with the limited powers of the
moral agencies through which it is effected. Our Saviour com
pares it to the slow organic growth of grain ; first the blade, then
the ear, then the full corn in the ear. And this is so because
God's government is regulated by reason in wisdom and love,
and is commensurate with the reign of law. It could not be
otherwise except by substituting the reign of capricious and
almighty will for the reign of reason and law ; and this substitu
tion would involve the exclusion from the universe of all ration
ality, of all free and responsible moral agents, of all moral law
and government, and of the whole moral and spiritual system.
Sheer materialism, without the order and continuity of nature,
would be the necessary issue. But because God's providential
purpose or government is commensurate with the reign of law, it
must be universal.
2. The doctrine of God's universal providential purpose and
government as here set forth, is in accordance with the Bible.
First, the Bible emphatically asserts and everywhere implies
that God's providential government of the world is in righteous
ness and good-will, in wisdom and love, in accordance with
eternal truth and law ; that it is administered for the realization
of the highest moral and spiritual ends, and thus his providential
purpose is subordinated to ends of his moral government ; that
in the creation and government of the universe he is expressing

566 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
and revealing all his divine perfections, and so declaring his own
glory. God is represented repeatedly as appealing to the reason
and moral sense of men to examine and see that all his action
towards them is reasonable and right. The Bible represents
God's government as absolute, independent, and supreme, yet
as regulated by law and administered in the interest of truth,
righteousness, and good-will. This is disclosed in the whole of
God's historical revelation of himself recorded in the Bible ; in
the whole of his redemptive action culminating in Christ and the
work of the Holy Spirit.
Secondly, the universality of God's providential purpose and
government is also taught abundantly and emphatically in the
Bible, both in general assertions and in particular examples.
It is unnecessary to cite texts to prove what is implied every
where in the inspired writings. Among the events referred in
the Bible to the providential government of God, are the origin
and division of nations (Acts xvii. 26) ; the revolutions of king
doms, of which the book of Daniel is a continuous example ; the
acquisition of wealth and honor (1 Chron. xxix. n, T2) ; the
death of individuals (Job xiv. 5) ; the sale of Joseph into Egypt;
the most minute events, as the casting of a lot, the fall of a spar
row, the feeding of the birds, the numbering of the hairs of the
head (Prov. xvi. 33; Matth. vi. 26; x. 29, 30; Luke xxi. r8).
The coming of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, the coming of
God's kingdom through successive stages, the redemption of men
from sin as a whole, and in all its details and results, are always
described as the action of God, and referred to his gracious and
sovereign purpose.
Thirdly, the Bible also represents the actions of free agents as
included under the providential purpose and government of God,
but only in such sense that their free agency in their actions and
their moral responsibility for them remain unimpaired. This is
exemplified in the biblical representations of the guilt of those
who caused the crucifixion of Jesus : " Him being delivered up
by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by
the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay " ; " For of a truth
against thy holy servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both
Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of
Israel, were gathered together to do whatsoever thy hand and thy
counsel foreordained to come to pass " (Acts ii. 23 ; iv. 27, 28).

GOD'S PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL 56;
In both passages it is plain from the context that the wickedness
and guilt of all concerned in causing Jesus to be crucified are
emphasized. Fourthly, the same recognition of man's free agency with
God's providential government and purpose is exemplified in
the whole biblical record of the history of Israel. The prophets
in successive generations habitually recall to remembrance the
fact that it was God, known by his memorial name Jehovah as
the God of Israel by the covenant of his grace, who brought them
out from Egypt and their slavery there. Throughout all the history
of Israel, in its great epochs and its critical emergencies, and in
the common course of events, the hand of Jehovah is recognized,
while the freedom and moral responsibility of the people, alike in
their obedience and their disobedience, and their actual efficiency
in determining the course of events, are emphatically declared.
This freedom and responsibility are assumed by all the prophets,
and are the very ground why God sends them to utter their
prophetic warnings. The providence of God and the freedom
and responsibility of the people in all the history of Israel were
recognized in their public worship, and solemnly chanted in the
temple (Psalms cv., cvi., cvii.).
In the revelation of these two factors the history of Israel is
the type of all history. In it the veil is lifted and God's provi
dential purpose and agency are clearly revealed with and above
man's free and responsible efficiency. The same two factors are
in the history of Christendom, and in all history, although in
some nations and periods the divine providence is more clearly
revealed than in others. God has always advanced his kingdom
through the agency of chosen peoples. God's hand in America
has been the theme of discourses and of written essays ; it is as
really evident as in the history of Israel. All true philosophy of
history must recognize these two factors, the providential purpose
and government of God and the agency, plans, and institutions
of men. Positivists have sometimes said there can be no philo
sophy of human history.1 On the basis of Positivism this is true ;
and it equally precludes philosophy from every sphere of knowl
edge and limits science to the phenomena of sense. The only
basis for philosophy is the recognition of the fact that the uni
verse is ultimately grounded in Reason freely but progressively
1 Popular Science Monthly, Dec. 18, 1873.

568 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
revealing in it the archetypal ideal of eternal reason in accord
ance with its eternal truths and laws. The only basis for the
philosophy of human history is the recognition of the providential
purpose and government of God, under the guidance of eternal
wisdom and love, progressively realizing the ideal of all perfection
and good through the free agency of rational and morally respon
sible persons. Every great advance in human progress, like the
extinction of negro slavery in the United States of America, and
many other great events in recent times, throws light on the
moral significance of events, not understood when they were
occurring, in their relation to human progress. The growth of
God's kingdom in the future will more and more reveal the sig
nificance of his providential government, till at last, in the con
summation of the divine work of redemption, his grand purpose
to declare his glory will be made evident ; and then will be heard,
" as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of
many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying,
Hallelujah, for the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigneth. Let
us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto
him" (Rev. xix. 6, 7). So the whole history of the world has
shown and will continue to demonstrate that " wisdom is justified
of her children."
Thus the Bible everywhere recognizes and emphasizes in the
history of nations and in all the affairs of men both God's provi
dential purpose and government and man's free will and moral
responsibility and his real efficiency in determining the course of
events. The inspired writers seem to see no incompatibility of
these two factors of human history. They present no theory to
explain the mode of their co-operation. The fact that they thus
emphasize both proves that the doctrine of God's universal provi
dential purpose and government, as they conceived it, contains
no elements incompatible with the free agency and moral respon
sibility of man, and sets forth a purpose and government planned
in eternal reason, accordant with its truths and laws, for the reali
zation of all perfection and good, and administered through the
whole history of man in perfect wisdom and love. .

CHAPTER XVI
PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT IN RELATION TO SIN
That the fact of sin does not disprove either the love or the
power of God was established in the discussion of God's moral
attributes. It only remains to ascertain what additional light,
from the point of view now attained, is thrown on the true signi
ficance of the doctrine that the sin of free agents is included
under the providential government and purpose of God, and of
the biblical representations of it.
I. From our present point of view we see that God's purpose
of the holy character and actions of his rational creatures is posi
tive ; his purpose of their sinful character and action is negative.
God's purpose is revealed in what he does. His purpose of holy
character and action is positive ; it is the purpose always to act
in the interest of holiness or universal love. In all his action in
creating and governing the universe he is revealing his perfec
tions and thus presenting to all rational beings motives to trust
and serve him in the life of universal love ; in addition to this,
in his Holy Spirit poured out on all, he is exerting direct and
positive influence to induce men to lead lives of righteousness
and good-will ; and all his action in his providential government
is accordant with the moral law of universal love and subordi
nated to moral ends in the advancement of his kingdom, the
universal reign of righteousness and good-will. And, as already
shown, in the case of every individual he does all to prevent his
sinning, or, if he is a sinner, to reclaim him to the life of holiness,
which perfect wisdom and love require or permit. When he
does anything it is because perfect wisdom and love require it ;
if he does not do more or otherwise, it is because perfect wisdom
and love do not permit him to do more or otherwise. Therefore

57° THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
God's purpose of the right character and action of men is posi
tive. On the other hand, his purpose of the wrong character and
action of rational beings is negative ; because it is his purpose
not to do more or otherwise than he does to lead them to holi
ness. He purposes that all his positive action shall be in the
interest of holiness. Then his purpose respecting sin is not to
do more or otherwise than he does to prevent it or to reclaim
the sinner from it. And the reason is, that in the case of every
individual he does all to draw him from sin which wisdom and
love permit or require. As Professor Forbes, of Aberdeen, truly
says : " In no case, even that of the greatest sinners, has aught
been omitted by God which he knew could possibly avail for
their amendment." J Then the purpose not to do more or other
wise is not a positive purpose but negative. It is involved in the
positive purpose to do for the prevention of sin or reclamation
from it all which wisdom and love require, and nothing which
wisdom and love forbid. It is like God's negative purpose not
to expend moral influence on a tree to induce it to love God and
its neighbor. A purpose to expend moral influence to lead to
a holy life on a being that, by its constitution like a tree, or by a
character confirmed in wickedness, is beyond the reach of moral
influence, would be unreasonable.2 This not doing more or
otherwise in any case involves no change in God's good-will, in
his gracious disposition toward all his creatures, and his willing
ness to reclaim them to repentance and filial trust in him, and to
receive all who thus return to him and to the life of universal
love. This is exemplified in Christ's weeping over Jerusalem
while pronouncing the doom which the people had brought on
themselves by resisting the long-continued offers and influences
of divine love. And God himself declares, " As I live, saith Je
hovah, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, but
that the wicked turn from his way and live." And Paul says of
God : " Who willeth that all men should be saved and come to
the knowledge of the truth."8
It follows that the providential purpose of God in its true
1 Predestination and Freewill and the Westminster Confession, pp. 18, 19.
2 " Nor is anything ordained by God by which a man is made worse, but
only that by which he is made better is ordained." (Augustine.)
3 Luke xix. 41-44; Ezek. xxxiii. n ; 1 Tim. ii. 4; Matth. xxiii. 37-39;
Luke xv. 1-32.

PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT IN RELATION TO SIN 571
meaning excludes the reprobation of any to Hell by the decree
of arbitrary and almighty will unregulated by law and without
reference to the foreseen character of the person, and all or
dering by God of the person's circumstances for the purpose of
excluding him from salvation, and all positive efficiency of God
determining the will in fixed necessity at death or at any time,
and the regeneration of the elect by almighty power or irresistible
grace while arbitrarily withholding from the reprobate this grace
without which they cannot return to God.1 The doctrines thus
excluded are contradictory to reason, incompatible with free will,
subversive of moral responsibility, law, and government, and of
our fundamental conceptions of the wisdom and love of God and
of the reasonableness of all his action. And the doctrine of
reprobation is not taught in the Bible. The Greek word trans
lated reprobate, denotes that which has been put to the test and
found wanting ; or, as Grimm translates it, found good for noth
ing (ineptus ad aliquid) . Thus the Bible, in its use of this word,
asserts the very contrary of an arbitrary reprobation, since the
word implies rejection only after probation and failure under it.2
The man is not worthless because he has been reprobated ; he is
reprobated because he has been found to be worthless. The sin
ner's persistence in sin is not the consequence of the divine Spi
rit's withdrawal, but the Spirit's withdrawal is the consequence
of his persistence in sin. And the evil to which he is given over
is his own sinful character, his own reprobate mind. He is left
to gratify his own evil desires, to persist in his own self-sufficiency,
self-will, and self-seeking, the worst and only essential evil. He
1 Calvin says : " Predestination is the eternal decree of God by which he
determined with himself what he would have to be done with every man.
For all are not created on equal terms ; but to some of them eternal life is
preordained, and to others eternal damnation. Therefore, as each has been
created for the one or the other of these two ends, we say he has been pre
destined to life or death." " Therefore if we cannot assign any reason for
his bestowing mercy on his people except that such is his pleasure, neither
can we have any other ground for his reprobating others but his own will."
" Those, therefore, whom God passes by he reprobates, and that for no
other reason but because it is his will to exclude them from the inheritance
which he predestines to his children." " A horrible decree indeed, I con
fess " ("Decretum quidem horribile fateor"). (Institutes, Bk. iii. chap.
21, § 5; chap. 22, § n ; chap. 23, §§ 1 & 7.)
2 Rom. i. 28; Tit. 1. 16; Heb. vi. 8 ; 1 Cor. ix. 27; 2 Cor. xiii. 5, 7 ; 2
Tim. iii. 8.

572 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
has chosen the earthly, the sensual, and the devilish as his good,
and thus he has shut himself up to it as that which alone he has
made himself capable of enjoying. " Whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap." "Thine own wickedness shall correct
thee and thy backslidings shall reprove thee." "They shall eat
the fruit of their own way and be filled with their own devices"
(Gal. vi. 7 ; Jeremiah ii. 19 ; Prov. i. 31 ; Isa. iii. 10). And this
result comes about in accordance with a universal law of the moral
system. God's gifts when neglected or misused are withdrawn ;
when rightly used they are continued and increased.
Here it is asked, Is any relief gained by regarding God as the
ultimate ground of the actuality of sin, instead of as its immediate
author? Does the intervention of any number of second causes
relieve the difficulty, inasmuch as they all depend on the First
Cause ? This question rests on the assumption that God's pur
pose is the arbitrary decree of capricious will ; and regards God's
causal efficiency or almightiness as the only factor in the solution
of the problem. If this were all, the intervention of second
causes would not remove the difficulty ; they would be puppets
moving as the master of the show pulled the string. The real
efficiency of second causes is a fact essential in any right concep
tion of God's providential government. But we must look be
yond the power of God and the efficiency of second causes and
comprehend all that belongs to the conception of the universe as
grounded in reason, of the reality of free will, of the moral law
and the moral system, and of God realizing his world-idea in the
action' of perfect wisdom and love. The rational free agent is
a sort of sub-creative centre of character, action, and influence.
After creating such a being God leaves him free to determine for
himself his own ends and actions, to direct and exert his own
power. Should any other being intrude within his personality
and make his determinations for him, he would cease to be
a free and responsible agent. Then it is clear that the sinner,
however dependent on God, is himself the sole responsible author
of his own sin.
Here it may be objected that, according to this doctrine, sin,
so far as it exists, frustrates the plan and purpose of God. In
respect to this, Canon Westcott says : " Sin did not alter the
divine purpose, but it modified the mode of its fulfilment." x
1 Christus Consummator, p. 118.

PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT IN RELATION TO SIN 573
This perhaps expresses the fact well enough as seen from our
point of view within the universe. But whatever modification
of the mode of fulfilling God's purpose is made on account of sin
is included in his eternal purpose itself. We must suppose that
the method of God's realizing his archetypal world-idea is differ
ent in view of the fact of sin from what it would have been if
none had sinned : yet the actuality of sin was eternally foreknown
by God, and was taken into account in his eternal purpose.
This signifies that sin is the real and essential evil ; that it is a
real hindrance and delay to the progressive realization of the
archetypal ideal of perfection and good ; that the energies of all
who are at one with God must be concentrated on reclaiming
men from it to the love and service of God ; entering into the
work of the God in Christ, who came to seek and to save the
lost. There is a real conflict in the world between love and
selfishness, between the children of light and the powers of dark
ness. But the powers of evil are finite and dependent, and can
not prevent the progressive realization of all that God in his
wisdom and love purposes. This fact that God's eternal purpose
to realize his world-idea must take cognizance of the foreseen fact
of sin discloses the fallacy of a familiar line of argument. An
example is the argument that God in Christ could not have come
into the world on account of sin, because in that case this great
transaction would have had its ground in the finite and the sinful.
But sin foreseen as actual must have been taken account of in the
eternal purpose of God ; and no man can determine a priori by
what different methods God would have revealed his glory if man
had never sinned. Certainly, as we have already seen, it would
be by some revelation of God in his likeness to men and his love
for them not less effective than his revelation in Christ. There
fore the great revelation of God in Christ in the incarnation is not
conditioned on the fact of sin ; but only the forms of the revela
tion in Christ and the events attending it which were incidental
to the fact that he came into a world of sinners. Therefore
the argument is not valid that because God eternally purposes
to adapt his method of realizing his archetypal world-idea with
reference to the foreseen fact of sin, therefore sin is itself eter
nally and unconditionally necessary in the archetypal idea itself
and essential in the constitution of the universe ; for in determin
ing his method of realizing his world-idea sin is considered by

574 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
God as just what it is, the action of a finite free agent, by his own
free choice living a life of supreme selfishness in disobedience
to God's law of love. Nothing is eternal or necessary in respect
to it except the possibility that a finite free agent may sin. This
possibility cannot be eliminated from the conception of a finite
free agent and a moral system.
II. God in all his action recorded in the Bible reveals himself
as always seeking to prevent sin and to reclaim sinners to the
godly life of righteousness and good-will. He thus reveals him
self in declaring, maintaining, and enforcing the law of love, in his
whole work of redeeming men from sin, and in all his dealings
with nations and individuals. There are also general assertions
that God is in no sense the responsible author of sin. " All that
is in the world," as distinguished from the kingdom of God and
antagonistic to it, " the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes
and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world." x
Here the objection is urged that the Bible sometimes seems
to imply that God is the immediate author of sin. There is a
considerable number of these texts ; but as compared with the
whole Bible they are very few. The seeming meaning attributed
to them is in direct contradiction to the whole tenor of the
biblical representations of God; and this establishes a strong
presumption that the seeming meaning is not the real one.
Some of these texts merely declare that God withdraws his
gracious influences from sinners who persist in resisting them.
They are left to go on in their own chosen way. He is repre
sented as thus withdrawing from heathen nations, " because that,
knowing God, they glorified him not as God . . . and refused
to have God in their knowledge." 2 He temporarily withdraws
his favor from Israel as his chosen people, on account of their
idolatry and disobedience; but over and over receives them
again when they repent.8 And at last, when they rejected the
Christ, he rejected them finally as having any peculiar privileges
as his chosen people, though still inviting them personally to
come to him in Christ and offering his grace to them freely
1 I John ii. 16; James i. 13-15; iii. 13-18; Ezek. xviii. 4-32; xxxiii.
10, 11.
2 Rom. i. 18-32.
8 Psalm lxxxi. 11, 12 ; Hosea iv. 17 ; and many others.

PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT IN RELATION TO SIN 575
as to all men. He is also represented as withdrawing his
gracious influences from individuals in consequence of their
persistent resistance of his grace and continuance in sin.2
God never withdraws his Spirit and grace from any one except
in consequence of his resistance of the gracious influences and his
persistence in sin.
He does not amuse himself with awakening a sinner's spiritual
aspirations while withholding the irresistible grace without which
the sinner cannot repent, lifting the sinner toward heaven till he
catches some glimpse of its glory and begins to feel some longing
to return to God, and then letting him drop only to see him fall
deeper into hell. He forsakes no sinner until he sees that the
sinner has by his own action so confirmed and fixed his evil
character as to be beyond the reach of moral influence to turn
him back to the life of faith and love. Then as incorrigible, and
only then, sinners are abandoned to themselves. They are left
to gratify their own sinful desires and to follow their own sinful
determinations. The evil which they suffer is the corruption and
perversion of their own being. The final sentence, Depart, is
only the declaration of the final and unchangeable separation
from God which they have themselves chosen and which they
have spent their energies all their lives long in effecting. God
awards to the sinner his final destiny according to a fixed law of
the moral system, that the neglect or misuse of gifts and oppor
tunities leads to forfeiture and loss, and powers abused are per
verted to evil; but the right use of them leads to increase,
improvement, and development. God's laws are not enforced,
like human laws, at the point of the sword, but through the very
constitution of the universe. The sinner's alienation and sepa
ration from God, with all the woes incident thereto, cannot be
avoided by one persisting in sin, so long as the universe remains
constituted according to the principles and laws of wisdom and
love and for the realization of the archetypal ideal of all perfec
tion and good.
A second class of these texts comprises three which assert
God's universal providential government probably in contradic
tion of the Persian doctrine that there are two eternal deities, one
1 Matth. xxiii. 29-39 ; Luke xix. 41-44; Rom- ix-> x-> xi-
2 Matth. xii. 31 ; Mark iii. 28 ; Heb. vi. 4; x. 26; 1 John v. 16 ; Prov. i.
24-33-

576 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
good and the other evil.1 In opposition to this doctrine, these
texts assert that sin and evil are finite and dependent, have their
existence only in time, and are not absolute, independent, and
eternal. There is a third class of these texts, the language of which
seems to affirm that God causes men to sin by his direct effi
ciency. These are texts in which God is said to harden men's
hearts, to lay stumbling-blocks in their way, to send delusion, to
stir up adversaries, and the like.2
The general explanation is that in these texts God's agency is
indicated in popular language without discriminating between the
remote occasion and the immediate efficient cause.
The same usage prevails in popular language everywhere and
always. It is commonly said that a revival of religion hardens
the hearts of those who go through it without accepting Christ
as he is offered in the gospel. We speak familiarly of gospel-
hardened sinners. This language is understood at once. No
body solemnly objects to it as declaring that the gospel or the
influence of God's Spirit in a revival causes men to sin. In the
same manner Paul speaks of the gospel which he preached as a
savor of life unto life to those who accepted the offered grace of
God in Christ, and of death unto death to those who rejected it.
Yet he explains that in each case the gospel preached rose, like
fragrant incense, with the sweet savor of Christ unto God, be
cause in each case the good news of God's redeeming grace had
been proclaimed to men and all the fulness of his love had come
to them in his Holy Spirit to draw them to himself.
It must also be remembered that the habit of philosophical
thought was never conspicuous among the Israelites. It is pre
cisely in respect to this that Paul contrasts them with the Greeks.3
They were wont to refer every event to God, without troubling
themselves with exact philosophical definitions and distinctions.

1 Isaiah xlv. 7 ; Amos iii. 6 ; Prov. xvi. 4.
2 Ex. Iv. 21 ; vii. 13, 3 ; x. I, 20, 27 ; xi. 10 ; xiv. 8 ; Deut. ii. 30 ; xxix. 4 ;
Josh. xi. 19, 20; 1 Sam. xxvi. 19, 20; 2 Sam. xii. 11; xxiv. 1 ; xvi. 10;
1 Kgs. xi. 23; xxii. 20; 2 Kgs. xxiv. 20; Psalm cv. 25; cvi. 15; Isa.
xxvi. 12; viii. 14; lxiii. 17; Jerem. vi. 21 ; Lam. iii. 38; Ezek. iii. 20; xiv. 9;
xx. 25, 26; Zech. viii. 10; John xii. 39; Rom. ix. 18; xi. 7, 8; 2 Thess. ii.
10, n ; Rev. xvii. 17.
3 1 Cor. i. 22-24.

PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT IN RELATION TO SIN 577
The Lord thundereth in the heavens.1 The same is a peculiarity
of other Semitic peoples to this day.
This usage of language is common in the Bible on other sub
jects. " The Lord plagued the people because they made the
calf which Aaron made." Paul says that our sinful passions are
by the law. He afterwards explains that the law is not the cause
but only the occasion of our own sinful action.2 An act cannot
be sin if there is no law. The prophets are habitually said to do
what they only foretell to be done by God.8
The same action ascribed immediately to God in one passage
is sometimes ascribed elsewhere to some other agency. In
Isaiah we read : " And he said, Go and .... make the
heart of this people fat and make their ears heavy and shut their
eyes, lest they see with their eyes and understand with their
heart and convert and be healed." Here, according to the usage
already mentioned, the prophet is represented as doing that of
which his prophecy will be the occasion. The agency is here
ascribed to the prophet. This passage is referred to by John
and by Paul, both of whom ascribe the hardening of the heart to
God. It is referred to by Matthew and in the Acts of the Apos
tles simply as stating the fact that the people's heart is waxed
gross, that their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have
closed, as the reason why they do not understand Christ and
receive him as the Messiah. Mark and Luke refer to it as a fact
and as the reason why Christ spoke in parables.4 In some texts
it is said that God hardened Pharaoh's heart ; in others it is said
Pharaoh himself hardened his heart ; 6 in others, simply that his
heart was hardened. This reference of the same event some
times to one and sometimes to another of the various agencies
immediately or remotely connected with it, exemplifies and con
firms the fact that the writers used popular language without dis
criminating between the immediate efficient cause and the remote

1 Ps. xxix.
2 Exod. xxxii. 35; Rom. vii. 5-12.
8 Gen. xxvii. 37 ; Isa. vi. 9, 10; Jerem. i. 10; xv. 1 ; Ezek. iv. 2; xxxii.
18 ; Hosea vi. 5.
* Isa. vi. 9, 10; John xii. 40; Rom. xi. 7, 8; Matth. xiii. 15; Acts xxviii.
26, 27 ; Mark iv. 11, 12 ; Luke viii. 10.
6 Exod. viii. 15, 32; ix. 34; I Sam. vi. 6; Exod. vii. 22; viii. 19; ix.
7. 35- VOL. I. — 37

578 THE LORD OF ALL IN PROVIDENCE
occasion of the event. And the same is further confirmed by
the actual occurrence of the fact referred to. When a prophet
is told to cast out a people or to destroy a city, it is not the
prophet who effects the overthrow ; but when the people disre
gard the divine warning through the prophet, the calamity comes
on them from a conquering enemy or some other agency, seem
ing to come about in the natural course of events. When a
prophet is told to make the heart of a people fat, to make their
ears heavy and to shut their eyes, the event proves that it is not
the prophet who does it but the people themselves by refusing
to heed and obey the divine warning and the stupefying, blinding,
and perverting of themselves resulting from their refusal and
resistance. God says by Jeremiah and Ezekiel that he will lay a
stumbling-Block before his people. But the event shows that
the stumbling-block over which they finally fell was their own
promised and eagerly expected Messiah. " But for such as dis
believe, the stone which the builders rejected, the same was
made the head of the corner, and a stone of. stumbling and a
rock of offence ; for they stumble at the word, being dis
obedient." J
It is evident that in the texts in question God's agency is in
dicated in popular language without discriminating between the
remote occasion and the immediate efficient cause. God is
often said to do what comes to pass through the free action of
men or the agency of second causes in nature. This usage
should be borne in mind in the interpretation of scripture,
especially of the Old Testament.
But even when thus interpreted, these texts, in all the three
1 Isa. viii. 14; xxviii. 16; Jerem. vi. 21; Ezek. iii. 20; iPet.ii. 6-8; Rom.
xi. 32, 33. In the Old Testament the translation of " harden " in the mar
gin is " make strong," that is, " confirm." This suggests the confirmation
or strengthening of sinful character by persistence in sinful action. It may
be referred to the person as its author, because it is by his own free action
that his character is thus confirmed or his heart hardened. Or it may in
popular language be referred to God, because the confirmation of sinful
character, which is the hardening of the heart, results from the constitution
which God has given to the moral system and to the universe in accordance
with the eternal principles and laws of reason. In several passages in the
New Testament the word translated " hardening " literally means petrifying,
or turning into stone. This figure also suggests the law of the confirmation
of character by action ; for petrifaction is a process in accordance with
scientific law.

PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT IN RELATION TO SIN 579
classes of them, clearly teach that the sins of free agents are in
some true sense under the providential government of God and
recognized in his providential purpose, — yet only in a sense con
sistent with the free will of the agent and his moral responsibility
as the author and doer of his own sins.

2652

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